Posts Tagged ‘Perthshire Advertiser’

A couple of people have told me they missed the November 6th edition of the Perthshire Advertiser in which I ranted on about the proposed supermarket in Scone. Following publication the Community Council contacted me and asked for permission to reprint it in their next free newsletter, so an antidote to SCoPE will be forthcoming through every letter box in the village in the next few weeks. How exciting!

After my letter was published I was pleasantly surprised to receive phone calls, texts, Facebook messages and be stopped in the street by many people who not only agreed, but wanted to thank me for putting my neck on the line and speaking out. Apparently I’m only saying what a lot of people are thinking which, if you know me, makes a nice change! The following week a further two letters were published from residents who support a new supermarket in the village. Last week, on 20th November “Name and address supplied” sent in a cowardly unsigned letter brandishing my views stupid, selfish and dishonest. My reply has been sent to the PA and I’ll be reproducing it here once they have had a chance to publish (or not) on Friday.There’s really no need to get personal.

In the meantime I have setup an online survey, which I hope the PA will publish a link to, and I invite any local residents whether from Scone, Perth or the outlying villages, to make their views known. It’s all very well that the people I meet give me a slap on the back, but if the consensus is that we are opposed then it really needs more than the current handful of very vocal people to stand up and say “No” (or “Yes” or “Don’t Care”).

Several people have voiced a desire to see a local group setup in opposition to SCoPE, the main naysayers who seem to think they speak on behalf of the whole village. It may come to that if I can figure out what needs to be done to move it forward (or anyone else? hint hint!).

So, for now here’s a full draft of the letter I sent to the PA. It was only slightly altered, I think I laboured the wine point a bit much. Enjoy!

Who will it be now?

“It’s time someone spoke up on behalf of the thousands of Scone residents who didn’t protest at the Park and Ride on Saturday 31st October, who didn’t return their questionnaire in May this year and who aren’t being called to rally in support of the proposed supermarket development in Scone.

My family has lived in the village for four generations and each of those generations has witnessed some expansion or development that threatens to “kill-off” the village and turn it into an un-serviced suburb of Perth. Clearly this has not happened. I am not the first generation to stop, take a look around and not recognize the place I grew up in, yet when I was invited to protest against this supermarket by a group of parents I was amused to find that not one of them had lived here longer than seven years. “What do these people know of how the village has changed?” I asked myself. It changed to accommodate them! To claim that any further development would destroy their village, the same village that has expanded time and time again with the housing developments they live in, is surely a joke? It is utterly ridiculous that people move into villages that have had to grow and develop to allow them to live there then demand that they cease to change forthwith.

With the best will in the world, nobody who purchases a car load of groceries a week can do so in the village stores, they just don’t stock enough lines to provide that sort of service. People who use the village shops choose them because they are convenient, or perhaps they only need a few things, or they actively support small independent business or, it’s not beyond imagination, they have already downed a bottle of wine before they realised they would need two (it happens).

There are many reasons to use local shops and for some people they will be the only ones they use. The Scone shops manage quite happily despite the fact that many of us drive to Perth for our “main” shop. Building a supermarket on the edge of the village will replace the weekly trek into town for those of us who shop for a large family but it will not stop us nipping to the Co-Op for milk and bread (and maybe wine) if that’s what we already do. It will not stop people who only shop in Spar from continuing to only shop in Spar and nothing will ever replace taking your child to The Sweetie Shop so they can stand on the stool and pick from the tuppenny tray.

With regard to traffic, we have no right to protest through traffic in Scone when we tolerate 6 buses an hour and vote for a footbridge across the Tay rather than a road bridge that would direct haulage away from the village. A daily supermarket delivery is but a drop in that particular road pollution ocean.

Finally, and not altogether seriously, I have heard calls to “Think of the children!” Well I have three and despite my efforts to ignore them I do often fail. Should they ever get the urge to earn their own money I would be a far happier Mum to have them work after school in a local supermarket, rather than have to put that Friday wine from the Co-Op on hold so I could go pick them up from some far flung supermarket off the No7 route.

The 4000+ Scone residents who didn’t protest last weekend and the 81% who didn’t return their questionnaires in May 2009 should not be dismissed. We are the silent majority who either welcome growth, relish change and crave the services that bigger towns have or don’t have much of an opinion either way. That said, if anyone doesn’t agree with this development and hasn’t said so then perhaps it’s time to disassociate from the silent majority and make yourself heard.

Nobody will be forced to use any new supermarket! If it succeeds it will be because people use it and therefore support it. Maybe I am naïve but I believe the only business that a Scone supermarket will get is business that already goes to big supermarkets elsewhere. The driving issue isn’t whether the people of Scone want a supermarket, as clearly only a few don’t, it’s what the people of Scone will choose to do when they get one that counts.”

