CELIA Hobbs (Letters, April 16) employs the tactic of deploying carefully selected statistics in order to make a political point which otherwise wouldn’t stand up to examination and seeks to use the construction of wind farms as justification for her assertion that “the SNP has sacrificed Scotland’s tourist industry for its flagship policy”. Hyperbole aside, the facts don’t back the assertion. Ms Hobbs quotes the fall in the number of tourist trips to Scotland between 2005 (17.3m) and 2014 (15.52m) as proof of her point. The SNP didn’t come to power until mid 2007 and as it didn’t and couldn’t immediately blanket the country with wind farms the connection seems tenuous. In fact tourism, as measured by tourist trips fell from 2005 on a yearly basis until 2010 (14.71m). Since then tourism numbers have recovered, though not in a linear fashion.
There are numerous reasons why tourism numbers fluctuate. These include both UK and worldwide economic factors, the relative strength/weakness of sterling versus the world’s currencies, the number of high-profile events occurring in any particular year and so on.
I’m sure tourists foreign and domestic don’t come to Scotland to look at windmills. Then again they didn’t flock to Fife or the Lothians to stare at coal bings and slag heaps and don’t visit the Ayrshire coast today to gaze upon Hunterston nuclear power station. Man’s need to find fuel has had a great impact on the landscape of Scotland over the centuries but the idea that the SNP and wind farms are somehow destroying our tourist industry isn’t just unproven, it’s untrue.
Kenneth McNeil,
Alva Place, Lenzie.
DAVID Hay (Letters, April 18) in response to my letter (April 14) claims that we need politicians to control the excesses of scientists and engineers.
He identifies Dounreay, an experimental but atypical nuclear station, as his reason for political control. Dounreay was not part of the SSE and North of Scotland hydro which I mentioned but controlled by the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Everything done at Dounreay, including the construction of the shaft for waste storage which energises Mr Hay, had to receive political approval by the UK government at the time before it could go ahead. It is always easy to point to errors in new technology but without experimentation we don’t progress and reap the benefits. Chernobyl was a reactor design rejected as unsafe by the West and the explosion caused by switching off safety systems. As for Fukushima, 20,000 died from the tsunami and none from the damage to the nuclear station. But thousands died from the unnecessary forced removal from nearby required by government as a result of unrealistic fear of radiation.
Professor Tony Trewavas,
Scientific Alliance Scotland, 7-9 North St David Street, Edinburgh.
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