Argyll and Bute Council has just cancelled the ‘Population Summit’ it was hosting this Friday, 9th May 2104, at the Queen’s Hall in Dunoon.
This action has been taken because the headline speaker, Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Employment and Sustainable Growth, John Swinney MSP, is unable to be present because he has a funeral to attend.
The invitation-only event – which involved other notable participants as well as Mr Swinney – has simply been binned by a council which itself has nothing to say to its electorate about an issue which is the greatest crisis this area has faced.
The council announcement says: ‘We understand that many delegates would have welcomed the opportunity to hear a national perspective from Mr Swinney.
‘He remains keen to be involved in the work we are doing to build a prosperous future for Argyll and Bute.
‘Therefore in order to secure the opportunity to bring local and national expertise and experience together, the council leadership has taken the decision to postpone the event on Friday and reschedule it for a date to be announced towards the end of the year.’
While many will unthinkingly understand the decision, it is helpful to interrogate it to understand just how impoverished and unable is our benighted council.
Depopulation is a general problem for Scotland’s rural and remote mainland areas and islands. It is a very specific and immediate problem for Argyll, one of the areas in Scotland facing the worst and quickest decline in population in the coming years.
What was John Swinney realistically going to tell anyone about ways of reversing depopulation?
If he knew how to fix it, as Infrastructure and Investment Secretary – the subsidary title Deputy First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, whipped from his unwilling grasp in 2012 – surely he would have done just that?. A major buttress against depopulation is, after all, job creation through economic growth driven by strategic infrastructural development.
Where has that been happening?
For Argyll has recurringly drawn attention to the poverty of the Scottish Government’s strategic ability, in the utter lack of any infrastructural development plan for the economic basket case that is the west coast and islands.
It’s not just that they’ve not done anything – it’s that they don’t know what to do and show no sign of making the effort to take hold of the situation. The west coast has the capacity to bring down an independent Scotland all by itself.
The body holding the parcel now that the music has stopped are Argyll and Bute Council. They must deliver an imaginative, robust and clearly well conceived economic development plan to stop Argyll running down the plughole. And if they have the slightest notion as to where to start, it doesn’t show.
The speed with which the council has scrambled away from holding Friday’s event demonstrates that all it was only ever meant to be was a decoy duck, a circus to deflect the attention of the worried electorate and a posing platform for vacuous nonentities who are killing off Argyll.
We would have hoped for a council with senior officers who would have seized the chance to take that platform and share their strategic thinking with their audience on a crisis faced by all. They talk in the cancellation notice, about: ‘…the work we are doing to build a prosperous future for Argyll and Bute’. Let’s hear about that – we who live here. No one knows anything about it.
Do not forget that this event also had a panel of political figures lined up to contribute – and they have been casually binned as apparently being of no account. Had they no contribution to make? Of course they had – every one of them.
The panel were:
- local SNP MSP and Education Secretary Michael Russell;
- Argyll and Bute’s MP, the experienced Liberal Democrat, Alan Reid;
- Conservative Highlands and Islands MSP, Jamie McGrigor, a senior spokesperson for his party;
- and the declared Labour candidate for Argyll and Bute in the 2015 General Election, Mary Galbraith.
Incredulous at the decision simply to cancel the event, Mary Gabraith says: ‘The cancellation of this summit raises some fundamental questions in my mind:
‘To what extent are these ‘population summits’ genuine, purposeful interventions, that will make a difference to the economies of said areas?
‘Or are they being staged by the Council to provide, however unwittingly, a platform for SNP ministers?
‘Surely it must be the latter, since John Swinney’s absence has resulted in the event being canned. If the process was necessary, meaningful and effective, it would be vital that it went ahead without him.
‘What we must now focus on is a really substantial programme of work that will:
- [a] help existing local employers grow their businesses;
- [b] encourage new enterprises to start up, and
- [c] bring new companies to the area.
‘It’s straightforward enough: most people know that good quality, well-paying jobs will fix our population problems.’
This has been another inglorious bolt for cover by our comedy council. All they wanted was a brush of the aura of something foreign to them called ‘government’, which Swinney would have brought with him. They were never going to be there to work themselves.
