Rob Edwards

Time 2020-10-12 12:03:03

Web Name: Rob Edwards

WebSite: http://www.robedwards.com

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The Ferret nosing up the trousers of power Joanna Blythmancommentary and restaurant reviews from the food writer Andy Wightmanland tenure, common land, who owns scotland Bella Caledoniafresh thinking for the new republic Dr Ian Fairlieconsultant on radioactivity and the environment Bright Greennews and analysis for Scotland's green and progressive movement Joyce McMillantheatre critic and commentator Raptor Persecution Scotlandexposing the persecution of birds of prey Daily nuclear newsupdated every day Iain Macwhirterpolitical commentary Allmediascotlandmedia in Scotland Nuclear Information Servicenuclear weapons and related safety issues comment, 5 May 2016Many of the stories that I used to post here for free, I now post on The Ferret, a new investigative journalism co-operative with which I am involved. That means that after three free views, you have to subscribe for £3 a month in order to see more.The Ferret is a much-needed bid to try and find a sustainable future for investigative journalism, which is suffering with the decline of newspapers. If you think, as I do, that Scotland needs a non-aligned, not-for-profit group of journalists dedicated to holding power to account, please consider subscribing.Recent stories I have published on The Ferret include the revelation that the Scottish Information Commissioner was leant on by the Scottish Government, an exposé of a secretive Cairngorms land deal and the woman who has been charged with peeing at Donald Trump s golf links in Aberdeenshire. My Ferret colleagues have also run a series of important stories on the domestic abuse suffered by refugee women in the UK, Facebook cracking down on Kurdish content, universities continued use of zero hours contracts and MSPs expenses.You can find out more about the people running The Ferret, plus our history and founding statement here. You can get involved in The Ferret community, sharing information and opinions here. And you can subscribe here. Simon Pepper, who has died aged 70, played a major role in shaping environmental campaigning and policy in Scotland. He made WWF Scotland into one of the country’s most influential pressure groups, forged dozens of different organisations into a powerful alliance and was a key advisor to successive governments.In 1985 Simon was WWF Scotland’s only employee, working from his study under the stairs at home near Aberfeldy. Over the course of the next 20 years under his leadership it grew to be an effective force for environmental good, with up to 20 staff.With skilled behind-the-scenes negotiating, he helped stop a destructive plan to gouge a superquarry into a mountain on the isle of Harris. The French multinational behind the plan, Lafarge, sponsored WWF International to the tune of £3.5 million and admitted that internal pressure from WWF Scotland helped persuade it to abandon the superquarry in 2004.Simon also was key in getting Scottish ministers to establish two national parks at Loch Lomond and the Cairngorms in 2002 and 2003. He fought plans for a funicular railway up Cairngorm, which turned out to be a financial and environmental disaster, and campaigned against fish farms and tax breaks for commercial forestry.Simon knew that more progress could be achieved if Scotland’s disparate conservation groups learnt to work better together. That’s why he devoted much energy to founding Scottish Environment Link in 1987, which now includes more than 35 organisations representing half a million people.The Millennium Forest for Scotland was Simon’s brainchild, and he helped run it from 1995 to 2001. That resulted in £27 million being spent restoring 22,000 hectares of woodland.He served on the boards of eight government agencies, offering ministers advice on forestry, deer, wildlife conservation, sustainable development, climate change and lottery funding. He was elected rector of St Andrews University from 2005 to 2008 and - to his embarrassment - was awarded an OBE. from the Sunday Herald, 2 September 2018It wasn’t, perhaps, the most important environment story the Sunday Herald has ever run. But it was certainly one of the most read.‘Virgin s wildlife orgy campaign labelled tasteless’ was the headline on 13 October 2007. It reported on a viral marketing campaign for Richard Branson’s Virgin Trains featuring a “sex party” video of pantomime animals “simulating vigorous and varied sex acts”.There was a tenuous connection to climate change, suggesting that rising temperatures would make animals mate earlier and more often. But it’s real and somewhat tacky purpose was to boost Branson’s transport business.Looking back over the Sunday Herald’s 19 years covering environmental issues, the story stands out as one of the few that might have raised a wry smile. Most have been depressing: polluted air and water, wiped out wildlife and wrecked environments.We visited India in 2014 to report on the 30th anniversary of the horrific toxic gas disaster that killed more than 25,000 people in Bhopal. The same year we also reported from Japan on the 25,000 people who will never go home because of radioactive contamination from the Fukushima nuclear accident 2011.We wrote about the persisting radioactive pollution of Scottish uplands from the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine in 1986. We revealed numerous blunders, leaks and accidents at Scotland’s nuclear power and weapons facilities, and helped expose some of the multiple follies of Trident.Every year we charted the faecal contamination of Scotland’s prized bathing waters, measured the climate-disrupting carbon belching from power and petrochemical plants and named the companies worst at pollution control and the councils worst at waste recycling. We repeatedly listed the city streets so polluted with traffic fumes that they would damage your health. My daughter, Lindsay Riddoch, who took her own life on the eve of her 25th birthday, was an ardent and articulate advocate for better mental health services, a historian, poet, pub-quizzer and demon game-player.She was a fiercely independent thinker and debater, intent on exposing injustice. If she saw something wrong, she would try and right it, and often talked about becoming a politician in later life. She laughed a lot, and was a loyal and loving friend to many. She threw herself into life.Lindsay was born in Edinburgh on 1 January 1993. She made a major impact at Boroughmuir High School, doing