“It’s about justice,” says Angus MacPhail, a creel fisher off Barra, in the Outer Hebrides, about the marine protection plans that he believes will devastate island cultures like his own.

“Our lives are being dictated by people who know nothing about the areas we live in or the jobs we do,” says MacPhail, whose main catch is crab and lobster. “Most of us fishing around islands like Barra are small-scale operators and you don’t get much more environmentally friendly than that.”

In recent months, coastal communities have united in furious opposition to Holyrood government proposals that would impose strict limits on human activity such as fishing, aquaculture and tourism in at least 10% of Scotland’s waters, which would result in a virtually total ban in practice.

The outcry over these highly protected marine areas (HPMAs) – a key part of the Bute House agreement that brought the Scottish Greens into government with the SNP in 2021 – has been heartfelt, with accusations that the policy is poorly evidenced, weakly consulted and dismissive of local experience.

A protest song penned by MacPhail and performed by his band Skipinnish, The Clearances Again, reached No 9 in the iTunes download charts 24 hours after its release in April.

Want to see more SNP fails? – Health Matters