John Cooper

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire (Mr MacDonald) on securing this a vital debate. “Wha but lo’e the bonnie hills”, the very first line of the song “Bonnie Galloway”—I will spare you by not singing it, Dr Huq—extols the virtues of the rolling uplands of the south-west of Scotland. Yet the tranquillity of the moors, farms and forests has been disturbed these last few years by the relentless march of wind turbines. Now Dumfries and Galloway is festooned with them and we have many more on the way. We are in the foothills of a renewables revolution. Arguments for or against wind farms are not for today. I feel that battle has been lost, but we must fight a rearguard action against ever-bigger turbines. Giants of over 650 feet from base to rotor tip are the fashion, and they are moving ever closer to our towns and villages. I feel that we will see Governments happily trample local opposition to wind farms and turn a deaf ear to forcing power cables underground. Whether we welcome wind farms or have them foisted upon us, we must wrest from them what community benefit we can. Communities already see little enough of the supply chain benefits. It is to be hoped that the previous UK Government’s efforts to create freeports in Scotland might see more of the manufacturing based here in Britain. I have hopes, too, that Labour will make good on a Northern Ireland enhanced investment zone, as mapped out by the previous Conservative Government, that included the western end of my constituency. That would be a game changer: imagine the jobs created if we could build those giant turbines in Stranraer and ship them out via the deep-water port of Cairnryan. On renewables, we in rural Scotland have had much of the pain and little of the gain.