Earlier in the week, a few people copied me into a twitter exchange about Scottish Natural Heritage’s delayed name change. If I was capable of doing anything on twitter, except using it as a means of enabling people to follow parkwatch’s posts, I might have shared this:
Says it all really!
If you don’t know SNH is the organisation which is now, following public outrage, trying to work out how it can get out of issuing licenses to cull beavers (see here). Ever since it took over from the Scottish Government responsibility for issuing licenses to kill protected wildlife c15 years ago it’s staff have been in an impossible situation.
Banned from translocating beavers within Scotland, despite suitable places having been identified first in the Cairngorms National Park and then by its own staff in the Highlands (see here), it has been forced into translocating as many at risk beavers as it can down to England.
I am sure their frontline staff really do care, they just don’t have a chance under the current system. It certainly was like that when I was on their Board for three years almost 20 years ago. Staff then had done some very thorough preparatory work and SNH was all ready to support the re-introduction of beavers to Scotland. However, a landowner then spoke to a civil servant and the result was the “trial” at Knapdale. Mea culpa, for not challenging how Board Members’ hands are tied. It’s far worse now.
The Knapdale trial was never needed, but it was a very effective way of preventing any meaningful re-introduction of beavers into Scotland. If beavers had not “unlawfully” got into the Tay catchment, we would be no further forward. The response of the Scottish Government to has been to leave SNH staff stuck with the beavers between unwooded watersheds, which the beavers are likely to have great difficulty crossing unaided and the farmers’ guns. Rumour has it that the beavers which are now in the Forth Catchment came from the Tay catchment but did so with a little help – not from SNH staff, I hasten to add!
A name change, even if it had been well managed, is not going to do anything to address the issues that have been undermining frontline SNH staff and preventing them from protecting nature for years. Scotland’s system for protecting nature is rotten. Fundamental reform of the relationship between central government, SNH and our National Parks Authorities, which are also supposed to put conservation first) is part of what is needed to change that.
It must be utterly frustrating being on the frontline staff of SNH – to watch the organisation being manipulated and neutered by the establishment and the Scottish Government. It’s re-branding will just be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Start at the top and gut the SNH Board. Dr Mike Cantlay was ineffectual and useless when he Chaired Visit Scotland (I have personal experience of Visit Scotland’s failings), and surprise, surprise he now presides over the disaster that SNH has become. The Scottish Government has got to stop recycling all its sycophantic friends around Scotland’s many quangos, and get some real leaders into these posts who will stand up for the values of their organisation and not be swayed by establishment lobbying and political pressure.
“ The Scottish Government has got to stop recycling all its sycophantic friends around Scotland’s many quangos, and get some real leaders into these posts who will stand up for the values of their organisation and not be swayed by establishment lobbying and political pressure.” – that is the key to how the current Scot.Gov works; ‘recycling’!
However, many land/nature issues are also stymied by the Establishment hold on land, law and the legislature in both Westminster and Holyrood.
Take the Space Park – the Scot. Gov wouldn’t want to call that in as the companies behind it are inteinsic in supporting the current programme. Far better to let the Local Authority take the heat yet in Stirling it was quite alright for a minister to over rule both the LA and his Reporter who has, on two occasions, denied the Judy Murray venture which may yet ravage a large swathe of greenbelt to create a wholly inappropriate housing and tennis academy whilst the National Tennis Centre is only 3 miles down the road!
This SNP Govt. seems to be all about ensuring its survival to maintain its dogma of Independence when many of their decisions go against the national interest; least of all deciding who it appoints to vital positions in the interests of the Nation’s people.
I’ve no desire to defend presentational changes to what should be a great force for good in Scotland but sadly isn’t but could this be the same Peter Fraser of the Scottish Gamekeepers Association, former keeper/stalker at Invercauld and agitator for more deer on Deeside?
PS beavers are perfectly capable of getting from the Tay/Earn catchment to the Allan/Forth without any help.