Letters to The National December 18: Trim the council fat cats not frontline services

I live in Labour/Tory/Lib Dem-controlled East Dunbartonshire. For many years the council has been trying to privatise as many services as they possibly can. But ask them to reduce the amount of administrators who earn more than the First Minister, they stay very silent.

Even at the last election, we found out several officials in Labour-run Glasgow City Council were earning £460,000 pa. I will give that a moment to sink in. Yet front line workers are expected to endure the savings? Does this remind you of anyone else? Red Tories or Blue Tories, what’s the difference?

Jim McGregor
Kirkintilloch

JOHN Swinney talks of the need to ‘work in partnership’ with Scottish local authorities to manage the coming year’s financial settlement. Some ‘partnership’ this is, where a large proportion of the budget cuts are simply passed on to councils, enabling the central SNP Government to look good ahead of next May’s elections, and leaving critical services provided by councils to suffer.

The cynical calculation Swinney has made is that in order to protect the SNP’s popularity, he will give no hint of future income tax increases.

Keith Howell
West Linton

WE are not able to lower tax, only raise it. If we raise it for the rich, we have to raise it across the board. Westminster have given us rope to hang ourselves. Keep this in mind when you next hear someone ranting about the SNP doing nothing. They are taxing second homes and shooting estates though!

Mark Harper
Dysart

Darling and Brown’s new roles pay back services rendered

FORMER Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling is to join the board of directors of Morgan Stanley, following closely on the heels of ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is to act as an advisor to the global investment firm Pimco.

The US-based multinational bank Morgan Stanley, which operates in 42 countries, is known for rewarding its board members handsomely. Last year, the 11 non-employees on the board of directors were paid between $85,000 and $115,000 as well as another $250,000 in stocks.

Darling will be cashing in at the same time that many of Morgan Stanley’s workers are being laid off, with an additional 1,200 job cuts recently announced.

In October 2008, as the global capitalist economy was teetering on the abyss in the greatest financial collapse since 1929, Darling organised a massive bail-out operation to save the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Lloyds Bank and HBOS from bankruptcy. The Bank of England provided £45 billion in loans to RBS, and the Government agreed to underwrite its debts should it default.

Having bailed out the banks at a cost of more than £1 trillion and effectively nationalising their debts, the Labour Government began implementing a massive looting operation against the working class to pay for this crisis.

RBS was later exonerated of any wrongdoing by a parliamentary investigation in 2009. Brown will join a team of five “well known experts in economic and political issues” at Pimco, including former US Federal Reserve Bank chairman Ben Bernanke and Jean-Claude Trichet, former president of the European Central Bank.

In joining the world of high finance, Darling and Brown are emulating the unindicted war criminal Tony Blair, who is now estimated to be worth more than £125m.

Numerous Labourites have also profited from the ongoing privatisation of the National Health Service. The seamless journey of Labour’s senior figures into the corridors of the financial elite underscores its character as a party of big business.

The appointments of Darling and Brown are payment for services rendered, and a recognition by the financial elite that as the crisis of capitalism escalates, they can rely on tried and trusted representatives in the Labour Party.

Alan Hinnrichs
Dundee

IS there any difference between the Unionist parties? When Thatcher came to power in 1979 she used a phrase associated with St Francis: “Where there is discord we will bring harmony” before going on to destroy industries and communities across Scotland and the North of England.

When David Cameron came to power through the back door in 2010 thanks to the treacherous Lib Dems he promised to “take care of the disabled and the vulnerable” and is abolishing the Welfare State, with his axemen Osborne and Duncan Smith.

As for New Labour, apart from the illegal Iraq war, they betrayed every principal in an effort to be more Tory than the Tories. If you look back on the then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, that “card-carrying socialist”, he used to spend Christmas Eve playing to the cameras as he dished out soup to the homeless. That stopped when the House of Lords gravy train arrived on the scene.

Let’s not forget Alistair Darling. Recently he has been handsomely rewarded with a peerage from David Cameron for services rendered to the Tory Party during the Scottish referendum. He has also been appointed as a director of multinational investor bankers Morgan Stanley who had to be bailed out to a tune of £71billion by the US government when it folded during the financial crash. Why would any company who failed worldwide employ a man who was Chancellor when the UK economy collapsed?

