from Sunday Herald, 17 April 2011
Martin Ford, the Aberdeenshire councillor pilloried by the local media for rejecting the controversial £750 million plan for a luxury golf and hotel resort by the US property tycoon, Donald Trump, suffered racist abuse because he is English.
After he was labelled as a “traitor”, a “misfit” and a “buffoon in a woolly jumper” by the Aberdeen Evening Express, Ford has revealed that he received “threatening and racist” emails referring to the fact that he was born and brought up in England.
He was also contacted by the local police and warned to stay in his house with his wife and lock the doors. He was the victim of “the behaviour of a mob”, he said.
Ford, who is now standing to be a Green MSP in the north east, has written his first detailed account of the weeks he was caught in the midst of a media maelstrom at the end of 2007. As chairman of Aberdeenshire council’s infrastructure services committee, he had used his casting vote to turn down Trump’s plan.
That unleashed a storm of protest locally, which ultimately led to him being sacked as committee chairman and resigning from the Liberal Democrat party. The rejection of Trump’s plan was overturned by the Scottish government, which called in the application and then gave it the go-ahead after a public inquiry.
The media attack on Ford was begun by the Aberdeen Press and Journal on 30 November 2007 which accused him in an editorial of putting his “precious, narrow-minded principles before the greater good of the region.”
It added: “A glorious opportunity to build future prosperity has been lost, thanks largely to one man who should never have been entrusted with the job of creating it. Welcome to La-la Land.”
Then the cudgels were taken up with a vengeance by the Evening Express, which lambasted Ford and the six other councillors who had voted with him as “traitors” on their front page. The story ran over seven pages, and included the councillors’ public email addresses.
They were all pictured with their heads as turnips. An editorial, headlined ‘Betrayed by the stupidity of seven’, lambasted them as “misfits”, “small-minded numpties”, “buffoons in wooly jumpers” and “no-hopers”. It called on them all to resign.
In the days that followed Ford received maybe more than 3,000 emails, most of them furious at the a stance he had taken. They came in “at a phenomenal rate”, he said. “Furious, disbelieving, angry - full of underlinings, words in block capitals and exclamation marks.”
Most were not abusive, but a few were “threatening and racist”, Ford said. The councillors’ code of conduct prevented him from releasing copies of the emails as they were technically casework, he argued.
Ford thought it was remarkable that, given the heightened emotions, only a few people resorted to unacceptable language. “I take the view that as the senders might well regret their own actions, what they wrote is best forgiven and forgotten,” he told the Sunday Herald.
Ford’s article, ‘Deciding the fate of a magical wild place’, gives a 40-page account of the whole Trump saga, focusing on the council’s decision to reject planning permission and its immediate aftermath. It is due to appear in the Spring issue of the Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies.
The behaviour of the Evening Express was, he said, “disgraceful”. Underlying the whole dispute was a fundamental clash of values, with some regarding the Trump plan as a engine for prosperity and others seeing it as “a billionaire’s vanity project, a symptom of materialism and greed, consumerism at its worst.”
The land rights campaigner, Andy Wightman, who is completing a report on the Trump development, was “shocked and appalled” at the way the democratic process was subverted to help Trump.
He said: “The episode has done lasting damage to the independence and impartiality of locally elected politicians who, like Martin Ford, were lambasted for merely exercising their civic duties.”
A spokesman for the Evening Express declined to comment yesterday. An opinion poll at the time suggested that 80% of local people supported the Trump development.
The paper's editor has changed since 2007. Damian Bates left and was replaced last month by Alan McCabe.
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