A Place to Stand

   This is in today's Scotsman

Clark Cross is correct to be suspicious that a seminar run by Scottish Renewables and renewableUK may provide a less than accurate assessment of the merits and otherwise of windmills.

Scottish Renewables employees have frequently appeared in the readers letters columns making claims which do not accord with the facts and when not in the public view might be expected to be even less concerned about accuracy.

However he is wrong to describe these organisations, lobbying our government for even more subsidy, as being funded only by the industry that directly benefits from the subsidies.

Scottish Renewables' membership list, on their website, consists in roughly equal measure, of subsidised industrialists and of government departments, quangos and councils.

RenewablesUK is more circumspect about its memberships but says it "plays a crucial role in bringing together all the key players" which suggests its membership is similar.

When government spends 60% of the money in the economy, as ours does, it is inevitable that companies, particularly in subsidy dependent industries, will spend a considerable amount of money lobbying for government's favour.

What is more reprehensible is the vicious circle whereby government departments, using our money, lobby each other and spend our money "raising awareness" of false scare stories of the "need" for ever more of our money to be spent by them and their ever growing bureaucratic empires.

Unfortunately every Holyrood party believes in Mencken's dictum that "the practical purpose of politics is to keep the public scared and eager th be led by frightening them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary" and have no intention of ending using our money for the purpose.

Ref - quote from Renewables UK http://www.bwea.com/members/index.html

    I am very pleased with that.it went in unedited except for dividing it into more paragraphs. It contains everything except the word "fakecharity" which the MSM resolutely refuse to use. Even the Mencken quote which I have used in Scotsman letters more than once before and also recently appeared on EU Referendum, where I have commented before.

   The underlined bit is underlined simply because I think it is the heart of the matter.

    Both Clark Cross to whom I am replying and Dr GM Lindsay are regulars, in the cause of sanity, in Scotsman and other newspapers lettercolumns and though we have not met in the flesh we have online.

    Since Brian Monteith mentioned me my  publication ratio in the Scotsman seems to have risen.