Green balloons will pop at the funeral of Scotland's industry

In the background the Grangemouth Future Industry Board has been meeting since December 2020. You can read their meeting minutes here https://www.gov.scot/groups/grangemouth-future-industry-board.

For over four years this body has grown. Taken on external consultants Aspect (who are “building upon more than 50 years of industry-leading experience, we’re reimagining workforce management tools with a new approach to innovation”), growing in membership from an initial eight members in 2020 to the latest 20-plus. Churning out tasks and minutes and subgroups and strategies. Bigger and bigger. More complex and wordy. UK Government. Scottish Government. Ineos (three members). Unions. Local government. Eco-organisations. Thousands and thousands of words. Tens of meetings. Hundreds of actions.

And now this. Grangemouth no more. Four hundred redundancy letters. The end of decades of complex, challenging, mostly profitable, rather ugly but elegant industrial activity in Scotland’s last refinery. The end of an era. Probably inevitably.

But what of the just transition? The exciting low-carbon future? The reskilled and newly resilient workforce? The compelling commercial green opportunities? What of all the efforts of the Grangemouth Future Industry Board in the face of a tough bottom-line focused incumbent?

Floating ever upwards. The green balloons at the funeral. Full of hyperbole and strategy and vision and rhetoric and consultant-speak. Ephemeral. Lighter than air. Pop! They’re gone.

The men in black coats gather to measure up for the coffin and plan the eulogy. And wring their hands a little. But only a little of course.

Neil Gilmour, Edinburgh.

This is revenge

SO to no one’s surprise, Grangemouth Refinery, currently the main source of oil for all of Scotland and much of Northern England, is to close.

For Petroineos this is revenge on the Scottish Government for its long-term ban on the fracking plan by which it had hoped to increase its already high profits. For the UK Government anything which damages Scotland’s economy and turns us from a major oil exporter into an importer of our own oil also damages the arguments for independence.

So everybody’s a winner. Apart from those dependent on a fixed pocket-money budget (the Scottish Government) or on future wages (the workers).

Mary McCabe, Glasgow.

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Why no subsidy in Scotland?

SCOTLAND is second only to Norway for oil and gas production in Europe and has contributed £400 billion to the Treasury in London. However, the UK Government can find billions to subsidise key industries, except in Scotland.

Last month Energy Voice reported that the Stanlow oil refinery in north-west England is getting ready to expand and sell more fuel when Grangemouth closes by investing in infrastructure and saying “we think conventional oil products are going to be around for a long time”. Stanlow is part of Hynet, which was granted Track 1 status by the UK Government for massive investment as the first carbon capture and hydrogen hub ahead of Scotland’s much better claims.

On February, the UK Government provided a £600 million guarantee for Ineos to build a petrochemical plant in Antwerp, Belgium, with the plant expected to be the largest petrochemical plant in Europe in 30 years. The Scottish Government led by Alex Salmond and John Swinney saved Grangemouth from closure in October 2013 after Unite union officials threatened to bring about an industrial catastrophe.

Earlier this week, Tata Steel and the UK Government signed a grant funding agreement worth £500 million, allowing Tata Steel to proceed with its plans to install a state-of-the-art electric arc furnace at its Port Talbot steelworks in Wales. Tata will own all the assets and income streams, while the Government will get no shares and the amount is not repayable.

In 2023, the Drax power plant in North Yorkshire received £539 million in direct government subsidies for burning forest biomass. This brings the total public subsidy the company has received for biomass to around £7 billion since 2012. Also, the nuclear power industry is subsidised by billions as part of a UK energy policy that has totally failed Scotland.

Mary Thomas, Edinburgh.

Misery upon misery

JILL Stephenson (Letters, September 13) writes that a larger No majority in the independence referendum would have "spared the miseries of the last 10 years". Actually, the miseries are a consequence of the No vote and Scotland remaining in the Union, being governed by a party Scotland did not vote for and has not voted for since the 1950s.

The Tory governments in that time have inflicted misery due to their incompetence: just reflect on the Truss government crashing the economy, the Johnson government proroguing Parliament (ruled unlawful) and the Partygate scandal.

The Conservatives exacerbated poverty in general and fuel poverty in particular. From the actions of the new Labour Government we can look forward to more of the same.

