It’s an odd one this but planners have applied to themselves to get their own permission to waste £100,000s of “Common Good” money on a hideous precast concrete Berlin Wall, which is to be built to obscure the shoreline of the natural and beautiful River Ness.
This monstrosity is an apparently much beloved vanity project backed by the likes of local provost Helen Carmichael (rarely to be seen not wearing her “chains of office”) and the die hard anti-art brigade are hell bent on despoiling Inverness and wasting the money even when it is desperately needed for very worthy projects to fight and alleviate Coronoavirus COVID19.
Locals love Rose Street car park. It has a beautiful entrance slope up to an elevated parking platform with sweeping views of Homebargains, Iceland and the toy superstore plus of course the unique and award winning Hanging Gardens of Inverness. The lower level provides shelter for winos and druggies with quick easy access to the bus station and local pubs.
Now all this will be destroyed by a new tower block hotel. The residents of the hotel will have the views to themselves and normal folk will just have to find a space miles from the High Street or squeeze into the multi-storey, which is already full at peak periods.
We salute Highland Council and its inspired planning department for wrecking another part of the so-called city.
Everyone has heard of The Hanging Gardens of Babylon but Highland Council is excited to promote a new tourist attract next to its Rose Street Car Park (you’ll have to pay-and-display an exorbitant fee to see them).
Parking for Hanging Gardens Inverness
It was hoped the local provost would cut a ribbon in front of the press but unfortunately she was unfortunately unavailable for comment. However, a spokesperson for The Silent Majority – a leading and vociferous group within the area – told The Loch Ness Free Press, “this is a major new attraction that rivals anything any other city has to offer. It is also eco-friendly as the vegetation performs a vital role scrubbing CO2 out of the atmosphere”.
We’re no sure what is happening around Loch Ness but there have been a number of people in bio hazard suits seen taking samples around the area. When approached these people mumble “national security” and refuse to answer any questions. It is known that a lot of visitors have been using surrounding woodlands as toilet areas, particularly since Highland Council introduced a 50p charge for village toilets in Drumnadrochit.
Bio Loch Ness Hazard
The catastrophe follows a period a few years ago in which thousands of tourists and others were seen throwing dead chickens into the loch. There was widespread concern at the time that Avian Flue could kill Nessie as dinosaurs are known to be the ancestors of today’s birds.
Fortunately the chicken craze has dwindled but now something more deadly may be in the water or surrounding areas. We have managed to gain some insight since an anonymous whistle blower contacted Professor Kettle of The Loch Ness Research Project. He said, “we have found a virus and are evaluating its danger to the public. It is believed to have accidentally been released from a research laboratory and travelled to the Loch Ness area on board a Caledonian Canal barge carrying a scientist on holiday”.
“I can’t say more at the moment as this very worrying and matters are progressing fast. People do need to wash their hands regularly”.
Nobody from the Local Contingencies Commission was available for comment at time of going to press.
Locals often engage in the hilarious “spot the provost in her chain” game in Inverness. The particular councilor sometimes seems to try and get half a dozen photos of herself in various poises in the same edition of the local paper. It is a bit like watching the joker mayor in the film “Carry on Girls”, only in his case the hapless guy in the chain-of-office got photo’d every time his trousers fell down.
Provost Chain of Office Trumps The Potholes
Now an anonymous American donor is rumoured to be considering buying a full size copy chain-of-office to give to the self styled first lady of the town so that she can wear it after she loses election (hopefully as soon as possible since Highland Council is a ramshackle shambles) or retires. That way she can continue to wear it pretty much all the time, just like she appears to now.
If you spot Inverness provost in her chain doing the shopping at her local supermarket, don’t laugh. Apparent vanity is a debilitating condition and we hope she gets better soon.
In separate developments a Highland Councilor has quit the shambolic local authority stating it is now just “the mad, the bad, and the sad” . Well done , Inverness Councillor Richard Laird – we couldn’t agree more. Read it all here.
It hasn’t taken long for councilors, past and present, to throw their voices behind the appalling and disgusting erection they are thrusting up alongside the beautiful and environmentally sensitive River Ness.
Highland Council art – only £750,000
Highland Council leader Margaret Davidson welcomed it (unsurprising when you look at her track record of supporting the blot on the landscape at Urquhart Castle , which is so ugly that every advertising photo is carefully angled to exclude any sight of it).
