‘Let’s get a grip of ourselves’

Mr Tulloch’s letter, unashamedly pre oil, if not gas, misses out the potential to re-open the UK’s coal fields, whilst we import cheap (?) high sulphur Polish coal.

Self-inflicted wound

Whilst a ‘radical Green’, in Mr Tulloch’s eyes, I’m not really a fan of extractive industries full stop, however with de-carbonisation technologies and carbon capture as an absolute imperative to existing or any future oil and gas developments and current production, these could be applied to ‘our’ own coal.

The closure of our coal industry, like steel and shipbuilding, due to chronic long-term under-investment by successive governments (the British capitalist disease) especially under the Tories in the 80s, for purely political ends, to undermine and annihilate the tradition trades unions.

Yes, Scargill was not a believer in democracy – dictatorship by the proletariat, as long as he was the dictator, benevolent (?) or otherwise – like most of the heavy industry trades unions, Stalinist Communists, who ran the heavy industry unions (Mick McGahey, Scottish Miners Union and Jimmy Reid in Upper Clyde Shipbuilders et al. ‘Red’ Robbo, famously in the mid 70’s another who help destroy the British car industry with the endless, if not pitiful excuses for industrial action.

Is this the same trade union leadership (it’s not!) who have been asleep at ‘the wheel’, after their copious amounts of ‘beer and sandwiches’ – caviar and foie gras with Chablis and claret – for the past 35 years!

Suddenly, thank goodness, they seem to have developed, or rediscovered a wider social conscious regarding the wider community and most the vulnerable in it and not just looking to ‘their members’.

‘Sense of’ but not actual community, in Shetland, may yet be developed, despite the wallowing for 40 years, living off the interest of often unethical, unsustainable foreign investment of the SIC ‘oil’ reserve funds and now ‘independent’, of Shetland (?), Charitable Trust and wind benefit funds.

Let’s get a grip of ourselves and create some community solidarity and cohesion. Wither the leadership?

James J Paton
Lerwick