Is staging a Cage Wars parody really so much worse than charging each other in hordes the length of a playing field and calling it “Cowboys and Indians”?

Following on from my previous post I should mention that the Perthshire Advertiser (PA) and Andrew Welsh are not solely culpable for the release of personal details leading to the identification of the 15 year old girl. Both the Courier and the Daily Record can join my local rag in this “Hall of Journalism Shame” (again, neither of whom I deem fit for a link).

My initial reaction on reading the article was to ask myself, my other half and my kids what all the fuss was about. A bunch of pupils staged a parody of the popular mixed martial arts live combat show Cage Wars (which is as it says on the tin – fighting in a cage) in a makeshift cage, filmed it on a mobile phone, added a commentary spoofing the wildly overenthusiastic WWE-esque US presenters along the lines of “OM MY GOD I CANNOT BELIEVE WHAT I’VE JUST SEE HERE!!!!!!!” and “THIS IS BRUTAL!!” and uploaded it to Youtube. Other than tampering with the safety fencing around a building site, which I can fully understand those involved getting it in the neck for… do any of them really deserve the histrionics and derision poured on them by the media? Do they really deserve to be slammed by and on the end of demands that they be “punished” from local councillor Alexander Stewart? Where the hacks see the “dark days of bullying” return and the reputation of the school at stake I see creativity, comic genius and FUN. Expecting children not to play with the tools our generation has developed in our quest for easier, faster, bigger and cheaper connectivity is just rank stupidity. Punishing them for doing so is just wrong.

It’s just this sort of knee-jerk reaction that marks adults as aliens in the digital world our progeny inhabit. Andrew Welsh is, I believe, the first “digital tourist” I have seen in action, I’m sure he won’t be the last. Would he, in his professional capacity, dare travel to another country, pour scorn and derision on their cultural activities (after he has fled of course) without so much as an attempt to engage with and learn from them? Well yeah he probably would given his record, but you get the point.

As a parent I hate being backed into a corner by social pressures and obligations to conform to the norm by forcing any of my children to accept, perhaps even accept punishment in the name of, a social nicety which I feel is alien. Of course I might be jumping to conclusions… perhaps the school “involving” their parents means raising the child protection issue I have already identified – I do hope so.

What’s the point of teaching our children online safety if allegedly responsible adults are going to break all the rules we encourage them to follow?

I gatecrashed East Lothian’s first Internet Safety training for Parents and Families evening held at Musselburgh Grammar School last month. I think I qualify as an “informed” parent having had a first career in IT and having conducted a fair bit of my professional life online. I’m an online survivor as it were! Notwithstanding a bit of CEOP sensationalism, I felt the evening was pitched pretty well, managing to avoid patronising parents with lessons in egg-sucking and give us a few “areas for development” to take home with us.

Kidsmart are the UK face of Childnet International a non-profit organisation working with others to:

“help make the Internet a great and safe place for children”

and they have formulated for parents 5 Key Points to online safety, the first of which stresses not to post any personal information that might lead to you being identified offline, so no addresses, phone numbers, school names and definitely no answering of A/S/L? Obvious, basic, and common sense.

I can’t claim to have oodles of statistics on paedophile techniques for grooming to hand, but I believe that most perpetrators of this crime are known personally to their victims, are more often than not members of their family or extended family and on the whole, don’t need the added hurdle of the internet to ingratiate or force themselves into their victim’s lives. But it does happen online, and A/S/L (age/sex/location) are the big three questions you do not answer when approached by a stranger online.

This obvious, basic and common-sense knowledge clearly bypassed Perthshire Advertiser (who I refuse to reward with a link) reporter ANDREW WELSH. Actually that’s not fair, having trawled around online for Mr Welsh’s online presence I’m sorry to say he doesn’t have one, which for a so-called journalist in this day and age is pretty lamentable. So I can hardly accuse Mr Welsh of endangering his own privacy with the flippant release of his personal information online. No, Mr Welsh instead published enough information in his 26th October Perthshire Advertiser article, “School fight prank posted on Youtube” to positively identify a 15 year old girl. Not only did he publish this child’s A/S/L, he made this information public along with her Youtube ID. Should I wish to I can now give you this child’s phone number, her parent’s names, her household make-up, when they bought their home (and how much they paid for it), and an aerial photo of their street, all for free. For a paltry £2 I can get much much more.

So what exactly was Mr Andrew Welsh thinking or not as the case may be? There can be no journalistic merit in his actions, the so-called offensive video (more on that later) that prompted the article was long since removed and indeed his report said as much. Other than identifying this child there seems to have been no real purpose to publishing this information. As far as I am concerned this is a serious child protection issue and Mr Welsh needs to be called to account for his actions. If he had done this to my child you can rest assured he would be.