REGARDING the article on the inequality for women re the changes to the state pension age, I am one of the women affected (Pensions must be safeguarded against Tory ideology, The National, December 11). Born in May 1953, I have worked weekends since age 15 and then full-time from age 18 apart from a break for childcare and a return to part-time work, later full-time.

We made a decision to relocate six years ago in the expectation of me being in receipt of the state pension at the age of 61, and I resigned from a decent job in order to do so. Subsequently a zero-hours contract in my most recent job was abruptly terminated along with that of three other women, and I’m now left in the position of not being eligible for Jobseeker’s Allowance, receiving a very small works pension due to part-time work for many years whilst raising my family, and NOT being eligible for the state pension due to the changes which the Tory/LibDem Coalition Government introduced in 2011.

I am now dependent on my husband and without his support I would be destitute. Many women are much worse off than I am and cannot afford to make up the necessary state pension years.

Help is possibly at hand however. A group of women have a campaign up and running on Facebook called WASPI (Women Against State Pension Inequality). We need 100,000 signatures for the online petition to be considered for debate in the House of Commons in the hope of obtaining transitional compensation as promised by the coalition government for women born in the 1950s.

You don’t have to be a woman or born in the 1950s to sign the petition – anyone can, and this is not a protest about men and women receiving the state pension at the same age but the fact that men were given much longer to make up the difference in eligible years than women, in many instances a year or two, and the fact that the Government has reneged on its promise. Please help this campaign by signing the petition.

Beth Barclay, Address supplied

IT was with some consternation I read Jeane Freeman’s assertion that women born between 6 March and 31 December 1953 will have to wait until age 65 to receive their state pension. I am one of those women. I was told back in 2012 that my pension date was March 2017. On reading her article I telephoned the Government’s Future Pension Centre and they too confirmed my date to be March 2017.

Susan Crisp, Grangemouth

Tourists don’t want to see wind farms

ROB Gibson MP clearly hasn’t a clue as to the value of wild land (Letters, December 10). He should be aware that tourism, whether he likes it or not, is probably the most valuable industry for the Highlands. Most of these tourists come in the hope of seeing landscapes unspoiled and unindustrialised. They do not want to see wind farms on every second hill.

Mr Gibson accuses the John Muir Trust and the Mountaineering Council for Scotland of being hopelessly romantic about wild land. Perhaps so, but their romanticism pales into insignificance compared to his own notion of filling long-deserted glens with people. The blunt truth is that very few want to live there or could cope with the lack of amenities. He also likes to claim these bodies are “remote desktop bureaucrats” conveniently forgetting that both have plenty of members, like me, who live in and are committed to the Highlands.

He also tries to give the impression that the communities he mentions were wholeheartedly in favour of the proposed wind farms, when in reality they were split between those for and against. Yes, we need wind energy from land-based turbines in the Highlands, especially if they are owned by and cater for their local communities. There is a place for bigger units too but they should be closer to the main centres of population, where transmission costs are lower and also as a reminder that we all need to reduce our demand for ever more electricity.

Andrew M Fraser, Inverness

ROB Gibson gave us an important reminder that in the far north of Scotland, “people become the endangered species, wild land is conservation by command of remote NGOs, SNH and the courts. Clearance country is the result of this deep social injustice”.

Conserving land at the expense of people has a long pedigree. It is commonly a euphemism for reserving large areas of land as playgrounds for the rich.

It was widely practised by British colonialists, for example in East Africa, where thousands of people were compelled to move and their land used to create game reserves. In the case of the Selous Game Reserve 40,000 people were forced to move. Afterwards, the colonial administrators congratulated themselves in having established the largest tract of land in East Africa, and probably in the whole of the African continent, where human rights were eradicated.

The same imperialist and anti-democratic attitudes linger on today, and underlie the hold that a few have over Scotlands’ land.

Aileen May, Edinburgh

AS more and more people reject the cruel idiocy of adding more bombs to the Middle East, it is good to see the SNP putting forward alternative actions – but they still appear to be avoiding mention of the group that can provide a genuine source of hope for the area and for us all.

