Country life

I lived and worked in 'the country' for 15 years of my 35 year professional life. I've been friends with people who live and work in the country for over 40 years. About half of Scotland's population live outside the city/town areas. A lot of them live in villages or on farms or crofts and earn their living from country pursuits.

When a friend's health board collapsed and her island and all the other islands round about and a good chunk of the mainland had to be attached to a new health board much further north with no
understanding of the conditions in her area, she was quite philosophical: It doesn't matter which health board we're in, she said, we'll be at the tail end of the queue. I tried to imagine the good folk of Stirling or Ayr being told their health board would now be located in Thurso or Jedburgh. Nope. Wouldn't happened.

I know how easy it is for the urban areas - Central Belt + Inverness, Dundee and Aberdeen, Ayrshire and Dumfries - to forget about the rural areas. I've met a lot of Scots who have never been as far north as Oban, don't know what it means when huge multi-national companies refuse to deliver goods to your postcode, don't realise most young people if they want to study at university have to leave their home, family and friends - and some even have to do that at the age of 12 when they go to secondary school.

We  only see the Highlands and Islands on the telly on Alba or Eorpa programmes. For them to appear on STV and BBC there has to be a catastrophe.

It's not just that we don't know where these places are or how hard it is to get there by public transport or how awful it is trying to find somewhere affordable to live in the country. We just don't understand how people live in these areas. More important: we don't understand how far removed from our lives their lives are. They grow fruit and veg in their gardens because that's really the only way to be sure of having a steady supply of good food all year round. They keep livestock because that gives them a decent source of things to eat - and things to sell. They dig and stack peats because the cost of heating a rural home is just that much higher than we know about in centrally-heated areas where we have a choice of gas, electric or oil fired heating. They have to have a car because either there's no public transport or it all stops at 5pm and how do you get to night classes or take the kid to Brownies?

Then there's the environment. I'm a Scottish Green. I was a bit queasy when I heard Patrick Harvie complaining about airport tax being halved yesterday. Patrick wants to stop people using gas-guzzling transport. A lot of people depend on planes for major trips - people in Campbeltown, Islay, Tiree, Colonsay, Lewis & Harris, the Uists, Barra, Orkney, Shetland, etc. No trains, you see. Alistair Carmichael, MP for Orkney and Shetland describes being asked why he couldn't take the train rather than a pricy plane journey. Where is your nearest train station? he was asked. Stavanger. And the journey time - for example - from Campbeltown to Glasgow is 3 3/4 hours by car and 35 minutes by plane. I want to cut airport tax for evetyone. Otherwise plane travel is unaffordable.

Worst of all in this sad litany of misunderstandings of rural life, there's the suspicion that country livers are all huntin n shootin people or multimillionaire farmers subsidised by the EU (ha!), rather than - as we know - hill farmers who have been through hell several times over. Remember Chernobyl? Foot and Mouth?

The Scottish Parliament today sanctioned the docking of dogs' tails. Working dogs. Not pets. Immediately, we have a backlash and I'm sorry to say a lot of it comes from my fellow Scottish Greens. The danger with being a city dweller - and totally ignorant of rural life - is that we judge everything by our standards. So tail-docking for dogs is cruel. It doesn't matter what arguments anyone puts forward, you can judge what rural people do by what you do when you've got a pet spaniel. And you would never dock your pet spaniel's tail. Well, of course not. Yours is not a working dog.

On top of that, you don't trust these country types. They love to torture animals, don't they? Well, no, in fact, these country types have been custodians of Scotland's countryside for centuries. I've walked round fields with farmers and representatives of the RSPB who wanted to tell us how to 'conserve' the land for corncrakes. It never occurred to them that farmers have been doing that for a long time. I'm not advocating that we ignore wildlife crime. I'd love to know who has been shooting and poisoning birds of prey in south and central Scotland so we can prosecute them to the full extent of the law. But I don't think they are the farmers and crofters who live here.

We have to trust the people who know the land.