work experience in the Scottish Parliament and with the Scottish Government. She was a diver, trampoliner and trombone player, winning awards.Aged 16, she won a place at United World College of the Atlantic near Cardiff. She joined a youth delegation helping less developed countries at the global climate summit at Cancun, Mexico, in 2010. She launched a website to help teenagers with mental health problems, and persuaded the TV presenter, Stephen Fry, to help promote it on social media.At the University of London’s School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), she studied history, specialising in Islam and the Middle East, and graduated with a first class honours degree. She also learnt Arabic, and was active in student politics.She volunteered at London Nightline, a charity offering confidential support for students, and in the Westminster office of the Green MP, Caroline Lucas. Her first job was with the digital activist group, 38 Degrees, where she campaigned for MPs to be more accountable.In 2015 she joined the NHS working with mental health service users in Camden, and then became a service development officer with the mental health charity, Rethink. Her career options seemed manifold.In July 2016 she admitted herself to Highgate Mental Health Centre, later moving to Cornerstone House in Borehamwood. There she ended her long and hard struggle with serious but ill-understood mental health problems.In her last two years, poems poured out of Lindsay, angry, dark, personal, political and funny, lucidly probing her demons and the world at large. She performed some at The Roundhouse in London and posted others online. She is sorely missed.She is survived by her sister, Robyn, her mother, Fiona, the wider family, a host of good friends and me.In memory of Lindsay, her family and friends have set up a fund, Words That Carry On, to raise £50,000 to research mental health issues. Donations can be made here.Versions of this obituary were also published in The Guardian on 17 January 2018 and The Herald on 22 January 2018. from Sunday Herald, 19 February 2017Frack is a harsh, ugly word, with unpleasant connotations. If public arguments were won or lost on single words, the fracking industry would be on a hiding to nothing. Fracked, as it were.But the issue of whether or not to exploit Scotland’s reserves of underground shale gas is much more important than a word. It is hard not to feel sympathy with the industry’s public relations executives as they struggle to avoid the term, talking about hydraulic fracturing instead.The long and tortured arguments over fracking in Scotland are now coming to a head. The Scottish Government has published six expert reports, launched a four-month public consultation, and is promising to take “a final decision by the end of 2017”.The companies that want to drill for onshore gas and their political backers, the Conservative Party, are embroiled in a fight to the finish with their opponents: environmentalists, local communities, Scottish Greens and the Labour Party. The outcome, with the SNP as judge and jury, is difficult to predict.The technology they are talking about is a method of drilling between one and three kilometres under the ground to extract tiny pockets of shale gas trapped in rock. Water, sand and chemicals would be pumped down wells and injected under pressure to fracture the rock and release the gas. Continue reading "Fracking: its economic, environmental and climate impact in Scotland" from The Guardian, 2 November 2016In 1992, when the first submarine armed with Trident nuclear missiles arrived on the Clyde near Glasgow, John Ainslie was in a canoe. Along with a flotilla of other protesters, he was buzzing the huge dark boat as it cut through the cold water. He had just been appointed as the coordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (SCND), and he was arrested by the Ministry of Defence police.John, who has died of cancer aged 62, was the quiet, unassuming heart of the peace movement in Scotland for the last 25 years. As well as putting himself on the line, he became an authoritative and internationally respected nuclear researcher. He was the author of 20 reports on aspects of nuclear policy, starting in 1992 with Cracking Under Pressure, about defects in nuclear submarine reactors.His most recent report, in July, written with Dan Plesch from the University of London, argued that successive UK governments had deceived the public by pretending that Trident was a British bomb when it is actually American. Other reports exposed Trident’s safety flaws, its targeting strategies, and its secret workings. In 2008, he discovered problems with a mysterious top-secret warhead ingredient known as fogbank.He backed Scottish independence as a way of triggering UK nuclear disarmament. In the run-up to the referendum in 2014 he showed how Trident warheads could be removed from the Clyde within two years – and how they could not safely be based anywhere else in the UK.John played a crucial role in breaking the story of the Trident submariner, William McNeilly, who went on the run in 2015 after alleging 30 safety and security flaws. John was a skilled user of freedom of information law, and helped to prise open the MoD’s secretive nuclear citadel and expose its inadequacies. from Sunday Herald, 23 October 2016Warm tributes from across the political divide have been paid to John Ainslie, the veteran co-ordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (SCND), who died on Friday after a long battle with cancer.The SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Greens, socialists, trade unionists, journalists and fellow campaigners were among the many who hailed him as a quiet and unassuming legend of the peace movement.Ainslie, who joined SCND as a full-time worker in 1992, has been a hugely influential figure in nuclear policy. His numerous expert reports and his detailed grasp of nuclear technology won him respect and admiration from peers around the world, and he was often quoted in the Sunday Herald and elsewhere.He was also an active campaigner. He buzzed the first Trident submarine to arrive in the Clyde in a canoe, drove around Glasgow in the early hours of the morning following nuclear bomb convoys and addressed countless meetings and protests.“My thoughts are with John s family and Scottish CND,” tweeted Sturgeon. “John was such a committed campaigner against nuclear weapons.” Continue reading "Tributes paid after peace campaigner, John Ainslie, dies"

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