THERE was resounding applause across the Highlands for MSP Edward Mountain’s words in your article "Highlands being sacrificed on the altar of net zero" (Agenda, The Herald, November 6).

For too long rural communities have been ignored or subjected to pointless platitudes from our elected representatives.

What is happening in the Highlands is an utter disgrace. Campaigners have long said that the rampant rollout of industrial wind turbines and their associated infrastructure for profit was unacceptable.

The destruction of the environment, wildlife and sense of wellbeing by global investment companies was and is unacceptable.

While wind developers have been the long-running enemies of many peaceful rural communities across Scotland they are now accompanied, at great speed and with Scottish Government endorsement, by the grid operators, lithium battery energy traders, pumped storage speculators and massive solar companies taking our farmland for the benefit of their shareholders.

We can all speculate where this energy "revolution" went catastrophically wrong, especially for those forced to live with it. The energy sector should probably never have been privatised. Instead of encouraging healthy competition the UK Government’s willingness to fork out billions of consumers' hard-earned cash in subsidies and support for these unreliable weather-dependent energy sources has been an unmitigated expensive and environmental disaster.

The Scottish Government’s lower planning fees and refusal to give communities a voice encouraged developers to hot-foot it north for an easier and cheaper ride through the planning process. The mental health of those living and working in rural locations and how this rampage would affect their finances was not given a moment's consideration, such was the desire to industrialise and be "world leaders" in something.

Instead of proportionate and fair development it has resulted in unfathomable greed where energy companies are ruthless and target the same rural communities again and again, caring nothing for them or the environment that they want to industrialise.

So while Edward Mountain deserves our appreciation for speaking out we now demand actions to follow his words.

As convener of the Scottish Parliament's net zero, energy and transport committee we ask him to bring the plight of rural constituents to that committee and soon. As has been recently agreed by Highland Council we demand full mapping of every single energy proposal and those constructed so everyone can see what is really happening in rural Scotland.

We also demand a moratorium. The Scottish Government has one in place for fracking so there is no reason why there cannot be one for further energy developments. It is within the Scottish Government’s power and campaigners would remind MSPs that elections are not that far away and this particular political hot potato is going precisely nowhere.

We would ask every MSP in Holyrood: are you with us or against us?

Lyndsey Ward, Spokeswoman for Communities B4 Power Companies, Beauly.

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Crisis in family legal cases

THE Scottish Legal Aid Board annual report ("Warning of legal aid ‘crisis’ as case payments drop 23%", The Herald, November 6) is relatively sanguine about the number of solicitor firms offering legal aid in family cases to resolve disagreements about contact and residence after divorce or separation.

Our casework gives a very different picture.

The number of firms recorded as taking on "at least one" legal aid case may look OK on the surface but the overall capacity available to the public has crashed.

We take calls on our helpline daily from desperate mothers and fathers saying they have called 60 or 70 firms but no-one will take them on.

At a recent Shared Parenting Scotland group meeting in Edinburgh, on a show of hands, nearly half the attendees were representing themselves, most with extreme reluctance. Either their earnings were just above the legal aid threshold and they couldn't afford private rates or, most, because they could not find a solicitor to take them on at all.

Some big players have left civil legal aid entirely and abruptly in the last couple of years. They have not been replaced.

There is a particular problem for clients looking for a solicitor to take over an existing case. Sometimes it may be because they have lost confidence in their current solicitor but also because their solicitor retired or died and the firm decided not to offer a replacement. One of our pro bono solicitors at a group meeting explained that the arithmetic of taking over a two or three-year-old case means they would be earning less than minimum wage.

One solution is for legal aid to fund alternative dispute resolution initiatives to take some of the cases out of court that don't really need to be there. It is not the Scottish Legal Aid Board's fault that the old structures of our adversarial system are creaking when cheaper and more humane alternatives are available.

Ian Maxwell, National Manager, Shared Parenting Scotland, Edinburgh.

Be grateful for (most) graduates

COMMENTING on the debate over tuition fees, George Morton (Letters, November 8) asks if anyone can explain to libertarians like him why taxpayers should be forced to fund other people's education or that of their kids.

He might have a point if he never seeks to benefit from the services of the nation’s university graduates or from the infrastructure and products they design. Does he live the life of a hermit? For example, does he never seek medical help; does he never use roads, the public water supply or any mechanical or electrical devices; and does he never buy products developed and produced by industry? For most of us, who every day benefit from the end results of the work of the medical, science, engineering (and many other) graduates our universities produce, it is only fair that we should share the cost of their training. And so should Mr Morton if he too benefits like the rest of us.

On the other hand, another question altogether is whether we should share the cost of the education of those who study one of the many airy-fairy arts subjects and who then fail to repay us by using their university training to make a constructive contribution to society.

Alistair Easton, Edinburgh.

There is renewed debate on university tuition feesThere is renewed debate on university tuition fees (Image: Newsquest) No way to cap the litter problem

MANY readers will have noticed that the once-removable cap on a plastic bottle is now tethered to it by a strip of plastic. This is a consequence of an EU Directive enacted last July and is promised to "limit the amount of plastic litter".

The justification for it is based on the impact of removing ring-pulls from drinks cans in the 1980s that stopped these being littered, but it's not clear if the same approach will work for the caps on plastic bottles.

Critics have argued that it's now more difficult to drink directly from the bottle as the top has to be held away from the spout, not easy for those whose hands aren't in the best of fettle.

Another point is that the people who habitually throw plastic bottles down as litter now only need one toss to do so.

In short, it looks like another cosmetic PR stunt to con the public into thinking "something is being done". Time will tell if this latest wheeze works.

Wouldn't it just be simpler to exhort the councils to get more staff out and issue fixed penalty notices to litterers?

John Crawford, Preston.