Interesting Links for 04-02-2018

[andrewducker]

Scottish estate owners warn against reversing Highland Clearances

(tags: Scotland housing )

Ultra-processed products now half of all UK family food purchases

(tags: food Technology uk )

We Asked Women’s Aid Centres If They’re Trans Inclusive and Here’s What They Said

(tags: Scotland transgender women )

A tragedy is when your hero is in the wrong story

(tags: stories shakespeare tragedy )

Brexit ‘ultras’ are undermining the integrity of the Civil Service. The consequences could be grave

(tags: government uk politics Europe OhForFucksSake )

Countries with the most guns list has some surprises

(tags: guns demographics )

Comments

[dewline]

1. Problem loading page. Connection not secure.

5. Brexit and the US 2016 Presidential vote...all part of the same international problem.

[andrewducker]

Scotsman working fine for me now.

(And yes, I agree)

[movingfinger]

Did The Scotsman get DDOS'd or something? All links to it are dead.

Copious kudos to A Thousand Flowers for doing journalism like it is supposed to be done! Contacting sources and asking questions. WHO KNEW THIS WORKED?

[andrewducker]

Scotsman working fine for me now.

And yes, I agree :-)

[danieldwilliam]

What do you suppose the mechanism for resettlement of the Highlands is?

What's the barrier to it not being done already?

[andrewducker]

I suspect that fundamentally people are moving to the cities.

Giving people the legal right to resettle the highlands isn't likely to have much effect unless people actually want to live there. And they mostly don't seem to want to.

(I'm willing to be proven wrong on that front though)

[danieldwilliam]

I wonder if climate change might help.

If the Highlands were a bit less bleak and a bit more agriculturally rich that might spur some resettlement.

Or not, if we end up with a north European ice-age.

[alithea]

Mostly lack of jobs, housing and infrastructure I think. Although obviously, there's a limited pool of people it appeals to anyway, given they struggle to recruit things like doctors and nurses where there are job vacancies.

It's mainly travel times to puts me off - it takes us a minimum of 6 hours to reach my mum's as it is, and probably minimum 4 hours to Kev's folks' taking in airport waiting times as well as actual travel time.

[danieldwilliam]

That was kind of what I was thinking. Why don't people live in the Highlands? Because there are no jobs, few people and it's all a long way a way from stuff.

And you get a whole chicken and egg thing going on. There's not really a case for building lots of great infrastructure if there are no people.

Orkney and Lewis both seem to have lots of crafts people who I presume are selling their goods to tourists and more frequently now over the internet. Interestingly the people of Lewis seemed to be against expansion of windfarms on their island whereas Orcadians are much more pro.

Some knowledge based business might be able to locate to the Higlands (software or merchant banking) but that requires many of the participants to want to be located in the Highlands. Which you might get from time to time but I'm not sure you can build a resettlement strategy around it at a national level.

I'm not sure how you solve the problem other than by building more and better roads and railways in the Highlands but there's a reason there are not many roads and railways - it's difficult terrrain with not many potential users.

It's one of the things that makes me wish Scotland had control over immigration. I think there is a model where Scotland could say to Syrian refugees - we need doctors, nurses etc in Fort William. You can come to Scotland and bring everyone you are related to but you have to promise to work at the Fort William clinic for ten years.

[alithea]

Definitely agree with your last point. The Westminster system is just crackers - deporting families who have settled in the Highlands, are educating their kids in Gaelic, running a business and employing local people - those villages are crying out for people like them!

[danieldwilliam]

Yeah, those stories upset both for the human impact and the dumbness.

It can't be beyond the wit of people to design an immigration system that says to people who want to come to the Uk "you are a marginal case, if you want to come the quid pro quo is you go and live and work in a part of the country where we really, really need warm bodies".

I often think to myself when someone mentions the deficit and national debt with regard to Scottish independence that one way of fixing it would be to have a very open immigration policy and increase our population by a few million extra tax payers. Somehow I don't think this is exactly what some of my fellow Yes voters have in mind.

[alithea]

This fellow Yes voter agrees, but sadly I think we are a minority.

A tragedy is when your hero is in the wrong story

[anef]

Well that is one of the (many, many) things that are going on in Hamlet, ie that he's trapped in a revenge tragedy, where he doesn't want to be, and he can't get out. Elsinore is a prison.