We are entering a new chapter in our history

SINCE this is my last column due to the cuts to freelance budgets by Scottish Provincial Press, and now that Babcock and their associates have been announced as the winners of the two-horse race for the decommissioning of Dounreay, I think it only appropriate to end the odyssey of the Pictish Navy with a constructive look at a possible future for Caithness.

There is a definite sense that we are entering a new chapter in our history and that the social and economic realities we have known since 1955 are going to change. For many this “uncertainty” is a thing of both worry about and fear.

For others it is a thing to be embraced, to be seen as an opportunity. For those of us who were born in the mid-50s Dounreay has been both a constant presence and a transformative agent – for Dounreay changed Caithness forever and we are that changeling generation.

Come 2038 – the date for the completion of decommissioning and when the almost £3 billion will be spent and the 20,000 tonnes of radioactive waste will be interred at Buldoo, which then can be added to our glorious burial mound archaeological heritage – I will either be dead or 82. So what are we actually left with now?

Dounreay arrived on our northern coast under a cloud of secrecy, half-truths, propaganda, convenience and military-industrial necessity. Uranium and plutonium were needed for the Cold War that never was fought and the nuclear reactors for the free electricity no-one ever received. For 57 years the majority have, on the other hand, enjoyed the material comfort of wages, job and house.

The “Atomicer” migration has been absorbed by the native population and in the west of the county, most especially in Thurso (Atomic City as it used to be called on CB radio), has produced a strange, culturally confused, mongrel generation whose rump is now reduced to 876 direct jobs on site and who no doubt expect it to be, right up to the end, as a spokesman said last week, “business as usual”.

THE fact is it was never a usual business. Pump-primed and bankrolled by the British Government, protected from the real world of economic peaks and troughs, the UKAEA has created in Caithness a culture and a society which is finding it more difficult than many other post-industrial communities to come to terms with life after the beast. This, admittedly, has not been helped by their being no social or economic percentage benefit written into any of the decommissioning contracts for the decommissioning of Dounreay and no matter what the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority or Babcock International will say the vast majority of the £3 billion will go over the Atlantic where the beating corporate heart of the Babcock Dounreay Partnership resides.

Meanwhile, back on the Caithness croft we face depopulation and unemployment with all the social problems these twin spectres bring.

The Westminster and Scottish governments, the Highland Council and Highlands and Islands Enterprise have all failed the people of Caithness. But there is not much to be gained by crying over that: what we need is direct action and some structure to our possibilities.

It seems to me what Caithness badly needs is a Caithness Development Agency, set up immediately by the Scottish Government, which should pass legislation to reverse the lax fiscal chicanery which allows Cumbria to benefit from the decommissioning of Sellafield through contractual percentages for social and economic benefit but from which Caithness does not. Babcock, let us note, has undertaken the Sellafield contract.

In Caithness all we ask for is parity. The funds the Caithness Development Agency would have at its disposal should go to small and medium enterprises in the county either as direct subsidy or as interest-free loans – whatever is appropriate.

The CDA should also have power to acquire land that is not being used productively to be given to those who can bring it into specific agricultural use, or for housing. But the emphasis of the CDA must be to allow local people to work out their own future, to enable them to determine their own destiny.

This regeneration of local initiatives must be supported by the creation of a Caithness Co-operative Bank, which will be owned by its members – the account holders – but which should initially be financed from the tax raised in Caithness as a percentage of the Scottish tax take and redistributed, through the bank, to the people of Caithness both as a fiscal incentive and a secure financial facility.

THROUGH a Caithness Development Agency and a Caithness Co-operative Bank the people of Caithness can construct their own economic strategy and create a culture of self determination – admittedly through work – which they have forgotten this past half century but which is in their cultural DNA and must be reinvigorated.

There is not space here to go into details on how these two bodies, this twin approach, would work. But one thing is clear: paternalism – whether it be huge industrial complexes which distort local equilibrium or feudal land ownership which denies any enterprise – have no place in a future Caithness.

We must empower ourselves in order to achieve our potential as a people and a society, and if we demand that our own government gives us the tools to do the job I can see no reason how it can refuse.

Once that is achieved and the Caithness Development Agency and the Caithness Co-operative Bank are up and running then government must step out of the picture and allow native flair and talent to fire its mettle and create a stable society for future generations to build on.

The Pictish Navy may be beached like an old Stroma yawl on the rocky shore of short-termism but Caithness is an ancient place with a long, brilliant future.

Believe me, this is not a message I have put in a bottle.