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Looming election puts change on the agenda - for the Inverness Courier

WHILE the year is off to a very cold start, politics hotted up at Westminster last week as parties started the race towards the general election.

And while the cold spell has brought out the best in community spirit in the Highlands, there was little sense that David Cameron and Gordon Brown would be willing to get out the shovels to help clear one another's streets. But despite the rows at Westminster, now is the time for people to start to think about what they want from their next government.

This year is going to offer huge challenges to the country - and particularly people in the Highlands.

After the many political and economic failures of the last few years, 2010 offers the opportunity to put the country back on the right track.

I believe the focus locally and nationally must be on delivering fairness in place of the widening inequalities that scar our society.

After 12 years of Labour government, Britain still has one of the most unfair tax systems in Europe. We will still do not do enough to give every child the best start in life and we are still falling short of the action needed to tackle climate change. Our broken political system has failed to fix these problems because of the unfairness built into it.

As we approach the election, the question is not whether the country needs change - it is what kind of change do we need?

Only radical change that makes the country fairer will allow us to get to grips with the huge problems we face.

Labour has totally failed to deliver fairness and the Conservatives cannot be trusted to do so because their first instinct is to help people already at the top.

Families across the Highlands have been put under huge financial pressure by the recession.

We need to make the tax system fairer to put more money into the pockets of people on low and middle incomes - and ask those at the top to bear more of the burden.

I don't want to see anyone paying income tax on the first £10,000 they earn.

I will be campaigning hard this year for more help for people struggling to pay the rising cost of heating their homes.

The Highlands has more severe fuel poverty than the rest of the country. The harsh winter conditions have been especially difficult for people who use heating oil to heat their homes and live in older, poorly insulated properties.

These families need to be given much greater priority. When I asked Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, about this in the Commons last Thursday, he was unable to make any new commitment to extra help to insulate the homes of those who do not have access to mains gas. Surely as a country we can do better.

Over the next few years, government spending is going to be under enormous pressure as we have to repair the damage done by the recession.

We need to make sure that the impact of the hard choices does not fall disproportionately on the vulnerable.

We will need a big push in 2010 to ensure central government cuts do not fall harder on the Highlands, and that we get a fairer funding deal that recognises the extra costs we face here.

There is much that needs to be done in 2010. But by working together we can achieve the change we need for the Highlands and for the whole country.

BEAULY-DENNY

The Scottish government's approval for the Beauly-Denny powerline proposal at least ended years of uncertainty for the renewable energy industry, which has such enormous potential to create jobs in the Highlands.

But in other respects the decision was disappointing. Worst of all, there was no requirement to put the line underground, as it should have been in the most sensitive areas in the Cairngorms National Park and near Beauly.

I hope ministers can be persuaded to insist on undergrounding when it comes to the mitigation measures the power company must put forward.

Scottish and Southern Energy has also been allowed to get away with the bare minimum of community benefit - nothing at all for Fort Augustus, for example. After the years of delay, we had hoped for better than this.

Posted on: 12/01/2010