Darling can now sit in luxury as the cash flows in yet somehow ignore the suffering that disabled people are suffering today at the hands of Cameron’s lot but which he played a major part in implementing when he was in office along with Brown and the rest of the so-called socialists? We in Scotland should be very proud we have an honest open party representing us in Westminster who hopefully sooner rather than later will get us our independence and deliver us from the poisonous greed-driven politics of Westminster.

Chas McArdle
Lanarkshire

IT was with some relief that I read the letters from the two correspondents in yesterday’s National about the launching of Major Tim Peake into space and found I was not the only reader to find the over the top coverage quite nauseating. After all, Peake was the eighth Brit in space and there was nowhere near the same coverage when astronaut and physicist Helen Sharman went into space a couple of years ago.

But Peake is a serving member of the British military, hence a wonderful opportunity for an orgy of flag-waving jingoism, including the BBC’s now almost mandatory Union Flag-draped schoolchildren cheering at camera. Please pass the sick bag.

Terry Keegans
Beith

TO ALL world leaders: Can you not just sit around the table and discuss your differences like civilized humans and lay down your weapons in the name of peace? This is a time for forgiveness, a time for healing, a time for peace and goodwill. So please disarm your bombs, put aside your ill-feeling and extend your hands in friendship. Are you brave enough to extend the olive branch of friendship? What is more, can you be even braver and accept it?

I often get confused at these so-called great statesmen and women who are too ready to resort to violence. Please grant all children worldwide the gift of peace and extend the hand of goodwill and friendship throughout the planet. If man could only stop fighting one another. Then maybe we could get on with the real battles that face the planet. Battles like that of declaring war on global warming, poverty and homelessness.

So let us work together and build a greener, cleaner and safer planet!

Please call a worldwide ceasefire now.

Molly Ann Tomney (aged 11)
Wishaw

A second chamber may foster a more dynamic nation

REGARDING Peter Craigie’s discussion of George Foulkes’s idea for an upper chamber for Holyrood (Letter, 16 December).

We could usefully have a Scottish Senate with an advisory rather than a legislative function. It could sit in the Old Royal High School building in Edinburgh. Its members could be appointed (partly as an honour for past services and in the hope of future service), along with others with skills and ideas to offer, bearing in mind gender balance and the representation of ethnic and other minorities. Such a Senate could examine and comment on proposed legislation and also suggest legislation, but legislative decisions would remain with the elected Parliament. This could be compatible with, and complementary to, Mr Craigie’s suggestion of a legislative council of experts, also advisory rather than legislative.

David Stevenson
Edinburgh

THE proposals for a Scottish Senate by George Foulkes are worthy of consideration. This is an opportunity to have a forum for new ideas hammered out in public debate which would form the basis for a dynamic nation with distinctive ways of doing things. This is known as our culture. The Senate could be based on the old Scottish parliamentary arrangement of the Estates, once the Kirk, Crown and Lords, but now modernised to represent professions, the media, arts, trades unions, academia, charities and most of all, the disadvantaged and pensioners. This type of body proved its use in the non-party Scottish Constitutional Convention formed to argue for the formation of the present Scottish Parliament.

A virtue would be that lobbyists would be required to present their case in public. A second benefit would be an appropriate use for the Old Royal High School, at this time under threat.

My own proposals for early discussion would be the restoration of the Scottish monarchy, which would enable royalist citizens to support their own country and not the present Union. Then, as we were promised our own mint under the terms of that Union, they could plan out the new Scottish currency which of course, would include a system of basic income on the proposed Finnish model. The teaching of either Gaelic or Scots in all schools should be on the diet.

All these would create more individuality in the country and thus open up a second front in the fight for independence. Our present parliament has been locked into a battle of attrition over taxes, elections and unforeseeable events and cannot be expected to be creative as well.

Iain WD Forde
Scotlandwell, Kinross-shire

THERE is, I promise, no whiff of ‘Ah kent his faither’ about this but the fulsome adulation being lavished on William McIlvanney, now as well as during his life, is wildly excessive, and miles beyond the merits of his work (Tears as Glasgow gives McIivanney a fitting send-off, The National, December 17).

