Lesley Riddoch

Happy New Year to everyone

From the team between Lesley Riddoch and the lady herself; all the best for the new year and , indeed, a new decade of opportunity ! Thanks again for your continued support and input, as ever.

The Feisty Lady and team

Dutch have a simple answer to energy crisis – working together

While tens of thousands of politicians and activists gathered hopefully in Copenhagen last Friday, a minor success was scored by eight men in wellingtons, standing on a barge beside the Afsluitdijk – the dyke that stops the North Sea from flooding the Netherlands. The focus of attention was a small, two-bladed tidal Tocardo turbine which has been spinning in one of the sluice channels between the freshwater IJsselmeer and the saltwater North Sea for the past 18 months.

A sensor in the turbine was dislodged during repairs to the sluice gates, and watching the massive effort needed to reconnect that single wire, the extra costs associated with marine energy became crystal clear.

An education in renewable energy in the Netherlands

Time to stop seeing both sides of the argument

If a country had a star sign, Britain would be an infuriating Libran. Pathologically unable to hear just one side of the argument, the tolerant (or contrarian) Brit starts to sympathise with the minority view even when the case for the prosecution seems complete.

Take Copenhagen. Just as the developed world is ready to tackle global warming, climate change deniers are attracting considerable public support. Just as bankers are hit with Alistair Darling’s tax on cash bonuses, opinion columns suggest the men and women of the City are merely scapegoats for our shared, national obsession with cash. And despite the presence of a bell tower in the latest set of MPs expenses, papers are starting to spotlight the plight of non- free-loading MPs, some of whom will stand down next year, demoralised and depressed at their collective and undeserved fall from grace.

Sky TV Channel 515 - Sunday night at 7pm and the repeats

I've just enjoyed a very strange evening recording an hour's show about Scottish independence before a London audience of young, black women (in the main) and a couple of voluble Scots. It was a Press TV event, chaired by Andrew Gilligan, filmed in a studio in deepest Chiswick with a four strong panel of myself, SNP MP Angus Brendan MacNeil, Labour MP Gavin Strang and UKIP MEP David Campbell Bannerman. It seems the prog is on Sky Channel 515 on Sunday night at 7pm and repeated a lot during the week. Channel 515 – hardly mainstream Sky you're thinking. And you're right. Turns out Press TV is funded by the Iranian government. And the channel broadcasts mainly Iranian news – the Iranian Al Jazeera as it was described. I'd be more worried about the Iranian connection if I could see any interest Iran might have in promoting or subverting Scottish independence. I think I may also have been a bit mouthy. Doubtless you'll let me know what you think!

Scottish Children and Eurpoe

Scottish children record the lowest feelings of wellbeing in Europe.

Never mind literacy, class size or the Curriculum for Excellence – we have bigger problems. Some of our children are doing fine – others are obese and disengaged. Some – in hopeless, drug-filled estates – are semi-feral. Others in leafy suburbs are over-parented. There is one common denominator though – guilty working mothers who dare not demand the massive change that would remedy educational problems and improve adult and child wellbeing -- kindergarten care on the Scandinavian model from the age of 1.

I can hear the objections already. Too expensive. Alright for them. A luxurious irrelevance when essential school services are being cut. Destruction of the “mother-at-home” parenting that has worked well for generations.

Let me ask one thing straight away.