Public life in Scotland

George Gunn
Atomic reactions

As the schizophrenic nature of this general election takes shape with major historical markers being laid down upon the political map of Scotland, one thing you can be sure of is that May will be the month of political deals within the body politic of the UK. That is the real agenda of the mainstream political parties, including the SNP. Power is what it is all about and the pre-election posturing on 'issues' and 'policy' should be seen for what it is – semantics. No politician can dare speak the truth. From the far north of Scotland this becomes crystal clear. Here, at least, we can concentrate on, thanks to Dounreay, what Wittgenstein called 'atomic facts'.
     This coming May will be the month for deal-making in London but last March was the month of deal-making in Caithness. First there was the belated announcement by the Crown Estate of the go-ahead for 10 sites with a total potential generating capacity of 1.2 gigawatts to be operated in and around the Pentland Firth by six developers. Only one is in Caithness waters and that is ScottishPower Renewables tidal installation off Duncansby Head. There is the likelihood that there will be a licence granted to the Atlantis Resource Corporation for a location south of Stroma in the near future. Some person at Highlands and Islands Enterprise, with a dodgy idea of parameters, has projected that all this possible development will create 'between 500 and 1,700' jobs in the far north. That's the difference, in miles, of the distance between here and London and here and Moscow. Making ridiculous forecasts is about the only thing left that HIE manages to achieve these days.
     The second deal was no deal at all. It is possible that not many people are aware of it because, unlike the renewable leases story, which was on the front page of the Caithness Courier, the story about the dropping of a community dividend from the contract announcement by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority for whoever wins the management contract for the remainder of the clean-up of the Dounreay site, was buried at the back of the same edition.
     It has always been believed, by the Dounreay Stakeholders Group and others, that the socio-economic compensation for the run-down of manpower at the site and the negative impact which that will have on the infrastructure of Caithness was part of the decommissioning deal. But not so.
     At the launch in Glasgow of the competition for the Dounreay work in March of this year it emerged that 'socio-economic spin-offs are not included in terms of the contract'. The Dounreay contract is a major part of Britain's £80 billion nuclear decommissioning legacy. Former Dounreay manager John Crofts, who is working as an adviser to one of the bidders, spelled it out in blunt terms. He said, 'The prime thing this is going to be judged on is cost. Absolutely nothing will interfere with this bid which counts, other than price'. Roy Kirk, the captain of the Caithness and Sutherland star-ship branch of Highlands and Islands Enterprise, tried to soften this harsh fiscal reality by saying that 'it amounts to a matter of good faith on the part of the bidders'. I imagine what attracts the likes of URS, AMEC, Babcock International and CH2M Hill and all the other US and UK companies who will be attracted to the Dounreay clean-up is not 'good faith' but profit, and lots of it.
     So now you know, if you had not suspected so before: that when it comes to the crunch the people of Caithness can whistle. George Farlaw, the Highland councillor for North Sutherland, compared it to being offered a pig in a poke. Just why the people of Caithness and North Sutherland should be treated in such a low monetary fashion when it comes to social compensation when the very same social issues played such a significant part in the similar decommissioning contracts issued for the clean-up of Sellafield in Cumbria, is not clear. It could be the direct result of the annual budget for Dounreay decommissioning being capped at £150 million per year. There are only so many pigs in that poke. It could also be that the UK government doesn't want to scare prospective site management companies off with what they might see as unwanted social responsibilities. As the history of Caithness has proved, social responsibilities and military/civil nuclear installations do not always go hand in hand.
    
At least the two deals, outlined above, however crummy, are the stuff of the real world. The third – let us call it an ongoing discussion rather than 'deal' – is how to address the 'heritage' of Dounreay. Such metaphysical matters occupy the minds of the members of the planning, environment and development department (PED) of the Highland Council. In March they debated a draft response to the NDA and the Dounreay Site Restoration Limited plans to develop a site strategy for heritage as the decommissioning process progresses.
     For some reason best known to themselves the councillors on the PED think that a 'total loss of the built site rather than preserving it may have a negative impact on the heritage of Caithness'. They also want an international conference relating to Dounreay and nuclear heritage issues to be held in Caithness and for the University of The Highlands and Islands to take a lead in proposing academic study options. They also, it would appear, want to have more Dounreay 'artefacts' on display at Caithness Horizons in Thurso in order to offer a 'greater opportunity to understand the local context and social heritage of the Dounreay site'. Presumably there will have to be a major section on the relation of leukaemia and other related cancers to such a 'heritage'? Or perhaps there can be an art installation of a thousand double-decker buses which reportedly can contain the 175,000 cubic metres of contaminated nuclear debris which will be deposited within the £110 million dump at Buldoo?
     A better idea would be for our democratic representatives to put Dounreay into the past and to move beyond it into the future so that our current population can be sustained, nourished and progress. A display of energy and imagination in this direction would be greatly appreciated by everyone living on both sides of the Split Stane and at either end of The Ord.
     It is alarming that our politicians who have been brought up on an historic diet of 'The Next Big Thing' cannot seem to recognise the true potential of the renewable revolution. One other disconcerting aspect of Dounreay's demise is that there has been so little interface between the out-going nuclear technology and the incoming renewable technology when companies like URS, AMEC and CH2M Hill have such strong industrial portfolios in renewables of all types. Is there some unwritten protocol which has excluded Dounreay engineering from what is going to happen in the Pentland Firth? Is this what is actually meant by 'good faith'? That is – there is none?
     It may be too late to do anything about the community benefit from the decommissioning of Dounreay but it is surely within our collective competence to do something to ensure a community benefit from renewables. Professor Jim Hunter of the UHI has already publicly stated that there should be some means whereby the greater community of the Highlands and Islands benefits from the renewable energy windfall centred upon the Beauly to Denny power line.
     In Caithness, if we are to benefit at all from being the 'Saudia Arabia of renewable energy' as Alex Salmond so disingenuously keeps calling it, it may behove us to realise just what the Crown Estate, who are issuing the leases, are. For one thing they do not 'own' the seabed. As Andy Wightman, the prominent writer on Scottish land issues has pointed out, 'The Crown Estate is a bundle of property rights administered by the Crown Estate Commission (CEC) and it is this body which has consistently confused the public by adopting the identity of the property which it administers as a branding device. Furthermore, the CEC does not 'own' the seabed, it merely administers the property rights of the seabed. The seabed is Crown land, a type of public land defined by Scots law. As such, it is within the competence of the Scottish Parliament to transfer title from the Crown to Scottish ministers and there would then be nothing left for the CEC to administer'.
     The question one has to ask is why the Scottish Government does not repatriate this Scottish Crown land and why it is happy for it to be administered by a company based in London to which all the revenue will flow. If the consortium led by URS is awarded the Dounreay contract by the NDA the revenues from decommissioning will flow to San Francisco.
     For how much longer are we going to be happy to be publicly confused, to be the passive recipients of corporate 'good faith', or to be lied to? No candidate on the current campaign trail, certainly not the sitting MP, the Lib-Dem aristocrat Viscount Sinclair, or 'John Thurso' as he prefers to be called, will go near any of this with a 10-foot barge pole. We need a better politics than this.

George Gunn is founder and artistic director of Grey Coast Theatre Company, based in Caithness, and is well known for his playwriting.
He was born in Dunnet.