AS someone who studiously avoids anything to do with any sort of British awards – from airheid luvvies gushing on aboot their careers to jingoistic gong hunters – it was heartening to see Ken Loach break the mould at the Bafta awards with his remarks about the heartlessness of the British Government and their punitive actions on the poor, while pandering to their wealthy chums.

Not the usual stuff audiences get to hear aboot – aftershave, mascara and thanking their producers and mammies for their career boosts.

Compare it to the scented fitba player complaining that his manager misled him aboot huvin’ tae dae charities and support the Bitter Togethwer campaign to get his knichthood.  An independent Scotland should have no need for these imperialist class-based hand-me-down “honours”. If we must have honours, make the system something we can all respect and appreciate and maybe even be proud of.

Donald Anderson, Glasgow 

IN his manifesto in 2007, Alex Salmond vowed he would abolish the grossly unfair, Tory-implemented council tax if he had an overall majority in Holyrood. However, he then reneged on his promise. When Nicola Sturgeon became First Minister she vowed to abolish the council tax and has also reneged on her promise.

I am a 69-year-old disabled pensioner who now lives alone as a result of a bereavement in my household. I received a letter from my local council tax office informing me that as a result of the Scottish Government raising the top four bands, being in band E, I will now be hit with an automatic £100 increase. That does not include any rise by my local council.  I attend hospital for treatment for five serious illnesses, with three of them – blood cancer, angina, and diabetes – threatening to shorten my life. I have saved hard through difficult times for my funeral and have money put aside for repairs to my home. In other words I have saved for a "rainy day”.

My home is in a “private” estate and I have two tiny spare bedrooms, one of which is used when my sister comes to stay with me when I am unwell.

If my home was sitting in a council scheme it would be banded as D. My total yearly income is less than £11,000 but according to the Scottish Government I am now being targeted as a wealthy pensioner and hit with an SNP version of the bedroom tax, which means I will have to undergo the degrading ritual of “means testing” just to live in my own home.  At least the Tories had the decency to exclude people over the age of 65 from their bedroom tax fiasco!

CM, Lanarkshire

THE Scottish Government really must clarify the situation resulting from the revaluation of rateable values of business premises. Although revaluation may lead to three- or four-fold rises in rateable value, the actual tax raised must not be raised by a similar amount or it will be seen as an unscrupulous tax grab by government.

I note from reading The National that the overall business rates poundage is set to fall by 3.7 per cent, but that is a pathetic reduction which fails to come near to compensating for the huge rises in rateable values.  Neither the First Minister nor the Finance Minister have satisfactorily explained what they intend to do to avert this potential huge tax rise for vulnerable businesses, on which our prosperity depends.

We need a clear explanation now before serious political damage and actual economic damage results.

Ian Grant, South Queensferry

SO Ruth Davidson presumes to know what Scotland wants and doesn’t want? Speaking before addressing her London pals yesterday, she says that Scotland doesn’t want the “uncertainty” of facing a second independence referendum.

Despite her party having minority of the Scottish vote in Holyrood and virtual non-representation in Westminster, through some mysterious means she claims to know that Scotland would prefer the certainty of disaster represented by Brexit!

Derek Ball, Bearsden  

THE spectacle of Scotland’s two “opposition” leaders heading to London to beg for more crumbs to stave off the inevitable end of the United Kingdom was an unbecoming sight. Kezia Dugdale will simply recycle Gordon Brown’s vapid prognostications about “federalism”, a phrase so overused and meaningless its only use should be as a cure for insomnia.

Dugdale is the political equivalent of a sandwich board vendor whose sign reads “the end is nigh”. Her leadership will finish off “Scottish” Labour. Ruth Davidson polls less in Scotland than Jeremy Corbyn, yet the Unionist establishment hails her as the “real” First Minister. Corbyn rightly decided he could not oppose Brexit as the people had voted for it. Yet Davidson is opposing an independence referendum despite the Scottish electorate voting for parties who vowed to hold one in the event of Brexit.

Alan Hinnrichs, Dundee 

I WAS so excited to see your Saturday headline that I bought my first National. And I have read it several times. It is only to be hoped that Scottish Labour voters, as I was for most of my life, take Henry McLeish’s questions seriously, for there surely is no future for Scotland under the English Tories.

And Kezia Dugdale can make as many federal suggestions as she likes – that will only waste time, because Brexit is now. I believe it is time for a resurgence of the Bravehearts and we had better start cutting the “long spears, twice the length of a man”, because it is quite probable that Theresa Longshanks could send in the “heavy horse”.

Robert Johnston, Airdrie 

GREG Moodie’s cartoon page in The National is consistently good!  In my view it should be on the front page at times, to draw more attention to real Scottish issues. What I would give to read a chapter including the following – Trump, a mushroom cloud, a hairdresser and a wind farm. Keep it up.

Kenneth HW Campbell, Troon

MICHAEL Gray must be raging. Around 40 Nazis in Glasgow last Friday, all in one room. Sadly, neither he nor any of his fellow “pacifists” were there to punch any of them. 

James Andrew Mills, Renfrewshire