SNP's snub to Shetland tunnels plan is just the latest insult of many to islanders
After 19 years in power, the SNP’s lacklustre Islands Plan feels like half-hearted electioneering
After 19 years, is this really it? That, I must confess, was my immediate reaction on Monday morning when I saw the announcement of the Scottish Government’s Islands Plan, accompanied by another visit by the First Minister to the Northern Isles (it is interesting the way these rare visits start to multiply just as an election comes into view).
After 19 years in government – and yet another lacklustre “capital P” Plan from Central Office – you really have to ask if this is the best the SNP can offer Scottish island communities.
I would call it last-minute Holyrood electioneering dressed up as government policy, if it were not so half-hearted an attempt. This is a plan that has been dreamt up in Edinburgh, not in the isles themselves. It is a vision of what people outside island communities think we need, rather than one built by and for islanders.
That is par for the course from the SNP, which has always seen people outwith the Central Belt as window dressing – political props, rather than living people.
During the 2021 Holyrood elections – the last time the nationalists belatedly remembered to toss a few island-shaped policies at the wall – they came up with the wheeze of paying people to move to our communities. It was a distraction from the real issues at best, and at worst, an active insult to islanders.
That sits comfortably alongside the other half-hearted island policies of years gone by, like the much-vaunted “islands-proofing” rules which have done the square-root of nothing (others might choose stronger language) for islanders since they were supposedly brought into force.
Outside of the gimmicks, on the issues that really matter for Scottish islands, the SNP plan is woefully inadequate. I have said many times that, for island communities, when you get transport right everything else falls into place – and yet there is not a word of contrition in the plan about the still-not-yet-ended CalMac ferries scandal, nor anything about how the Scottish Government might do better in the future.
Meanwhile there is nothing concrete – let alone a proper roadmap for action – on tunnels for the isles. Even as people in places like Shetland have made it clear that they see fixed links as essential to our future, the SNP persist in claiming that inter-island tunnel proposals are merely a matter for local councils – as if vital infrastructure that could transform and protect our communities for generations to come is some sort of parochial luxury.
If anything, the campaign for tunnels in Shetland has been as powerful a demonstration as you could ask for that there is political energy in our island communities ready to be unleashed – if the SNP would just get out of our way.
Forget the plans from Central Office in the Central Belt: real ambition for our island communities would start with a plan explicitly developed outside of Edinburgh. Answers to the future of island communities will not be found in Bute House, but in Bute, Uist and Unst.
That message runs counter to all the SNP’s centralising instincts after a generation in power. After 19 years of their mismanagement of our island communities, however, we can surely do better than this.
Alistair Carmichael is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland
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