Bog Myrtle & Peat

After July’s announcement about a new National Park in Galloway, the situation has stumbled to a strange hiatus. People are arguing about what it all means, and nobody knows for sure if the decision has already been taken. If you judge it on the basis that the Government has committed to making a new National Park in Scotland before 2026 and Galloway is the only candidate on the table, the situation seems pretty cut-and-dry. But the forthcoming consultation has promised to gauge public opinion on the idea, and some folk argue that it’s just a proposal which can be politely refused. The flabby nature of the announcement (and some of the bendable wordplay around what’ll happen next) has been extremely confusing. Should we bother engaging with the consultation if the decision has already been made? Are Ministers seriously planning to fund a new National Park if they’re already failing to uphold existing commitments to nature and the environment?

Nobody knows…

…it depends who you ask… 

… and most importantly, it depends whose side are you on…

There’s no obvious explanation for this current period of inaction. It’s now clear that nothing much is going to happen before the autumn, and perhaps Ministers imagined that this three month pause would allow people in Galloway to engage with the facts and get ready for the debate. They couldn’t have been more wrong, and it’s not our fault if the story has been completely derailed by inaction and stasis. Instead of calm consideration, we now have a Wild West dynamic which has overridden even the simplest aspects of the discussion. Without any independent facilitation or arbitration, National Parks have become a flashpoint of division and conflict across the entire southwest. Consistent with every debate transacted across social media, Parkers denounce any criticism of the plan while No-Parkers fail to see any good in it whatsoever. Depending on where you look, it’s either the best thing in the entire world or a complete unmitigated nightmare. 

In the absence of external, unbiased input, the only source of new information on National Parks is being drawn from organisations which campaign either for or against them. Both sides ride into battle on facts which can be ignored or promoted accordingly – there’s no longer any sense of weighing up pros or cons, and even those who are undecided have begun to feel a growing pressure to make up their minds. I still haven’t met anybody who wants a National Park in Galloway, but I do know several people who feel embarrassed that they don’t really know – importantly, they don’t feel like they can trust either side of the argument. As time goes by, the “undecideds” are being swallowed up into binary camps… and we have to be very clear that time is going by. When the consultation finally wakes up and swings itself down into Galloway, it’s not going to land in a calm and inquisitive forum of enquiry and exchange. It’s going to smash into a smouldering mess of resentment and distrust. Part of NatureSCOT’s remit during the consultation is to provide information on what’s possible, framing views and exchanges which can then be taken back north to Ministers. That already seems laughably naïve.  

If the consultation had begun when the announcement was made (or even within a month of it), there’s a chance that we could have discussed it openly – although probably with a kind of pessimistic curiosity that is endemic to Galloway. That should have been obvious from the outset, and if the mechanism to support the consultation wasn’t ready, the launch should have been postponed. After all, nobody pressed Government Ministers to make their announcement in July. We were just getting on with our lives, and they have no real excuse for dropping such a noisy, controversial bomb in Galloway without giving any thought to how it would be received – particularly if they were just over a month away from announcing swingeing cuts to conservation and environmental funding because the money’s run out. As my opinion begins to tend against designation, my main regret is that the quality of the conversation has been so poor and lopsided. I would have been interested to hear the cases presented fairly for and against the idea. It now seems likely that we’ll never hear both sides of the argument – for the sake of a bungled process.

Thinking about this troubled start, it’s clear that these problems are firmly rooted in Holyrood and NatureSCOT – which is to say “external mechanisms”. This is a useful reminder that National Parks are for the benefit of the nation – the clue is in the title, and it’s an important detail because the final decision won’t actually be made here in the southwest. It will be made in Edinburgh by people who represent all of Scotland. They have our interests at heart only insofar as our interests align with a majority of people in this country. That’s the real issue at the heart of this conversation – even if we design the park we want, we’ll get the park that Scotland gives us. Whatever that means, I’m not sure that the handling (or mishandling) of the story so far has inspired any great confidence at this end.