The greatest writer of the century (and, presumably, the last one too)? Hardly: a truly great writer would have had the sense and taste to resist the slick but appallingly contrived pun he built on the name of a character in Laidlaw, a tough nut who ruled his Protestant street.

The late Stanley Eveling drily remarked of McIlvanney’s Docherty that, if he wanted to learn about Glasgow hard men, the first person he’d ask wouldn’t be an English teacher from Kilmarnock.

McIlvanney undoubtedly had a very superior talent in language and a rich, vivid vocabulary; in prose, the problem was that he couldn’t resist displaying these for the delectation of the reader, often at the expense of the ideas he may have wanted to transmit.

He was also distinctly regional in his focus, and far too easily diverted by the picaresque to open up the aspects of character and action which throw light on common humanity.

And, at the same time, we have a writer who, though less lauded was more successful in opening up humanity’s common core and in expressing an understanding of and compassion for our trials and tribulations on a peculiarly Scottish scale of values.

Located on the very fringe of our country, George Mackay Brown illuminated our fundamental common moral values, and the often-painful struggle of ordinary people to abide by them, with a quiet clarity which never fails to carry conviction.

Let us by all means give McIlvanney his due; and not only on account of ‘de mortuis’.

He deserves recognition for broadening the canvas of Scottish writing – but let us not either blur the view with unmerited accolades.

Colin Stuart
Sline, Fife

The Long Letter

Only the Russians are abiding by the tenets of law in Syria

ROBERT J Sutherland’s letter about Russian intervention in Syria and how people are mistaken to say it’s all the fault of the US (Letters, December 16) raises many points but none of these seems to have much substance.

While it is clear that Russia has intervened in Syria to support their client state, the destabilisation of that country has been funded and supported by the US and its client state, Israel.

The late Ian Bell noted that Daesh never attack Israel. In one of his last columns he wrote: “Among the odder complications are that Daesh and Israel have never exchanged a shot, that “valued Nato ally”. We know Daesh arms are supplied by the US and/or Saudi Arabia, another US client state.

Israel has just asked the US to back its annexation of the Golan Heights on a permanent basis.

This is still legally Syrian territory but Israel has just started to offer oil exploration licenses for sale regarding that territory.

‘Fault’ maybe open to interpretation but cause and effect less so.

The US agenda in Syria is ‘regime change’, not for the benefit of Syrians but for that of the US and Israel.

Had the intent been to help the Syrian people, the US would not have been so ineffective in its year-long bombing campaign of Daesh and would have armed the Kurds, who are tackling them on the ground.

Instead, the US is by its silence complicit in illegal trading in stolen Syrian oil by Turkey, which is another US ally.

The money for the oil goes to fund Daesh and the US has avoided doing anything about it.

Under these circumstances, people seem to be justified in holding the US, or rather US policy, as being to blame for much of the suffering in Syria.

Whatever Assad’s role, he seems to be the least worst option for the people of Syria and for that part of the world at the moment.

In the absence of something better to replace him, it seems ‘regime change’ will not improve the lot of Syrians but it might enhance the position of Israel and the US in the area. Since Mr Sutherland himself mentions Gaddafi, he might ponder on whether things have improved in Libya after the enforced regime change in that country.

Like it or not, the Russians seem to be the only ones adhering to the tenets of international law.

They were invited to intervene in Syria by the government of that country.

No one else has that authority and there is no United Nations mandate authorising intervention in that sovereign state’s territory.

Accordingly, the bombing by the RAF seems to be of questionable legality to say the least. Mr Sutherland uses the term ‘war criminal’ in his letter to describe Syria’s president. If that shoe fits, shouldn’t the UK Government and the RAF take a turn at wearing it?

Unlike Mr Sutherland, I do not consider it strange that people hold the policy of the US at fault. They are, I believe, deeply disappointed and worried that what we believed to be the champion of freedom and the rule of law is just another empire builder.

That said, they may not be surprised that the UK has sought to revert to that style of statecraft.

George C Gebbie
Clarkston