THERE is so much wrong with the letter from Jim Stewart (Letters, The National, June 4) that it’s difficult to know where to start.
He says Scotland has “pillaged doctors and professionals” which other countries have “paid to educate” and which Scotland “refuses to pay for and train in Scotland”. This was specifically the point of the Fresh Talent Initiative introduced by Labour and maintained by the SNP until it was abolished by the Tory Home Office. The whole point of FTI was to bring students from other countries here for training with the option of staying here to work for two years after qualification.
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Mr Stewart says that the SNP has “slashed student grants” and “got rid of 140,000 college places”. It’s true that in times of Tory-imposed austerity, the colleges were required to focus on courses that led to employment and as a consequence, many lifestyle courses which contributed to life-long learning and the ability to socialise were lost, but the priority had to be for jobs.
Mr Stewart also says that Scotland pays for EU students, but not for students from other parts of the UK. He should note that tuition-fee exemption is based on residency and not nationality. He should also note that students from Scotland travelling to study in other parts of the UK are charged £9000 per year. He goes on to say that it is “easier for working-class children to get to university in Tory England than SNP Scotland”. I’m not sure where he gets these figures from or what “working class” means these days, but these families are going to have to be able to find £27,000 per student to fund a three-year course in Tory England.
I’m not sure how Mr Stewart envisages the control of “unrestricted and unregulated population growth” unless this means strict controls on immigration which does not seem to be a very internationalist approach, but he finishes by saying that “population growth does not solve any of Scotland’s problems”. However, as Scotland’s working-age population shrinks and the ageing population grows, where exactly does he think the tax revenues needed to sustain and provide services for the entire population will come from?
Douglas Turner
Edinburgh
DOES Jim Stewart of Musselburgh think we are all stupid? So English students should come up to free university education in Scotland and Scots going south should continue paying £9000 per year?
How many new universities would we have to start building next week as England, with a population of 56 million, sends its students up to Scotland, with a population of 5m? There is of course really no such thing as “free university education”. In Scotland the Scottish Government pays for the education of its students out of the hard-pressed taxpayer funded Scottish budget, so why they would pay for students from England defeats me (unless of course the Westminster government were to pay £9000 per annum for each English student). It’s only England in developed Europe that charges its young people so disgracefully for education.
On college courses the SNP government cancelled or combined hundreds and thousands of seriously undersubscribed part-time courses and put the resources into meaningful full-time courses. There is now a record number of Scottish students in serious full-time course at Scottish colleges.
The rest of his missive is of a similar vein and I have to believe it is a spoof communication to provide some levity in the letter section.
David McEwan Hill
Sandbank, Argyll
I HAVE always regarded myself as a socialist, at least since my student days where I first become interested in politics.
However, whilst not doubting my own beliefs, I am confused over the socialism being spouted by the left-wing membership of this country. This with particular reference to Andrew Wilson’s Growth Report. I for one, and there are many others, do not take this report as a sacrosanct document for the SNP government to enact upon. Moreover it is certainly not a bucket list of things to do with regard to winning our independence.
However, it is doing what it was designed for, and that is to get the nation discussing its content. Nicola Sturgeon has already suggested debate on this throughout the different indyref groups and movements during the summer before annual conference in October. One thing I will expect to see from the report is plenty of motions and amendments dealing with the report’s content and submitted to conference in order to provide a healthy debate.
If Andrew Wilson’s report will provide anything substantive to his efforts for independence it will be a bloody good conference dealing with Scotland’s freedom and its social and economic growth as a consequence.
So let’s drop all this bickering over what are really old-fashioned, left-wing notions and let’s redefine a socialism fit for a 21st-century Scotland.
Alan Magnus-Bennett
Fife
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