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::''"Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light"'' -John Milton
The 'Annotated Angus' is a documentary record of a presentation given by Angus MacDonald to [[FITCC]] in late 2021. [[EMD]] hoped to finish it by New Year's Eve 2021, but didn't.▼
▲The 'Annotated Angus' is a
===== The 'Annotated Angus' =====
AMD introduced himself briefly as having had a "very good career" [''esp. abroad in Hong Kong'' -EMD] but with local roots dating back something like 1000 years(!), and therefore having both the means and the motivation to help Fort William "flourish." Strictly speaking, AMD's family seat is closer to Spean Bridge than Ft Wm, but he was very clear that our town needs to thrive if the area is to "work," for which reason AMD has already opened two businesses in the High Street: a bookshop and a two-screen cinema.
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For certain categories of development however, there is inescapably a requirement to obtain public funds drawn from general taxation (including local authority funding from central government, which is a very substantial source of their revenue). Similarly inescapable is the political character of concentrating a distribution of public money in pursuit of local goals at, theoretically, the expense of other areas.
The other source of capital AMD identified was philanthropy - charitable giving. Voluntary contributions need not always be in money form, of course. Our local "third sector" appears to be pretty healthy. AMD cited the "200 people" who turned-out for the April spring-clean organised by the "fantastic" Town Team (FWTT). But he thought we could attract more private funds by casting a wider net, and gave several examples of local landowners with philanthropic leanings and/or established charitable trusts. He went on to propose tying all these threads together by announcing an ambition to become British Town of the Year in [[FW2027|2027]], apparently after visiting the Welsh ex-mining town of Treorchy in the Rhondda Valley which was named the UK's High Street of the Year in 2020 (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treorchy Wikipedia]).
::''Somewhat closer to home than South Wales, another inspiring example might be the Ayrshire 'Craft Town' of West Kilbride (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Kilbride#Crafts Wikipedia] again).'' -EMD
There was a fairly long discussion about adding features to the High Street. AMD's first suggestion was to commission a suite of appropriately-themed bronzes, presumably life-size. His ideas included: a highland cow, a stag, a drover with cattle or, more realistically, sheep, and a kilted bagpiper. FITCC Secretary Patricia Jordan mentioned some very good bronzes in Perth and Dundee but lamented that permission to site a statue on the West End roundabout had been refused by the road authorities on safety grounds: it was said that it would be a distraction to drivers and therefore dangerous to traffic. Another councillor draw attention to the irony of a statue of an eagle in Inverness tagged with "Welcome to the Highlands," the Highland boundary fault being well over a hundred miles away.
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AMD thought we could expect very little political support for our ambition for Fort William to become a British Town of the Year. He emphasised the poor quality of our transport infrastructure and inadequacy of public spending on capital projects, describing the local ferry services provided by Caledonian MacBrayne as "a disgrace - as is the A82."
It is hardly in question that our area both needs and deserves more money from central government. Our locality was promised a new hospital two decades ago, as well as improvements to the A82, neither of which have been forthcoming (although EMD has argued strongly for several years that retaining a roadbridge crossing to Caol Spit on the local plan quite forestalls any possible progress on an A82 bypass extension through Blackparks, among other ill-consequences, and serves no purpose whatsoever because "''the mooted bridge will never be built, period''"). Somewhat more recently, the promised STEM centre has yet to materialise despite a number of similar assurances given over the last few years.
::''"If we can't claim and obtain our rightful share of funds from general taxation when our MP leads Scotland's governing party at Westminster and our MSP is the second most powerful woman in Scotland, when the hell can we?"'' -EMD
AMD contrasted his BToY initiative with the "grandiose" ambitions of Highland Council's longstanding [[FW2040|FW2040 project]]. This was to some extent based on a misunderstanding of the origin of FW2040, which was and is an (unfunded) attempt, mandated by ScotGov, to impose a measure of coherence on local development. AMD was certainly right, though, to draw attention to the fact that FW2040 has very little to do with the development of Fort William town centre, where the most significant changes wrought by HRC in recent years have probably been the abandonment of several office buildings following the opening of the Charles Kennedy building south of the West End roundabout.
::''HRC's FW2040 project lead is the highly competent Scott Delgano, ably assisted by HIE's equally capable Alastair Nicholson; neither gentleman can be blamed for FW2040's deficiencies which largely flow from the statutory and regulatory framework underlying the project. Entirely separate, too, is the problem of underfulfillment: if funds are rarely if ever channelled here other than via Inverness, the prevailing glacial pace of implementation is hardly likely to improve.'' -EMD
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::''I know of no way to organise a postal-vote primary for less than £500 because that is the minimum spend to gain access to Royal Mail's 'Mailsort Three' (ie third-class mass-mailing) services.'' -EMD
=====Afterword: The North Face of Ben Nevis=====
===== Postscript: Excerpt from (DRAFT) MINUTE OF FITCC MEETING on TUESDAY 16th NOVEMBER 2021 at 7:00pm via MS-Teams =====▼
::''It's long been an adage of mine that the goddamned Nessiemafiosi would steal Ben Nevis for their town if they could (I refuse to dignify a tin-pot conurbation of barely fifty thousand people with the word 'city', btw). Fortunately, the Ben's celebrated North Face is over two kilometres long and won't be going anywhere this side of a thermonuclear explosion. <br />I said earlier that we could and should make more of this excellent asset. An admittedly minor but potentially useful side-effect of popularising [[3P3D|Three Peaks Three Days]] would be to increase demand for accommodation, albeit mainly on bank holiday Saturday nights in the first instance. However, pushing 3P3D would generate interest in the north face across the UK which could only stimulate demand year-round.'' -EMD
▲=====
(DRAFT) MINUTE: Tue 16/11/21 FITCC (‘Teams’) meeting - #3: Angus MacDonald (Highland Cinema and Bookshop)
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