I live Shetland I have many friends throughout Island, remote & rural parts of Scotland. I am the recycling manager for a large role model social enterprise company as well as a former sole trader. I have watched creeping regulations, red tape, unworkable health & safety legislation, over the top public health regulations & other high cost measures mostly emanating from the EU resulting in a real choking off of island, remote & rural survival.
The dogmatic adoption of all EU regulations / directives and the accompanying bureaucracy / costs etc has & continues to marginalise & bankrupt sustainable economic survival & development. The EU's one size fits all mentality is closing down remote, rural & island communities.
If this consultation exercise is to address anything in a meaningful or serious way it will have to grasp this & seek solutions to the cause of closing hotels, public halls, shops, petrol stations, craft workshops, transport costs in the region & a host of other local goods & services all trying to survive without economies of scale enjoyed by Glasgow, Brussels, Berlin etc who basically have the same regulations, licence costs, public & environmental health laws and so on.
Rural Scottish businesses are often seasonal but face the same laws, regulations & costs on top of higher remote / rural operating costs. This cannot go on if rural Scotland is to survive let alone develop. We have to reduce the regulatory burden, reduce the various licence fees, introduce different tiers of operation to better reflect the socio economic disadvantage rural Scotland faces when trading within the EU.
If there is no way to make the EU redefine the strategy to allow rural Scotland to survive & flourish within a corrupt EU we need to get out of the EU as we cannot afford to be in it much longer.
In my experience, the EU gets the blame for a deeper problem, for which it is not blameless, but which also underlies much local and central government action. Fundamentally, systems of governance, bureaucracies, tend to implement rules still by letter not spirit. This is systemic.
Bureaucracies are all institutionally unresponsive, unenterprising and essentially small-c conservative. Rural areas suffer because policy-making favours the urban and policies are conceived from urban experience and often to deal with the urban features of certain issues. Bureacratic execution of policy then implements urban responses in rural areas without any culture of response or flexibility.
Where the EU is blamed for ludicrous and inappropriate regulation, it is actually amplified bureacratic thinking. Different systems reinforce each others failings to the point of near madness. Local government implements national government policies it feels are thrust upon it. The mindset expects that to fail (lacking local knowledge) but practices it to the letter so that it does.
National governments adopt and distort EU regulations for similar reasons, or to emphasise political differences, shift the focus of blame and so on. If there is anything that policians can do to help us in rural areas it is this.
They need to understand how policy is often shaped by the louder urban majority then forced to fit rural circumstances. They need to understand how their systems of implementation are rigid, self-serving and inflexible. They need to start working on changes to how they actually think and work. Unless there is a fundamental change in the implementation model for governance, rural areas are likely to continue to suffer from marginalisation and just plain not being taken seriously.
Either that or we declare a form of independence, shift the business models we use, and devise different means of co-operation in order to compete with the urban with its so-called economies of scale and it's log-jammed business environment. But that's a different story…
Scotland: National Rural Network
Comments
Rural Scotland Consultation
I live Shetland I have many friends throughout Island, remote & rural parts of Scotland. I am the recycling manager for a large role model social enterprise company as well as a former sole trader. I have watched creeping regulations, red tape, unworkable health & safety legislation, over the top public health regulations & other high cost measures mostly emanating from the EU resulting in a real choking off of island, remote & rural survival.
The dogmatic adoption of all EU regulations / directives and the accompanying bureaucracy / costs etc has & continues to marginalise & bankrupt sustainable economic survival & development. The EU's one size fits all mentality is closing down remote, rural & island communities.
If this consultation exercise is to address anything in a meaningful or serious way it will have to grasp this & seek solutions to the cause of closing hotels, public halls, shops, petrol stations, craft workshops, transport costs in the region & a host of other local goods & services all trying to survive without economies of scale enjoyed by Glasgow, Brussels, Berlin etc who basically have the same regulations, licence costs, public & environmental health laws and so on.
Rural Scottish businesses are often seasonal but face the same laws, regulations & costs on top of higher remote / rural operating costs. This cannot go on if rural Scotland is to survive let alone develop. We have to reduce the regulatory burden, reduce the various licence fees, introduce different tiers of operation to better reflect the socio economic disadvantage rural Scotland faces when trading within the EU.
If there is no way to make the EU redefine the strategy to allow rural Scotland to survive & flourish within a corrupt EU we need to get out of the EU as we cannot afford to be in it much longer.
Bureaucratic Thinking
In my experience, the EU gets the blame for a deeper problem, for which it is not blameless, but which also underlies much local and central government action. Fundamentally, systems of governance, bureaucracies, tend to implement rules still by letter not spirit. This is systemic.
Bureaucracies are all institutionally unresponsive, unenterprising and essentially small-c conservative. Rural areas suffer because policy-making favours the urban and policies are conceived from urban experience and often to deal with the urban features of certain issues. Bureacratic execution of policy then implements urban responses in rural areas without any culture of response or flexibility.
Where the EU is blamed for ludicrous and inappropriate regulation, it is actually amplified bureacratic thinking. Different systems reinforce each others failings to the point of near madness. Local government implements national government policies it feels are thrust upon it. The mindset expects that to fail (lacking local knowledge) but practices it to the letter so that it does.
National governments adopt and distort EU regulations for similar reasons, or to emphasise political differences, shift the focus of blame and so on. If there is anything that policians can do to help us in rural areas it is this.
They need to understand how policy is often shaped by the louder urban majority then forced to fit rural circumstances. They need to understand how their systems of implementation are rigid, self-serving and inflexible. They need to start working on changes to how they actually think and work. Unless there is a fundamental change in the implementation model for governance, rural areas are likely to continue to suffer from marginalisation and just plain not being taken seriously.
Either that or we declare a form of independence, shift the business models we use, and devise different means of co-operation in order to compete with the urban with its so-called economies of scale and it's log-jammed business environment. But that's a different story…