Views
Solutions require national input - for the Strathspey & Badenoch Herald
AFTER the madness of Westminster, it has been a real pleasure in the last month to be back at home in the strath.
The first couple of weeks of the recess have flown past, with a succession of surgeries and visits letting me get to many of the smaller communities right across the area.
We've also had the chance to get around a good number of the excellent summer events hosted by communities locally as a family.
In getting out and about at this time of year, issues are raised that might not come up during the regular weekly commute to London, when time is shorter and surgeries tend to be limited to the bigger towns and villages.
I am always very happy to hear from anyone with a concern or a point to make, but for perfectly understandable reasons the majority of people who get in touch are facing a particular problem and seeking my help.
Representing people who are being treated badly – whether by the Government, the council, private companies or someone else altogether – is a vitally important part of my job.
Through Parliament, I can hold Ministers to account for their actions – or at least those of Gordon Brown's Ministers who have been elected and sit in the House of Commons!
Very often bureaucracies let people down – more often through inattention or indifference than malice – and an MP getting involved can sometimes be enough to get them to sit up and take notice.
The number of cases like that which I deal with remains fairly steady all year, but the summer brings a slightly broader dimension to my local work.
People are much more likely to approach me at this time of year with concerns about longer-term changes which they are seeing, or issues which affect whole communities.
These kinds of point can be every bit as important to the task of representing our area – not least because an emerging concern this year may anticipate something which will cause hundreds of individual people more immediate problems later on.
The way in which governments work means solutions can be much easier to find if action is taken before Ministers have dug themselves into an argument.
One issue which was raised with me a couple of weeks ago, and which has been with us for quite some time, is the complexity of our rail fare system and the bizarre and environmentally-damaging consequences that it has.
A local person spotted and told me about the absurd system that ScotRail operate by which it is cheaper for someone who lives in Kingussie to travel to Aviemore to get to Edinburgh.
At a time when we should be encouraging both tourism and green behaviour, this is a particularly thoughtless policy.
Thankfully, local businesses are thinking a lot harder about how to improve things locally. While, it is too early to make predictions, many of the local tourism providers that I have talked to over the summer seem to be doing well.
But they also need the support of the public sector to do it. That's why initiatives like the Aviemore and Cairngorms DMO and the plans for the future of the Cairngorms Chamber of Commerce make so much sense.
By working together, local businesses are setting the agenda both for themselves and for government bodies.
One government-owned sector which needs to do much more to help are the banks. I have for months been asking Government Ministers to do more to make the banks we own do more to help local firms.
But local firms, individuals and farmers are still having lending cut or charges increased.
Despite the warnings from my Lib Dem colleague Vince Cable, myself and many others, the Labour government seems totally incapable of using its powers to good effect.
So if I draw one conclusion it is this: the recession may be a national, even global, problem, but many of the best ways to beat it are local.
But we need national government to act to help get us through, but too often it is getting in the way.
Posted on: 19/08/2009
