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Plenary, 04 Nov 2009

04 Nov 2009 · S3 · Plenary

Item of business

National Parks

Harvie, Christopher SNP Mid Scotland and Fife Watch on SPTV

In his last novel, "The Duke's Children", Anthony Trollope, whom no one would regard as a radical, wrote of a Scottish Highlands that was afflicted by field sports—empty of people and trees and with sportsmen blasting anything that moved. A few years after he wrote that, his friend the jurist and Oxford professor James Bryce, was the first MP to press for an access to mountains bill in the 1890s. I wrote his biography quite recently, and found that that was the first attempt to get access to those beautiful areas of the country. Bryce was a great disciple of John Ruskin, a Scot of Scots, who was the architect of the National Trust.

I have seen a national park close up—I live on the fringes of the Snowdonia national park—so I know that the status imposes certain disciplines on the area and the people who live there, and that living in a national park is the most valuable form of education about a natural life that is threatened from so many directions.

Scotland's national parks—Loch Lomond and the Trossachs and the Cairngorms—are beginning to play a crucial part in the conservation of our natural heritage, and in allowing the public to enjoy those treasures of nature and scenery. The two national parks cover more than 3,000 square miles and contain such scenic presences as Ben Lomond and Loch Katrine, Rob Roy's Balquhidder and Queen Victoria's Balmoral. As the lady said, it is so interesting to talk to the Highlanders, whom one meets so much in the Highlands. With Queen Victoria, what you saw was what you got.

In August 2005, only two years after opening, the Cairngorms national park was awarded the European charter for sustainable tourism in protected areas—the first national park in Britain to win the prestigious award. It is therefore encouraging to see that despite tight finances, cuts and the like, the Scottish Government is still able to increase slightly the maintenance budget for the national parks to around £13 million, and that new initiatives are striving to streamline and democratise national park authorities.

One has to go further. It is not just a question of preventing damage from being done to the parks by those who are insensitive or plain stupid; the parks should also be signposted sensitively. The late Ian Nairn, who was a great defender of the planning system, used to talk of the subtopian impact of festoons of road signs dotted all over the place that were aimed at drivers driving very fast so that they could pick out the signs in their bright and usually lurid form. It is surely in the national park ethos that the speeds at which cars travel and, for that matter, the size of the cars, should be consonant with the heritage of the parks. However, we have clogged roads and the curse of the four-wheel drive vehicle. We have the supermarket on the park fringe killing off the village stores that walkers or cyclists might require, and we have the cottage wall covered in graffiti. [Interruption.] Does Mr Rumbles want to intervene?

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Plenary, 04 Nov 2009

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