Does living in a small country breed small-mindedness? The Scottish Executive hopes not. Indeed, its strategy for promoting Scotland in the wider world plays on this country's modest size as being a virtue. Regardless of their location or the scale of their boundaries, governments need to think big if they are to make the most of the assets they are responsible for managing.
Based on the evidence to emerge from the Atholl Arms Hotel in Blair Atholl yesterday, the executive has been found wanting in its ambitions for the Cairngorm National Park, a Scottish asset ripe for responsible exploitation for this country's gain.
Ministers stand accused, with some justification, of small-mindedness in relation to their refusal to consider extending the park's boundaries until it undergoes its first five-year review, which will not begin for another 18 months. Even before the park was created in 2003, its southern and south-easterly boundaries were the focus of controversy. The Scottish Parliament's Environment and Rural Development Committee, meeting in the hotel yesterday, heard that a campaign to extend the boundary to include parts of Highland Perthshire and eastern Perthshire had gathered momentum since these areas had been excluded. Ministers chose, wrongly, to limit the boundary, and it can be argued that the park, and parts of the Highlands that should by rights be in it, have suffered as a consequence.
Their inclusion would provide better tourist facilities which would in turn bring an economic benefit. The committee is scrutinising a bill from John Swinney, the SNP MSP, to right what is a boundary wrong. Given the weight of evidence and the lack of a convincing case against change, it seems likely that the boundary will be extended, later rather than sooner. There is no good reason why it should not be the other way round. Opposition on dull procedural grounds smacks of pettiness.
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