Who Gives a Damn about these Yokels?

It’s yet another victory for the wild-eyed zealots from the Church of Green Energy who head the government’s Departure of the Environment. They’re hell bent on destroying two of the most beautiful valleys in the Scottish Borders in the name of …yes, saving the environment. And the government has just given them £600 million to do it.

The Yarrow and Ettrick valleys are stunningly lovely, with historic associations to literary giants Walter Scott and James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. Wordsworth even wrote some (pretty execrable) poems about the Yarrow Valley.

More importantly they’re beloved of pistonheads and bikers. The A708 that runs through the Yarrow Valley has been called ‘the best driving road in the UK’ by one motoring writer and a ‘dream drive’ by another.

But the government is determined to link up the National Grid and their green cult members don’t care what it destroys in the process. SPEN’s Cross Border Connection will see the installation of massive 50 to 60 metre high pylons linked to wind farms in some of the most beautiful, unspoiled countryside in the whole of the UK.

The plan is incomprehensibly Byzantine, involving the bringing of energy from Banchory in the north east of Scotland down the east of the country to a new sub-station in Galashiels, then weaving a drunken path through the Borders to Carlisle and ultimately down to Manchester. There being presumably a terrible dearth of wind and water in the west of Scotland and Cumbria.

Locals reacted with total outrage at the original proposals, in which the pylons were sited at the eastern end of the Yarrow Valley, objecting to the visual destruction of the area, so what did SPEN do? Moved them to an even more beautiful part.

There was method in their madness. Yarrow Feus, the new proposed location, is far less populated than the eastern site and it’s a numbers game. The fact that 100 percent of the population is up in arms is irrelevant. There’s only around 100 of these yokels anyway so who gives a damn? The really important number is what the energy companies make. Scottish Power’s profits were £1.2 billion last year. The energy companies made £12 million recently just for turning their wind turbines off.

You might have thought that the Scottish government would object to the desecration of the country’s landscape – and the potential destruction of their tourist trade – but the ruling party, the Supine Nitwit Party (SNP) are too busy counting up their bawbees to notice the sheer colonialism of all this, that Scotland’s beauty is being desecrated to take energy into England by a Spanish owned company while English beauty spots like the Lake District, the North Yorkshire Moors and the Peak District are free of pylons and wind turbines because cables are buried underground..

The people of the Borders are being told that that’s too expensive for the likes of them and the SNP just shrug their shoulders. (A proposed development on Loch Lomond by the Yorkshire company, Flamingo Land, has had 155000 letters of objection and still the Scottish government won’t intervene.)

Particularly under Nicola Sturgeon the SNP were fanatical in their zeal for green energy, perhaps because their political majority depended on the Grumbling Gnome, Patrick Harvie, and his Green party acolytes. Now under their more realistic leader, John Swinney, they’ve started to backpedal, but it may be too late. Ed Miliband, Energy Secretary under the Monster Raving Labour Party, has set his eyes on England too and won’t rest till wind turbines that are regularly turned off, solar panel farms and massive pylons litter the landscape, dwarfing its mountains green and pleasant pastures.

The John Muir Trust has objected to the plans, as has the Ministry of Defence, whose Typhoon fighter jets regularly use the Yarrow Valley for low level training flights. They can console themselves with the thought that their military hardware will be redundant in a few years anyway. Practically all the wind turbines and solar batteries used  for green energy in this country are shipped a mere 4813 miles from China. US spooks have discovered rogue components in some, enabling the Chinese, in the event of war on Europe, to shut down the grid and freeze us all to death.

The consultation time has now closed, though SPEN were deeply cynical as they put the proposed route in a different part of the valley and pretended it was the same route, giving locals just a month to respond instead of the customary three months. Iif you agree that this is undemocratic please bombard them with letters of protest to:

info@crossborderconnection.co.uk