WHELAN'S WORLD: Shallow practices are damaging our endangered water

A few weeks ago I was invited by a friend to fish the Spey on the lower beats not far from the sea near Fochabers.

It was an invitation I couldn’t resist.

The fact is that every single salmon entering the Spey has to go though these beats and with the river being so low there is usually more chance of hooking a bar of silver here than anywhere else on the river.

As the days approached we were all praying for rain and an end to the heatwave, as the river was now dangerously low and almost too warm for Atlantic salmon.

We heard a rumour that some beats had even stopped fishing including the famous Tulchan water just up from Grantown.

Our party caught just one fish over three days and unfortunately that wasn’t me, though I did hook one that came off.

Of much more interest to me was the time I managed to have with the ghillies who spend most of their lives working on the river.

I learnt that the so called Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) had recalibrated the river heights they put on their website upwards by five inches, so that what was previously reported as the river height at Grantown as, say, 5” is now really 10” – meaning that the public think the river is much higher than it really is!

They do this, of course, to hide the real facts about a river that is being abstracted to death.

We know that the biggest offender here is the Spey Dam on the estate owned by Sanjeev Gupta which is responsible for 66 per cent of all abstractions.

You might think then that SEPA would be on high alert just now to actually protect the river and stop even more catastrophic abstractions... but no.

Thanks to the eagle-eyed ghillies, I was shown huge Scottish Water pipes actually sucking water out of the river with pumps.

This is downright wrong yet they are so brazen about it they even put up a sign to inform us that this dirty deed is happening.

I put a picture of this happening on Twitter so that SEPA could see it too.

Scottish Water is so incompetent that in a country with so much water they claim there is a water shortage.

No, there isn’t a water shortage – just years of failure by Scottish Water to prepare for drought by investing in reservoirs.

It’s as if they want to match the incompetence of the water companies in England.

The result of this is seen here in the Highlands where wild salmon will be gone from our rivers unless this government acts now to stop this environmental vandalism.

• I’ve been asked if I knew any of the people caught out on video dancing at a party during lockdown in the Tory Party HQ. As it happens I do, though not to talk to, just because a pal of mine recognised her.

She was the woman in the red dress cavorting with an idiot in a silly jumper and my mate knew her because she worked on Boris Johnson’s campaign.

What was more interesting to me was the fact that the Guardian reported she was paid to work for the disgraced former Prime Minister by the owner of the Spey dam Sanjeev Gupta.

I will, however, forgive Sanjeev for this indiscretion if he agrees to bust the Spey dam and let the river flow freely, as Feargal Sharkey suggested during his visit to the strath last month.

Charlie Whelan (Labour) was a former spokesman for Gordon Brown

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