Letters / No lectures required
I wish to respond to some of the comments which appeared in your article last week (Court rules in Viking Energy’s favour; SN 9/7/14).
First, Drew Ratter claims that Sustainable Shetland’s legal action has put the Shetland Charitable Trust’s share in the Viking Windfarm at risk. If this has been his greatest fear, why did he not mention it in his Shetland Life article on the Viking Windfarm last December?
It is no secret that the trust has discussed selling its share in the past – long before the judicial review, and as there are continued uncertainties over both the costs and timing of the interconnector and who pays for it, and the consequent transmission charges, one can but wonder if the feasibility of pulling out of the project has remained on the SCT table for those very reasons.
Furthermore for the trust not to have considered the possibility of a judicial review (given that Shetland Islands Council and the Scottish ministers had ruled out a public local inquiry) and its financial implications, would have been remiss indeed.
We should also not forget that Viking Energy Partnership made its own choice to participate in the judicial review as an interested party. Sustainable Shetland’s petition was for judicial review of the Scottish Ministers’ planning consent.
Of course it would be convenient to find such an easy target for a scapegoat as Sustainable Shetland, of whose members Mr Ratter appears to be in complete contempt (the Shetland Life article referred to them as being irresponsible blind fanatics). Fortunately we have got used to this kind of thing.
I can’t count the number of times that serious and pertinent questions have been put by us into the public domain, hoping for a sensible response from proponents of the windfarm.
Sadly we either meet with a wall of silence, or at best insulting or derogatory remarks from publicly accountable figures.
In the meantime, I can assure your readers – and our MSP, Tavish Scott, who has weighed in with his suggestions as to what Sustainable Shetland should do – that any decision as regards future legal action will be considered very carefully and seriously by us.
We really do not require lectures on how we should behave.
For the chair of SCT, Bobby Hunter, however, to say: “I cannot see any basis on which this business [i.e., legal action] could be taken any further” is to dismiss as irrelevant the full legal implications of the Inner Court of Session’s ruling, which naturally we consider does require the closest scrutiny.
James Mackenzie
Vice-chair
Sustainable Shetland
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