COMMENT: Governments still show colonial attitude
By Daniel Lawson
When the Scottish government proposed turning at least 10 per cent of Scotland’s seas into Highly Marine Protected Areas (HPMAs), and banning all “extractive activities” within them, it spoke to the colonial attitude that our governments still show towards fishing – and the communities that continue to fish.
Far from only outlawing commercial fishing, these HPMAs threatened to stop even basic sustenance fishing: no more taking the bairns off to fish in the family boat. The cultural message to islanders was clear: your heritage and dearly-held pastimes are wrong and damaging, somehow, and we – a distant government – have decided to ban them.
Thankfully and rightly since ditched, those HPMA proposals unfortunately epitomised the disconnect clearly seen in Scotland between the urban and the rural, and between the political and the practical.
We’ve seen this disconnect before, mind you. The much-maligned Highland Clearances live long in the rural mindset, and I’m sure our SNP government would be rightly mortified by the comparison, but the parallels are clear and obvious. Instead of working folk being turfed out of common land to make way for new industry, we’re seeing fishing crews cast out of their traditional grounds to make way for new industry – in this case the multinational energy companies trying to produce offshore wind power.
The ironies are numerous and palpable. To make way for these developers, the profits currently made from an area of sea will instead accrue to the absentee landlords of the modern day: foreign-owned multinational energy companies. With our own government’s backing, and at the expense of our own people, it is instead the Irish government and Norwegian oil companies that will profit from these areas around Shetland – due to their financial stakes in the energy firms fronting these windfarm developments.
Even worse is the proposed solution to this loss of fishing grounds: that protected areas should be set aside for fishing to continue within. Putting aside the major issues this could pose given shifting fish stocks and the potential consequences of climate change, this is a so-called solution that smacks of centralised colonial attitude: think native Americans forced on to their reserves. Our fishing fleet is too often treated as a problem to be managed away, rather than the sustainable solution to some of the pressing issues facing us all.
I suspect that all of our politicians would reject the charge of colonial attitudes – wary of the connotations with clearances, empire and exploitation – but recent policies and plans speak for themselves.
Fishing crews in Shetland – and the many other folk here who rely on fishing for their livelihoods – face powerful external market forces which, if allowed to continue so unchecked, will undermine this important local industry to the detriment of us all. And in exchange for what?
As the band Skippinish now sing, this really is the clearances come again – and traditional society is once again threatened by a headlong rush into the arms of big business. When faced with the oil and gas boom of the 1970s, visionary Shetland stood up for itself to the government and developers of the day and – mixing political demands with canny negotiation – won some measure of local control and recompense in exchange for hosting important energy developments. Where is that vision now?
• Daniel Lawson is an executive officer for Shetland Fishermen’s Association.
