In your briefing today:

📣 The Scottish Government is to crack down on AI data centre development in Scotland, amid growing pressure from the Scottish Greens and local campaigners across the country who say the centres will place too much pressure on energy supplies.

Ministers now say they will use planning powers to monitor applications, with councils having to notify the Scottish Government of any new applications for large centres within days of them being submitted.

Developers of two proposed centres - one in Edinburgh, the other in Fife - have also been told to conduct environmental impact assessments on their plans.

But the move has disappointed some campaigners, who wanted to see a moratorium on data centre development across the country. (Times)

📣 Russia has accused the UK of “deliberately opting for an escalation of the Ukraine crisis” after reports at the weekend that British-made drones had struck targets deep inside Russia.

The Sunday Times reported at the weekend that the British-made drones were being used for the highly effective strikes by Ukraine.

The Russian Embassy to the UK has now said in a statement that “London’s actions will inevitably carry consequences for which it will have to answer," saying the deeper its involvement in the conflict, "the higher the price it will pay". (BBC)

📣 Edinburgh risks killing the “golden goose” of its festivals through a lack of funding, the head of the Fringe Society has warned. Chief executive Tony Lankester has pointed to the Adelaide Fringe, the world’s second-biggest fringe festival after Edinburgh, which gets five times as much public support per ticket.

“Avignon, Montreal, Melbourne and Salzburg tell similar stories,” writes Lankester in The Scotsman. “That is what it looks like when a city is serious about being a cultural capital, and serious about protecting the golden goose rather than putting it in jeopardy.” (Scotsman has the exclusive) (Read Lankester’s full piece)

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📣 There’s no decision yet on the new North Sea oil and gas developments, but Andy Burnham is - as we suggested yesterday - facing a clash with his MPs no matter which way he turns. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is calling on him to say yes to both. (Mail)

📣 Civil service bosses stopped penalising staff for breaking hybrid office working rules after trade unions objected. (Herald has the exclusive)

📣 Police are investigating a double death in Glasgow, after two men were found with serious injuries in a flat near Byres Road. (Sun)

📣 The Boston woman who made headlines after she found love with a member of the Tartan Army has had second thoughts… after it emerged her man is facing serious criminal charges in Scotland. (Daily Record)

📣 Reform’s plans to overhaul the welfare system, which the party claims would reduce the cost of benefits by £50 billion, risk alienating would-be voters and could undermine its ability to win the next election, polling guru Professor Sir John Curtice has said. (Independent)

📣 Extreme heat is more dangerous for people aged over 60 than previously thought. (Guardian)

📣 Homes across the UK are taking longer to sell than last year, amid volatility in mortgage rates. (Guardian)

📣 A British couple have died in Greece after the helicopter carrying them on a honeymoon flight crashed after a mechanical failure. (Mail)

⚽️ The Scottish FA deployed AI to help research who should be the next national team manager, the SFA’s chief football officer Craig Mulholland tells the BBC. But perhaps the most surprising revelation in this piece is the news that only 20 people applied for the job. You should have thrown your hat in the ring, after all. (BBC)

⚽️ FIFA Chief Operating Officer Kevin Lamour, who fiercely criticised the organisation’s president Gianni Infantino, has been sacked. (BBC)

⚽️ Rangers are close to signing right-back Kosta Nedeljkovic of Aston Villa. (Sun)

🗣️ On a windswept shore road in Leith docks, round the back of the Scottish Government’s vast and largely unoccupied offices, there’s a squat office block housing a visa agency.

This isn’t one of Edinburgh’s prettier corners: warehouses at the docks, low-rise blocks of flats built a while ago on the opposite side, huddled next to newer (bigger) blocks rising up by the water.

It’s a docklands redevelopment area which could easily be London, or Manchester, or Liverpool, except here the thriving heart of Leith - with its outstanding restaurants, bars and shops - is an easy walk away, and the tram link can whisk you into the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Edinburgh’s city centre in half an hour.

All told, it seems an unlikely new front line in an escalating war between developers and campaigners. But, in its utterly mundane way, it is.

The local story, first

A developer wants to knock the visa office down and put up a hotel to create a “welcoming base” for visitors to the area. The picture above shows the plan - a 10-storey tower on one side, a lower building next to it. The development’s website takes you through the near-obligatory nods to local heritage: “wine-bottle shaped panels on the facade” to reference Leith’s wine trade, arched openings at street level to echo the nearby Forth Ports HQ.

Given Edinburgh is short of hotel rooms, and land it can build them on, the commercial rationale is easy to grasp. And the building that the developers want to tear down is no beauty. You’d imagine this one might get waved through.

Some locals, however, disagree: according to the Edinburgh News, they think the plans for the 121-bed hotel are a “carbuncle”. They think adding “decorative screens and artistic features” isn’t enough to ensure the building fits in. They don’t like the scale. Their campaign website lists ten major objections, all told, including the impact of construction, flood risks and the impact on views. A campaign of objection is up and running.

And off goes another planning row: a public consultation is now open, a formal planning application is due in September, and council staff will deliberate before recommending to councillors whether or not to grant permission. It might not stop there.

The bigger picture

This is how planning works in Scotland, and it’s a system that - says developers - is starting to make it very hard indeed to get stuff built.

Why so?

First, community groups are becoming much more effective at spotting developments and objecting to them. All the details are online, a click away from the mechanisms to oppose them.

Second, AI is making those objections much more effective. Point your web browser over to ObjectNow, for instance, and you’ll find a ready-made kit for objecting to any sort of development: £100 buys you an excellent campaign website. £100 more buys you some research to construct an objection. Another £100 buys you an efficient system to then flood “potentially thousands of personalised objection letters […] until the consultation closes”.

To be clear - there’s no suggestion the Leith objectors are using ObjectNow. But elsewhere, this service is already having a profound impact on planning. As The Ferret reported earlier this month, a surge in AI-powered objections to wind farms led to the Scottish Government quietly deciding to stop taking public responses by email.

Third, AI makes it easy to flood the system. One report claims “one housing application in the Midlands drew more than 500 objection emails from a single resident, including a 160-page report.” You don’t need a specialised system like ObjectNow to do that: common-or-garden ChatGPT will do the job just fine.

In other words, AI hasn’t democratised objection: it has threatened to bring the whole system to a halt. And the institutional response appears to have been to close the channel of complaint, rather than fix the planning process itself.

All this matters because Scotland is about to go through a period of intense lobbying for, and against, development. Ironically, the very rise of AI will drive some of the demand for infrastructure - data centres, electricity pylons and wind farms.

And the concern is that if consultation processes stop being a genuine, grassroots signal, developers and decision-makers will stop treating it as important - and communities with genuine, well-founded concerns will lose their voice.

Developers, meanwhile, will be deterred from even considering entering the process if AI “slop” objections halt every idea.

A small hotel development in Leith, or a vast data centre in rural Scotland: the outcomes of all, yes or no, will depend on the process surviving a period of rapid, forced change - and somehow managing to keep all parties satisfied.

A little like the individual planning rows themselves, this one will run and run.

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