Viewpoint / Let’s continue to benefit from effective representation
Former local member of the Scottish Youth Parliament and now student of journalism at Stirling University, Bertie Summers, wades into the campaign for the upcoming Scottish parliamentary election by endorsing the Lib Dems and their candidate Emma Macdonald
I WAS really pleased to see that Shetland’s very serious issue of poor connectivity has been taken a huge step in the right direction.
I am now much more hopeful after the resilience forum was thankfully held for two hours in the Islesburgh Community Centre on Friday, 21 November.
Our communities have experienced three lengthy broadband outages on the Shefa-2 cable in the last few years that left hundreds of Shetland residents without connection. There were two this year, including in October, in addition to an incident in the autumn of 2022.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude and appreciation towards Alistair Carmichael and Beatrice Wishart for organising this meeting and for successfully inviting so many people, including Emma Macdonald, to it. I was also really pleased to have been sent an email alert from the Liberal Democrats, which reported in great detail what happened that week and the comments that had been made by our representatives.
After the meetings, Alistair said: “This was a positive and constructive summit, and I am grateful to everyone who attended and contributed to the meetings. This is not the end of the process but the start of it, and we will be following up the plans and proposals made in the coming days and weeks.”
Beatrice said: “Our islands cannot be left behind. Digital connectivity should be treated as a vital utility as it has become increasingly important to all of us for all aspects of daily living in an ever-changing world.”
Attending the summit herself, Emma said: “The public forum was incredibly impactful. Some of the stories islanders shared were harrowing – people who were cut off from their work, families unable to contact vulnerable relatives, businesses losing income, and individuals unable to reach essential services.”
“These experiences make it absolutely clear that what happened during the Shefa 2 outage is not good enough for Shetland. And we cannot treat it as a one-off. It is not a question of if this happens again – it is when. That means we need stronger planning, better redundancy in our networks, and a system that recognises the unique vulnerabilities of rural and island communities.”
This clearly shows that all three of them (Carmichael, Wishart, Macdonald) have clearly displayed their firmly passionate beliefs that our island communities really do deserve much better, not just in the area of improving connectivity, but across the board. We have spent far too many years being letdown and disappointed by the UK and Scottish governments.
It is, therefore, really good, in my opinion, that we can still count on the Liberal Democrats to provide us with reliable and engaging, hard-working representatives, who truly care about us and our opinions/concerns and who really do have our best interests at heart.
The fact that they have just made such great progress in delivering a better deal for the islanders of today and tomorrow indicates just what is at stake in next year’s Scottish Parliament elections. After finding out all about Emma Macdonald’s extensive life and political experience, I am personally very impressed with what she’s done, which is why I will definitely vote for her in five months from now.
This includes serving on the Shetland Islands Council for the last eight years, during which she has been the council leader since 2022 and was the council’s deputy leader for most of her first term as a councillor before that. This is a crucial public role that has, in Emma’s words, seen her “challenging the centralisation of decision making away from local government”.
From the “national care service to education, there has been a constant need to fight to ensure decisions are made locally”. She has spent almost her entire life living here in Shetland, has been residing in Voe for the past 18 years, andran her own cafe business before being elected to the SIC. None of this is mundane or easy, in the slightest.
I have seen how hard it is to run a business, and Emma has worked very long days throughout her capacity as a member of the SIC. Whilst councillors are supposed to work from 9am to 5pm, she’s revealed there have been time when she’s had to work from 8am to 10pm. Not too many people could do all of that.
With such an incredible work ethic that Emma has demonstrated, that’s why I strongly believe her to be the right person to represent us both internally and externally going forward. It’s why I think Macdonald is, by far, the candidate who is the most committed to the Northern Isles, out of all three of them.
Not only that, but John Erskine and Hannah Mary Goodlad are standing with political parties (Labour and the SNP) that are currently squeezing and centralising power away from local communities and stifling local control over our affairs during their current time in government, either in London or in Edinburgh.
Both of our distant Westminster and Holyrood governments have been caught out giving our local fishing sector a truly rotten deal. We have a Labour government in London allocating just 8% of their fisheries fund to Scotland,when 60% of the UK’s fish are caught in Scotland. Meanwhile, we also have an SNP government in Edinburgh that has already been allocating just 5% of their own fisheries fund to Shetland since 2020, even though we produce more than 20% of Scotland’s catch.
This is just one, out of many, examples which make it clear that our next MSP should be Emma Macdonald.
If what you’re looking for in our next MSP is someone who will always speak up for their constituents (us) and stand up to both the UK and the Scottish governments and call them out when they really mess things up badly, then she is undoubtedly the right choice.
I personally think that we’ve been very fortunate to have enjoyed fantastic, effective representation in the UK and Scottish Parliaments since 1950 from the Liberal Democrats. Let’s continue to benefit from it by electing somebody who will certainly be our strong voice in Holyrood, in Emma Macdonald for Shetland.
