Knowledge and the abuse of power Globally, there is a struggle going on about who controls information and part of this is about who gets to see publicly funded research. George Monbiot has given excellent coverage to how academic research is being captured by corporate interests and what people are doing to oppose this (see…
Month: April 2019
Evidence from the last few weeks shows that, despite some recent progress (see here for example), there is still an extensive failure to implement access rights in our National Parks. This is particularly worrying because our National Parks are the best resourced Access Authorities in Scotland and have had a statutory duty to promote public…
I almost never watch TV but last week, in the middle of the first week of the Extinction Rebellion protest, I did watch the BBC documentary “Climate Change – the Facts” narrated by David Attenborough. The footage of forest fires burning out of control and the evidence that not only have the numbers of fires…
Yesterday, Flamingo Land’s media consultants issued a New release on their revised Planning Application at Balloch. This received widespread media coverage and appeared designed to deceive. Most of the media did not fall for the attempt to rename the proposed development Lomond Banks and continued to refer to it as Flamingo Land. No-one, however, questioned…
This is the second, in a series of posts (see here), about HIE’s mismanagement of Cairn Gorm based on their latest response to my questions about the procurement process which led to CairnGorm Mountain Ltd being outsourced to “Natural Retreats”. In 2013 Highlands and Islands Enterprise excluded Cairngorms Snowsports, a sound local company with a…
After announcing a “major application” update last week (see here), the revisions to the Flamingo Land planning application appeared yesterday evening. There are about 40 new documents on the planning portal (see here), all dated 5th April rather than the 17th April when they were made public by the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National…
A couple of weeks ago the Environment Secretary, Roseanna Cunningham, announced the Scottish Government would create a new law to make it illegal to throw litter out of cars (see here). Funny, I had thought that littering was already an offence, whether or not thrown out a car window. It was also announced that…
At the end of last week Highlands and Islands Enterprise provided me with a number of documents relating to their decision to “appoint” “Natural Retreats” to “operate” Cairngorm Mountain Ltd. To give HIE credit, they have not tried to delay release of the information and relatively little of it is redacted. The documents confirm there…
Every time I travelled along the A82 last year I spotted people camping in breach of the camping byelaws in the tent free zone the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority has created between Inveruglas and the Falls of Falloch. The northern part of this was not included originally within the Loch Lomond West…
Following Dave Morris’ post (see here) on how the Cairngorms National Park Authority are trying to restrict access to paths, parkswatch has been sent some more photos of unlawful signs by readers. When a National Park, which has a privileged place on the National Access Forum, believes its alright to issue a news release telling…
In my view there is no justification for a Public Authority to commission research and then to keep this secret. That, however, has been what the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority has been doing for the last five years. Unlike the Cairngorms National Park, which has a Research Strategy and a dedicated website…
Scotland has fewer democratically elected representatives and a more centralised system of government than anywhere else in Europe, including England (see here) and (here). More and more power is exercised directly by the Scottish Government, . While the Scottish Parliament has, since it was set up, reviewed or created a number of new Public Authorities,…
The Cairngorms National Park Authority‘s news release On 2 April the Cairngorms National Park Authority issued a news release under the heading “Protect wildlife – dogs on leads please” here. This news release should set alarm bells ringing amongst all who cherish our statutory rights of access to land. Although much of the news release…
Almost the first thing Highland and Islands Enterprise did after it bought back Cairn Gorm Mountain was to inform the Cairngorms National Park Authority that it wished to proceed with the Planning Application to redevelop the Ptarmigan building near the summit of Cairn Gorm (see here for background). About a month ago stories appeared in…
Apologies for the belated blog on the last Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Board Meeting (see here for papers) which took place on Monday 18th March – and, no, this isn’t an April Fool! As predicted (see here) the agenda was far too long and by 1.30pm, when I had to leave and the…