"I am here today to ask for your help in defending your
fellow citizens from a gross injustice.
An unelected cabal made up of the Harbour Board, unelected officers at
City Council, Scottish Enterprise and Sir Ian Wood’s ONE/ETZ company are
planning to steal the last green space accessible to the poorest people in the
North East. This collusion of private
interests and the political system is crony capitalism at its most sordid.
Folk in Torry are already disadvantaged. Their industries, fishing, ship building and
repair, were lost to the oil industry.
Homes were destroyed when Shell replaced a picturesque fishing village
with a major accident hazard site. They
were surrounded by landfill sites and industrial estates. Edged by Wellington Road. Home to two large harbours, a sewage
treatment works, a gas turbine testing plant, a fishmeal factory. A 150,000
tonnes per annum incinerator is being built 500 metres from the Primary
School.
They were promised extensive environmental improvements by
the Harbour Board and Aberdeen City Council in exchange for giving up Bay of
Nigg. That was in 2016. Fast forward a few years and these two bodies
were conspiring to remove Torry’s last green spaces and leave a settlement of
ten and a half thousand people completely surrounded by industry. The pandemic has shown us we need
green-spaces for health and well-being.
Local health professionals have spelled out clearly what the loss of St
Fittick’s Park will mean to the local community, where life expectancy is 13
years lower than in the leafier suburbs of Aberdeen, and healthy life twenty
years lower. The media has condemned the
plan. The list of organisations backing
our campaign to save the park grows by the week.
So why is this happening?
Explanation A – Sir Ian Wood’s ONE company got control of
economic development via the City Region Deal, and splurged the money on an Oil
and Gas Technology Centre. They backed
the wrong horse, and are desperate for a way out of the fix. At the same time the Harbour Board borrowed
a heap of dosh to build in a pristine bay across from St Fittick’s Bay. Last year they had to renegotiate their deal
with European Investment Bank because they were at risk of “breaching their
banking covenant”.
Naw – I don’t know what “breaching their banking covenant”
means either. Are there any good
socialist accountants here? Is socialist
accountant an oxymoron?
A few weeks later they had to borrow another £30 million
from the Scottish National Investment Bank, so it sounds as though they’re
having financial problems. What better
way of retrofitting a couple of cock-ups than spinning the politicians a line
that getting carte blanche to destroy the green belt will make Aberdeen great
again?
Explanation B is that stealing Torry’s public land for
private profit was the plan all along and that Aberdeen City Council and
Aberdeen Harbour Board just lied through their teeth. A or B – take your pick, the outcome is the
same. The land grab – or as the
collection of spivs, misinformation pedlars and artistes of the untruth call it
“the energy transition zone”, is a right wee public money magnet. £27m from Rishi, £26m from ScotGov and – wait
for this, comrades £14.7m from the “Just Transition Fund”. Either
this is a fine example of irony, or the Government thinks George Orwell’s 1984
was an instruction manual.
There was a man once who believed in superior and inferior
humans. In fairness, he used quicker,
more innovative methods of ridding the state of the poor, the sick, the foreign
and the different. We march every year
to remind ourselves that the concentration camps and the gas chambers didn’t
appear out of thin air. Times are
beginning to look a lot like the 1930s.
And as Brecht puts it -
“Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men! Although the world stood up and
stopped the bastard, The bitch that bore him is in heat again”
We humans are hard wired for empathy. It takes years of conditioning, years of
propaganda to get us to the point where we no longer care about our brither man. Where we think that might is right. Where we accept millions of pounds of public
money being given to a speculative business venture is acceptable. Where we accept that folk can’t afford to
heat their homes or feed themselves is acceptable. When the destruction of the last green space
in Torry gets only a shrug, an acceptance that it’s a done deal because the
rich and powerful will it so. If you
tolerate this, then your children will be next.
Comrades – I’m leaving this rally to go over to a
consultation on Sir Ian Wood’s Energy Transition Zone. Sir Ian Wood’s ONE company has effectively
privatised economic development in this City.
Sir Ian formed another private company “ETZ ltd” from the energy wing of
ONE. ETZ ltd hired a consultant,
Ironside Farrar, for a quarter of a million to “Masterplan” an industrial park
in Torry that includes St Fittick’s Park.
So both planning and economic development been outsourced to the private
sector.
Join me. Let’s take
our banners over to Torry, and tell Ironside Farrar what we think of their sham
consultation.
Solidarity!