The Nairnshire Telegraph this week details anger expressed at last week's West Community Council meeting about the way Nairn's tourism ambitions are handled by Highland Council. The satirical headline "Welcome to Smithton East!" says it all really. All those that are deeply concerned about how our civic identity has been going down the Inverness drain over the last thirty years or so will share the sentiment expressed in the article and editorial in this week's Nairnshire Telegraph. In that editorial Iain Bain details:
“It comes in the same week that a press
release from Highland Council dropped the name of Nairn from a local government
appellation. Inverness , Badenoch and Strathspey was how this area was termed in a
statement relating to new Leader operations. We asked Highland Council’s press
office to clarify Nairn’s position and were told that Inverness included Nairn.”
Quotes again this week from Michael Green and also from Liz. Iain Bain also goes on to detail more worries that there is worse to come for Nairn in the future. He also details some positive suggestions to reverse this situation.
It is time surely for Colin and Liz, to detail a road map of what their ruling administration intend to do to reverse the decline of Nairn's civic identity and just what autonomy they intend to return to this community, after all they are the Glenurquhart Road masters now. Scotland gets a vote to decide its future in 2014, how about one for Nairn to decide if it wants to stay part of Highland Council?
Update: Support from one Inverness Councillor
Update: Support from one Inverness Councillor
@gurnnurn Speaking as a proud Invernessian and a Highland Councillor, my city does not, and will not, include Nairn. #HighlandIdentities
— Richard Laird (@Richard_Laird) March 26, 2013
Can someone remind me again why Nairn's three community councils cannot merge into a single representative body? Because surely one united CC fighting for Nairn's interests would be more effective than three smaller factions?
ReplyDeleteIt's hard not to compare the campaign for Independence for Scotland with that of Nairnshire gaining autonomy from Inverness. In both instances folk feel as though they are ruled from afar with policies that do little to address the actual needs of the town
ReplyDeleteI find myself disappointed with some of our councillors who seem intent on pumping out party rhetoric (as interesting as that may be), and who seemed to have distanced themselves to a degree from the folk of Nairn. I'm sure this isn't an intentional move, it's just how they now come across since being elected. Any criticism just seems to draw a response of 'we've done this' with a list of projects etc, some of which would have been carried out by the council no matter who our councillors were.
Tourism is a major part of the town and surely should enjoy the highest priority, but we've gone from having our own tourist office with professional staff to hiving off leaflets and brochures to whoever will take them. Please correct me if I'm wrong but staff at the community centre don't receive on going information with regard tourism nor any training. I'm sure they do their best but is this really the service we want for Nairn? It must give the impression to tourists that we have a slightly cynical can't be bothered attitude towards them.
Those involved in Nairn tourism need to decide how much tourist information is worth to them. Do visitors just research everything on line making a tourist information point redundant, I don't think so
But, it seems that Inverness now decide the value of such matters for us, and guess what, they've decided they're not very important and we've been relegated to being an unimportant feature in their spending plan