Mundell takes government to task over destruction of the landscape
Dumfriesshire MSP Oliver Mundell has launched a stinging attack on the Scottish Government, accusing it of turning its back on rural Scotland and overseeing the
destruction of the countryside.
Aiming his fire at new legislation currently going through Parliament, he described it as “another attack dressed up in the cloak of so-called animal welfare without the evidence to back it up.”
“The countryside and the people living in it are being used as a political football,” he said. “Increasingly, our way of life is demonised. False divisions are stoked up. Fragile communities have never felt more abandoned and ignored. Twenty-five years into the new Scottish Parliament, life is worse for many who live in rural
Scotland. Increasingly, the very viability of their communities comes into question. How can SNP MSPs who represent rural communities go along with that?
Mr Mundell who formerly held the position as his party’s spokesman on the rural economy and tourism, says people in the ruling SNP-Green coalition who claim to care about the country’s moorlands but in reality want to see them diminished or even abandoned.
“They see no problem in forcing those who do more for biodiversity than almost anyone else out of their jobs and off the hills,” he said. “Let us not kid ourselves. The grandstanding of members in this Parliament on countryside issues that they do not understand has real-world consequences, but I guess that, if they never leave the central belt, they would not know that.”
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