Catriona C Clark, Falkirk.

FM should act in rapists row

YET again the First Minister hides behind the “I cannot interfere” argument when challenged about the outrageous disclosure that Police Scotland will allow rapists to self-identify as women ("FM says he cannot intervene in 'self-declare' sex storm", The Herald, September 13). However he forgets that it was the SNP administration which intervened in the running of the Scottish police force when it created the one body that is now a failing Police Scotland.

As with John Swinney’s “it’s all Westminster's fault”, he has no place to hide on this issue. Dare I risk the saying that Mr Swinney should "grow a pair” and instruct Police Scotland accordingly?

Richard Allison, Edinburgh.

Stop the flow of arms

I ONCE saw a placard in New York that read “Why do people kill people to show that killing people is wrong?”. It was against the death penalty in America but could easily be adapted to fit the dilemma of whether to allow Ukraine to bomb Russia with missiles made in the UK.

Neil Mackay ("Give Ukraine permission to use the West's weapons", The Herald, September 12) is not alone in sanitising the use of modern weapons, saying the “moral route is to attack military, industrial and strategic targets inside Russia’s borders” as if there was no human cost but only enemy hardware being destroyed. He says: “The war must be brought home to Putin.” No women or children will be harmed I take it, just as there are none in Gaza? Do Russian lives matter? Not if we label them “the enemy” or “collateral”.

Then there is the boomerang affect. We become the enemy to them and Scotland in particular as military, industrial and strategic targets are all here. It is very frightening talk.

Our hearts bleed for Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan. The only way forward for our planet is to stop the flow of arms on all sides. Beat them into ploughshares before, as my mother who suffered the bombs dropping on her tenement flat during the Second World War used to say, “we all go up in a wee blue light” or worse, in a mushroom cloud.

Susan Martin, Rutherglen.

Lomond site is not a floodplain

CITING flooding and woodland management, National Park planners have recommended refusal for the Lomond Banks application to build a mixed tourism development on brownfield land next to the Lomond Shores retail crescent. The park’s board will make the decision on Monday (September 16), but if they follow their planning officers’ advice they may find themselves at odds with the Scottish Government, which has recently said it wishes to free up the planning process in order to encourage economic growth.

The planners correctly identify the risks from extreme rainfall events associated with global warming, but such risks are regularly accounted for in other new waterside developments by making flood mitigation measures a planning condition. Of course, had the site been a flood plain, downriver, say near Dumbarton, flood mitigation there would have been a complete no-no, because the loss of the flood plain area would restrict flow, exacerbating flooding upstream.

What seems to have escaped everyone’s understanding is that the Lomond Banks site is not a floodplain. It is a “raised beach” levelled off by wave action thousands of years ago when the post-glacial sea level was higher. Further levelling and raising occurred when the railway and its extensive sidings were built there in the 19th century. That is why it is so flat, but being flat does not make it a flood plain.

An artist's impression of the proposed Lomond Banks development (Image: Lomond Banks)

Furthermore the site is at the source point in the River Leven’s journey to Dumbarton, so flood mitigation measures there will only serve to throttle the outflow from Loch Lomond, tending to reduce flooding downstream. Back-up effects will still of course occur, but these will be spread over the whole 71square kilometres surface area of Loch Lomond and will be negligible. Citing flooding as a reason for refusing planning permission on this site is a fundamental error which would readily be overturned at appeal.

Planners have also cited concerns about loss of ancient woodland, but there is photographic evidence the woods are not ancient. By the middle of the 20th century almost all of the ancient wood shown on Roy’s map had been replaced by railway yards, farmland, a sand and gravel quarry and a caravan site. New woodland has now covered the scars of the railway yards and quarries and it is partly the presence of these trees which has attracted the developer. Why would they remove them when the whole ethos of their scheme is one of bringing people closer to nature with lodges dotted in amongst trees? Tree planting and other green measures such as grey squirrel control, wildlife corridors and wetland areas could easily be introduced as a planning condition. As with the non-issue of flooding, the citing of woodland loss as a reason for refusal of planning permission makes no sense.

John Urquhart, Chair, Friends of Loch Lomond and The Trossachs, Balloch.