The PKK in Iraq and the PKK-linked YPG in north Syria are not only the most effective fighters against Daesh, but are at the same time attempting to build a secular grassroots democracy that emphasises fairness and an equal place for women.

The best hope of preventing the flow of fighters, arms and oil in and out of Daesh-occupied Syria would be to give the YPG the support they need to link up their separate autonomous regions and so effectively close off the border with Turkey. But Turkey has been persecuting the Kurds for the best part of 100 years and is using the current conflict as an excuse to attack both their fighters in Iraq and Syria and their politicians and activists and main centres of population within Turkey.

In maintaining the prescription on the PKK, the UK is contributing to this persecution and to the stifling of the best chance of a better future for the whole region. Last Saturday’s RISE conference agreed to “call on the UK to immediately lift the ban on the PKK and urge the UK and our legal representatives to press for the removal of the PKK from the UK, EU and UN lists of proscribed terrorist organisations”. We hope that RISE will just be one of many groups calling for this ban to be lifted.

Sarah Glynn, Sarah Collins, Cat Boyd and Aram Mohammed, RISE

WHILST I agree with Catriona Grigg on the importance of free speech (Letters, December 10), I have to disagree with her view that Tyson Fury is receiving unduly harsh treatment.

She concedes, in passing, that he is a male chauvinist, though he would be more aptly termed a misogynist. This isn’t the cringeworthy rambling of an uncle with “dated” views, or questionable punchlines (a tedious enough reminder of who wears the 1950s slacks, anyway). This is an offence to all women, and a ready vocabulary for every insecure young man impressionable enough to emulate this kind of behaviour.

Fury isn’t being – and shouldn’t be – muzzled, here. He just shouldn’t be given a public pedestal and prime-time anointment (doesn’t the P in SPOTY stand for personality? Can we stop saying this award simply prizes particular sporting achievements? His sporting ability is beyond question and he has already won that medal).

Where I depart entirely from Ms Grigg is seeing Fury’s fisticuff fundamentalism as a follower of Jesus “honestly trying to articulate his beliefs”. A fastidious stickler for scriptural fidelity? A pillar of piety and propriety? I think not. This brand of mundane misogyny, homophobia and hate should have neither a medal nor a dog collar pinned to it.

Alex MacMillan, Dunbar

AS the Forth Road Bridge drama unfolds and more details about repair management and funding cuts come to light, I can’t help thinking of the time when we all paid our £1 toll fee.

Most of us probably welcomed the abolition of the toll, as proposed by the SNP in May 2007 only weeks after being elected into government. Yet parliamentary agreement ensued that legislation on mandatory bridge levies had to be revoked, thus removing statutory means of raising maintenance funds.

Had the toll stayed in place, it would by now have generated an estimated revenue of £120 million – a nice cash boost to keeping the bridge in good health. There really is no such thing as a free lunch – election gifts always come at a price.

Regina Erich, Stonehaven

THE Carmichael lie-gate fiasco rumbles on, and why shouldn’t it ? I for one, although being a horrible nasty nationalist, will defiantly pursue what justice there is in our lying and hypocritically corrupt UK community.

Carmichael’s fanatical hatred of anything SNP (and that of most other Unionists) is both disgusting and ill-founded. When will these idiots realise that not only do they insult SNP supporters, amounting at present to at least 50 per cent of the Scottish electorate, but also many thousands of Greens and the more honest and open-minded Unionists in our country? When the SNP is unjustly slurred by leading politicians and the general media, they also slur the entire Yes movement.

Perhaps I could retort that every Unionist in the UK is nothing but a lying, cheating, dishonourable curmudgeon, simply because I, and the honest amongst us, “know” that Carmichael is a “proven” one?

Alfie Ward, Biggar

THERE is an aspect of “Frenchgate”which seems not to have been the centre of focus either in the court case nor media and that is that his lie assumed that the French ambassador would adhere to diplomatic convention and thereby not comment on the false allegation.

This level of calculation by Carmichael just shows the degree of deceit he is capable of and proves beyond any reasonable doubt that he is not suitable for any public office.

Ian Stewart, Uig