Oil (2)
The fight for Drumbuie
Naomi Mitchison
The fight is on at the Drumbuie inquiry. Will Mowlem and Taylor Woodrow be allowed to build a particular type of platform for oil rigs, which needs deep water for part of its construction and, later for testing and towing? Must these extremely large objects, which Would fill Trafalgar Square, be built in a singularly beautiful part of the Highland west• coast, on land belonging to the National Trust, against the wishes of most of the inhabitants as well as the Ross and Cromarty County Council, the Countryside Commission and above all the National Trust itself, which feels with some justice that this is the thin end of the wedge? If they lease land to heavy industry in one place — originally the pressure, was on to sell it — there may be further encroachments, encouraged perhaps by the Department of Trade and Industry. This was not why the land was given to them and it might well discourage other possible donors. The lawyers on both sides are having a field day in the main room at Balmacarra Hotel where, rather oddly, the inquiry is being held. I'm always sorry for people who are being skilfully cross-examined, however much I disagree with them! The interested audience, hoping next session to get one of the soft chairs, is mixed, as are the voices, from ripe Highland to flat English, by way of cultured Edinburgh. Mowlem's have produced some propaganda, rather inaccurately aimed, it seemed to me. The people of Kyle and Plockton and Drumbuie itself are not dimwits and are quite aware that 'national interests' and Mowlem profits can be used synonymously. There were some other funny words going around. It was suggested that there were several other types of platform which did not need to be built in deep water and with an imported labour force of several hundred. Instead a different kind might be built on the Clyde or at Hunterston, where skilled and semi-skilled men are available on the spot. No, no, they wouldn't consider it. The Condeep, the Norwegian design, was the best, the most versatile — an odd epithet for a very solid concrete construction.
My own feeling all the time was that, if Condeep was so good and the Norwegian fjords so suitable, why not 'think European' and have them built' there? Some wages and salaries might be lost to the UK, but not, I think, to the Highlands: There is practically full employment just now in Skye and Kyle. A few men might be tempted away by the huge pay packet, but the tempo of construction work, with the long hours and absence of
some of the usual amenities, is not what they are used to, and they may find that PAYE nibbles away a few pounds. So these platforms will do little for the place in which the companies want to build them. Norway, however, insists on a much larger government share, both of profits and of direction, than the UK does. Wages are higher there, too. That mightn't suit the British industrialists, even in partnership with a Norwegian firm. In fact, I was rather shocked at the way Norway was referred to. But I suppose few people now remember Narvik.
From time to time someone referred to the Hydro-Electric Board which, also, imported men to work in big labour camps on the dams and tunnels, many of which were in remote parts of the Highlands. But there is no real comparison. Dam construction made a temporary mess, droWned some good land and an occasional house or steading, but it left some beautiful long lochs, and the low, grey dam walls, with power houses designed to fit into the landscape. In Addition it left a few permanent maintenance jobs and above all power and light, even if some of it is being exported south at a cheaper rate than is charged in most Highland towns and villages. There is often the extra benefit of salmon or trout fisheries. But if Mowlem get Drumbuie they will leave in ten years or so, perhaps more, perhaps less, depending on contracts from oil companies, leaving nothing behind but social disruption and unease and a place inevitably scarred and disfigured. The sum these industrialists thought sufficient for the final tidying up was so laughably small compared with their admitted profit level, not to speak of the grant from the DTI, that one could hear the indrawn breath of jeering surprise among the listening audience.
Keeping the Kyle railway line open was one of their levers. One hopes that the idiocy of closing any more Highland lines and putting yet more cars and buses on dangerous roads is over. One also hopes that electricity generating stations which have been changing from coal to oil will change back. A bigger demand for coal — and remember we have coal reserves for a hundred years, long after North Sea oil has all gone — will ease the tension in the industry. There is also shale oil in Scotland, which would be being worked at this moment if the British Government had not seen fit to raise the tax on Scottish shale oil to the level of imported oil.
Yet of course the Highlands would be glad of more industry of a kind which might keep
people from moving south and which would be something for school boys and girls to look forward to. This means that it must have some element of permanency and reliability and have some connection with the environment. Across in Skye, not many miles from Balmacarra as the crow flies (but what crow in its senses would fly across the Sound of Sleat?), a new knitwear factory is starting up. This is in the Gaelic-speaking community round Isle Oronsay which is being fostered by a very practical idealist, lain Noble. I was sceptical about this until I saw for myself how much people enjoyed speaking their own language, even though they used English for some purposes; the young couples are being drawn in and a school which might have been closed is now bursting at the seams.
Another industry which has a very prosperous looking future in front of it is salmon and trout farming. In five years or so it could employ five hundred men, with others, or women and girls, cleaning and packing. It could happen in a dozen or more communities, wherever there is a suitable river for the hatching. As the price of prime meat goes up, so the gap between beef and salmon narrows, and a pound of salmon goes further than a pound of beef or mutton. It is interesting and varied work and fits in well with tourism, especially if Highland hotels take to salmon on the menu — and I don't mean tinned or frozen. There are opportunities there for smoking, too. In ten years it could double, like any industry depending on biological growth rather than money. It is something the National Trust could fit in, since it could never spoil an area of natural beauty. It will be weeks before the Drumbuie arguments are finished. I hope that whoever makes the decision will look and think hard about all the implications, not only those of the next two or three years. We don't want to play money politics with the Highland west coast.
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