Yakking for Argyll

As a teenager when I heard the Sex Pistols on old analogue radio for the first time, I knew, with many of my contemporaries, that I was hearing history in the making, even out in nowhere-near-anything-north of England. That day burned bright in every teenager’s consciousness – radio had allowed us to activate in a new and anti-establishment way.

So somehow it doesn’t surprise me that there’s a report out which means the Highlands & Islands loses its ‘life-line’ analogue radio. One of the ways of creating a national consensus, a sense of history or even a sense of nation, is through national media. In one stroke this report proposes stripping one of the truly citizen-accessible old-style mediums from this country. This initiative is Westminster-led, and one cannot help wondering whether the report is both a national steer toward DAB and also an attempt to stifle traditional localised media creation, and therefore undermine the independence-minded Scottish Government full access to its constituency. OK, as the Newsroom team state, forArgyll is a new technology initiative, but Scotland is a divided nation in terms of media access, and a majority of the older population depend on radio, not to listen to the Sex Pistols obviously, but to keep in touch with the moment.

As a Sassenyak I wouldn’t want to overplay this, but with attacks on Salmond in the UK-national press becoming more vociferous, and our first minister’s obvious recent motions toward the stated SNP objective of independence, conspiracy-hunting in the reports and papers issued from Westminster is becoming more than an idle pasttime – of course they don’t want to lose the North Sea Oil dividend, let alone pay some of it back

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