Former councilor Thomas Prag has been involved with various awful so called “art” projects and was another enthusiastic endorser of the Berlin Wall Project. The provost (we wonder if she actually sleeps with her chain of office on, as it appears to be melted onto her skin or fixed with Gorilla Glue) also welcomed her own decision making process. From top to bottom, Highland Council has taken its tax payers to the cleaners, ram raided the common good fund for cash and slashed the budgets of essential care services to build its drunks and druggies den and make Inverness River Mess.
This fight is over: Highland Councillors have thrown money, art, culture and the environment into the sea as they voted 15 – 7 to squander £750,000 of tax payer’s money on their own bigwigs’ vanity project: A Berlin Wall built on wild habitat alongside the once beautiful River Ness.
Highland Council art – only £400,000
A spokesman for the campaign to stop this folly told us, “at least when the council leader and provost tell us there is no money for elderly and disabled care, educational needs or road repairs we can shove this wastage down their throats and say ‘we know why, you burned all the money'”.
In an astonishing last minute intervention the Director of Eden Court Theatre in Inverness threw his support in favour of the scheme and accused protesters of standing in the way of cultural progress in Inverness. The sad reality is that Inverness is already losing its Ironworks music venue to be replaced by another grey stock built hotel and Eden Court is the only cultural venue left. Its Director should have fought for any funds that were available for art to go to it – instead of this total “vanity” mess pushed through by apparently artistically challenged councilors who just seem to want a memorial erection in the city centre dedicated to themselves (at any price). £750,000 (and it will probably go over a million as developers rarely finish on time within budget) is much too much to waste on bulldozers scraping away the green sides of the River Ness, destroying its nature to build a druggies’ den that will be filled with rubbish, dog excrement, old needles and graffiti within weeks of opening.
In years gone by we had this cultural and environmental vandalism years ago – with the Urquhart Castle visitor centre at Loch ness (its real monster). The place is so absolutely hideous that every photo of the castle that you see on a card or biscuit tin or the quango’s (Historic Environment Scotland) own marketing material is very carefully angled to exclude the monstrosity. There is precious little left of value in Inverness, it isn’t worth a visitors’ journey and now there will be even less.
Inverness Councillor Ron MacWilliam has been spearheading The People’s Rebellion against Highland Council’s ludicrous and profligate wastage of public funds (£300,000 so far – and nothing has even been constructed yet!)
River Ness – about to be lined with a Berlin Wall
Now MacWilliam has reportedly been summoned for a dressing down and told to personally attend to apologise to the Highland Council bosses angry at his defiance of their diktats and refusal to be “muzzled”.
He was on the front page of The Inverness Courier this week and both he and fellow champions against The Wall have used The Freedom of Information Act to successfully crowbar the numbers showing true scale of the waste of public money out of the council (already spent and gone) because it is determined to build Inverness’s very own Cold War Era Berlin Wall alongside the (currently) beautiful River Ness. Photo it now folks, soon it will be a concrete catastrophe.
Many of us believe this is a disgusting waste of money by a local authority that is currently chopping and cutting every budget including elderly and vulnerable persons’ care and even charging 50p for use of toilets. But of course The River Ness Mess is a Vanity Project and nothing pushes big wigs’ buttons like the thought of a “legacy” – in this case a massive erection in the so called city centre, whatever the cost and loss to its citizens and the environment. What a way to literally pour The Common Good Fund into the sea. The councillors and officers behind it owe the people of Inverness and the Highlands an apology and should hang their heads in shame, while also cancelling this River Ness Mess.
Sort out the mess first, Highland Council
We are proudly one hundred percent behind Councilor Ron MacWilliam and the group fighting this disaster. The council’s River Ness Mess is not art, it’s a blot on the landscape that will harm fragile wildlife and the environment and be nothing more than another litter and graffiti strewn cesspit for druggies and winos – and Inverness already has those in spades.
Wanted for some 25 alleged charges including multiple rapes and sexual assaults (some of the charges reportedly involve a girl aged between 12 and 16), the former street pedlar from Inverness, Kim Gordon aka Kim Avis aka Kem Avis has reportedly given up his fight against extradition back to Scotland. After initially failing to attend his trial at Edinburgh High Court, the man who some Highland Councilors had branded “the finest ambassador for Inverness” fled to the United States and went on the run as a fugitive. He apparently faked his own death in California and then legged it in a van – but US Marshals acting with Interpol and the Scottish authorities captured him in a cheap motel 1300 miles away in Colorado.
According to reports he may be returned to the UK this week and will apparently be accompanied by US Marshals and probably well cuffed to his seat!
There is more about Inverness’s “finest ambassador” here. It might be thought that the councilors who came up with that title would have the grace to resign.
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