Views

Festival helped banish credit-crunch gloom - for The Inverness Courier

THE new year in Inverness got off to a great start with the excellent Hogmanay party — great fun was had and some brilliant music enjoyed by thousands of people. Comedy value was added by the sight of three councillors from the Winter Festival organising committee doing the Timewarp on stage.

The festival has been a splendid initiative which I hope will be repeated.

With home-grown ideas and a huge amount of hard work from the councillors and staff behind it, it has done what we will need much more of in 2009 — lifted a little of the recession gloom and helped to make our area even more attractive to visitors.

Tourism can be one of the important local industries that bucks the economic trend, but government needs to take the right action to support it.

The weak pound will make travelling to Scotland more attractive and cost-effective for visitors from overseas.

It will also make going abroad more expensive for British people, so again we have an opportunity to promote the Highlands as the best place for a holiday at home.

We have some world-beating tourism attractions in Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey — let alone the rest of the Highlands.

With Inverness and Loch Ness, the natural adventures to be had in the Cairngorms National Park, the superb seaside facilities and golf in Nairn and elsewhere, we have a great deal to offer.

The growth of destination management organisations — we have the first two in the country — around Loch Ness and the Cairngorms, shows the effort local businesses and communities are willing to put in to improve the offer further and to promote it.

So now we need the taxpayer-funded tourism bodies to step up to the plate too.

We should be seeing a vigorous and well-funded campaign to promote the Highlands and Scotland by VisitScotland across the whole of the UK, and into Europe.

Such a campaign should be a major plank of the government's efforts to overcome the effects of the economic slowdown.

Another opportunity is the Year of Homecoming. This should be a chance to encourage those across the world with a connection to the Highlands to come and visit the area again.

It is bewildering and bizarre that most of the effort to promote this is going on within Scotland. We are already here!

A change of plan is needed to ensure this is not the big missed opportunity of 2009.

BYPASS CAMPAIGN

The biggest local disappointment of 2008 was the Scottish Government's half-baked transport plan, with lots of vague commitments. The only really specific decision was a wrong one — to reject the Inverness bypass.

Now political shenanigans about the Forth Road Bridge might be the excuse given for not funding other projects.

A lot of people in Inverness have worked hard to get the trunk road link to a point where it can be built, and have campaigned hard to persuade the government it is the right thing to do. Now we have to redouble our campaigning effort to get them to change their minds.

I hope we can get together a city-wide campaign, involving everyone who supports this project, to demonstrate to the government the strength of feeling that exists locally.

By working together we can show that there is a powerful case for this being a high priority for funding. If we keep the pressure on, I believe we can be successful. The alternative is simply not acceptable.

Posted on: 13/01/2009