SHETLAND needs more autonomy from Edinburgh, said the islands' council leader in a New Year rebuke to the Scottish Executive about "the heavy hand of centralised government".
In a message to the islands' 22,000 inhabitants, published in the Shetland Times, Sandy Cluness, convener of Shetland Islands Council, railed against the executive's "apparent inability to deliver the promised devolution of powers beyond the central belt" and raised the spectre of Shetland "losing its identity".
Cluness went on to suggest that the UK government was hindering Shetland's attempts to attract people to bolster the islands' rapidly dwindling population - a reference to the continued Home Office threat to deport a Myanmar woman and her two young nephews from Shetland, which has generated strong feelings locally.
"The heavy hand of centralised government can be debilitating for small islands - this may be why the Scottish islands continue to decline whilst similar peripheral communities seem to grow in strength and population, " he wrote.
His comments will be widely interpreted as a rallying call to those islanders who favour greater independence from Edinburgh and London, and are a calculated sleight against Shetland's Liberal Democrat MSP, Tavish Scott, who is a junior minister in the Scottish Executive. Last year Cluness insisted there was "a demand for greater autonomy in all the Scottish islands".
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