Trump does not actually want to be president

This explains why they are so happy to make extraordinary fantastical promises. It also explains why Trump is now clinging to his hideous spat with the Khan family. He realises he has finally hit on something that may make him un-electable. His preferred position (as the “November’s election will be rigged” claim makes obvious) is victim/coulda-been-hero.

In a world where politics can turn on a pin head in a second, Hillary Clinton needs to make sure her entire campaign is not based on keeping Trump out.
Amanda Baker
Edinburgh

THE news that Donald Trump doesn’t grasp why America’s nukes cannot be used has been met with widespread derision, but surely his ignorance is less chilling than Theresa May’s confirmation that she would use the UK’s?
Joan Brown
Edinburgh

ALL power to a new Scottish Six, but the reality is that the whole of television broadcasting in, for and about Scotland is in need of a drastic and urgent overhaul. The UK vote to leave the EU and all of the ensuing ramifications for Scotland have gone almost completely un-reviewed, un-analysed and un-debated from a Scottish point of view because there are virtually no Scottish programmes about Scottish political affairs currently being broadcast.

The BBC’s Scotland 2016 has been axed – not without good reason – and BBC so-called-Scotland has so far failed to offer an alternative. STV’s Scotland Tonight is off air at the moment. I emailed them to ask if they might reconsider the timing of their summer holiday given the fairly momentous events that have taken place recently – events that have a great bearing on Scotland’s future and are crying out for a Scottish perspective. They thanked me for my interest, ignored the main point of my email, and rather patronisingly assured me that Scotland Tonight would be returning to our screens “later in the year”. Well that’s all right then.

An absolute disgrace all round and an unbelievable insult to the people of Scotland, especially considering what tripe the broadcasters do actually show in the place of informed opinion and debate about important current issues.
Ellen Renton
Address supplied

ON RT, the Russian Television news programme, yesterday morning there were pictures of an Israeli soldier stamping on the foot of a small eight-year-old Palestinian girl, taking her bike from her and throwing it into a hedge at the other side of the road. The message was clear: “Stay on your own side of the road.”

It is sickening to watch apartheid raise its ugly head again. I remember apartheid in South Africa, and how we took too the streets, wrote letters to our MPs and boycotted South African goods, even going as far as changing banks. The difference then was Britain did a lot of trade with – and many in Britain had interests – in – South African companies. These companies in turn put pressure on the government.

No government or organisation can or will ever put pressure on Israel no matter what they do in Palestine. Today, in Hebron, we saw apartheid played out in real time and the world looked on. In contrast, on BBC Breakfast: silly people sitting on sofas, cracking jokes and news that is no news. It is not an hour-long six o’clock news “more of the same” programme we need for Scotland, it’s a Scottish broadcasting service.
Walter Hamilton
St Andrews

THANK you for Caroline Leckie’s article (No-one should feel pressure to toe the party political line by supporting named persons, The National, Aug 1). There will have been many people around Scotland relieved by the verdict of the Supreme Court on the proposed named person legislation. As the judges pointed out: “the first thing that a totalitarian regime tries to do is to get to the children, to distance them from the subversive, varied influences of their families, and indoctrinate them in their rulers’ view of the world.”

This, of course, was what happened under the National Socialist (Nazi) Party in Germany: it was the case in Communist Russia and in all the communist countries under the Soviet Union: and it is true today in China and North Korea.

It might be argued that the Scottish Government has nothing in common with these regimes. But no government can tell how, once a law has been enshrined, a future government will use that law.

Russia, in the mid-19th century, passed iniquitous laws, allowing anyone to confiscate the houses and possessions of Jews, and to this end, to have Jews arrested at any time and forcibly exiled to Siberia. Less than a hundred years later, these same laws were being applied to their own people – that is, to anyone whose beliefs were considered not politically correct. It was Lenin himself who coined that phrase.

It is important that the judiciary always remain independent of government. As the judges in this case wisely discerned, “within limits, families must be left to bring up their children in their own way”.
Lesley J Findlay
Fort Augustus

WHILE there may be one named person allocated to an individual, there will have to be in turn designated responsible persons within stated geographic areas for different public bodies, eg the police, that control the flow of information available, between named and designated responsible persons, who in turn control the flow of information/data into/out of their organisation. Information going into the system requires control of both veracity and extent, both by qualified data controllers, and the practitioners actually providing the data.

Data going out requires an experienced tailoring to the needs of the end user.

Perhaps one of the better information control regimes used across local/central government and other public bodies, are geographical information systems. These make use of huge databases, allowing this data to be properly accessed, in part or in whole, by designated individuals, both in the planning system and in other activities such as flood risk management, contaminated ground control, redevelopment etc.

This proven system has a core of information/data control protocols that can be applied within the new named person legislation.
Stephen Tingle
Glasgow