TRUMP PULLS OUT
Last week, The Trump Organization announced it was withdrawing its planning application to build a second golf course at Menie and has abandoned its scheme to construct a large golf resort at the site.
This is not a huge surprise, given Mr Trump's track record elsewhere. For the last few years, the very slow pace of progress on the Menie development, the procrastination and delay, have strongly suggested Mr Trump was seeking an exit strategy – but wanted to be able to blame someone else for his decision not to proceed. His way out has been to blame the Scottish Government.
Mr Trump has now used the First Minister twice. Back in 2007, to help progress his planning application. Now, as the scapegoat for his decision to stop work on the development. Mr Salmond has been played.
Mr Trump is claiming the proposed wind farm in Aberdeen Bay is the reason for his decision. It has been suggested by some that the proposed wind farm should have been moved or abandoned to appease Mr Trump. Firstly, the turbines planned for Aberdeen Bay will not be an 'ordinary' wind farm, but a test centre crucial to developing the renewables industry in the North-east, and so of great economic importance to the region. Secondly, Mr Trump has been making threats and unreasonable demands from the start. You don't appease an arrogant, irrational bully. It doesn't work. They only come back wanting even more.
Mr Trump's tendency to change his position and contradict himself, means we cannot be sure that he will not say something quite different next week. But I do think this probably is Mr Trump walking away from continuing work on his Menie development.
Of course, the Scottish Government should never have stepped in to grant Mr Trump planning permission in the first place. We have lost an important and beautiful natural area that was legally protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Our duty, as I saw it, was to hand this natural heritage over to following generations intact, so they could enjoy it and wonder at and better understand nature. Instead, it has become a golf course. The justification for allowing this damage to the environment was the jobs and economic benefit the proposed golf resort would bring. While the scale of the economic benefit promised by Mr Trump was clearly ridiculously exaggerated, there is no doubt that, had the resort gone ahead, there would have been some job creation and economic activity as a result. As it is, the North-east has got the worst of all possible worlds. We have lost our irreplaceable, natural, mobile dune system - for negligible economic return.
Mr Trump, clearly, should never have been given planning permission.