IN sheer frustration, I must finally take issue with your correspondents who repeat ad nauseam that Brexit is the democratic will of the people. In my view, it most certainly is not. To be such, it should represent all those who have been and will be committing their lives and efforts to this country for as long as the results of Brexit continue. Yet David Cameron, with his focus entirely on his party divisions and attempting to ensure the result he wanted, technically rigged the voting electorate.
Firstly, those most likely to live with the consequences are the young, 16- and 17-year-olds, just leaving school with their whole lives ahead of them to contribute to and benefit from our society. Yet they were excluded from voting on this crucial decision. So too were residents of foreign birth, even if they had lived here for 20 or 30 years, who demonstrated their commitment to this country and its future by marrying a UK citizen, bringing up a family, working, paying taxes and contributing to their community. Why were they excluded? Did they, and their children in years to come, not have a justifiable stake in the kind of future we will live with?
Yet many expats were given a vote, people who over the years have abandoned their input to the UK and gone to live, work and contribute to other countries around the world. They may have contributed nothing for years and may well have no input to our future. Was this in hope that they would vote with a blind, nostalgic loyalty to the UK, which would cost them nothing in thought at the time or in having to live later with the consequences, but would vote as Cameron hoped?
No-one can know how those who cared too little to vote at all might have affected the outcome. The input, however, of the first two groups and exclusion of the last would at least have produced a result properly representative of the democratic will of all those with a stake in our future.
Let us stop spouting this fallacy in the hope that, heard often enough, it will miraculously become true. This, without doubt, is FAKE NEWS!
P Davidson
Falkirk
EVEN though the enormous downsides of Brexit have been clearly revealed, we still amazingly proceed. It is now obvious that the benefits trumpeted by the Leave campaign simply never existed, and that Britain will be hugely disadvantaged across a wide front by leaving the EU.
It is therefore the duty of government to abandon this folly, by simply voting to do so. No public consultation of any kind is needed, as Lord Kerr of Kinlochard – the author of Article 50 – was at pains to point out during his recent lecture at Edinburgh University Business School. It is solely a government decision.
The obvious complications of Brexit always made it a dubious objective in any event.
Malcolm Parkin
Kinross
WHAT an excellent comment from Gordon Millar in Wednesday’s National (View from England: Don’t take public services for granted, July 18).
I can understand exactly what he means from personal experience. The first time I went over the Queensferry Crossing, my reaction was “WOW!!!” Now when I go over it I’m just crossing the bridge. The effect of just how magnificent an achievement this is wears off with use. It’s easy to forget that it came in below budget and not much beyond the estimated finish date. The little bit over is entirely down to the extreme weather we suffered, but no doubt that will be blamed on the SNP. They really have not done enough to control the weather; or maybe they have deliberately made it windy in order to achieve the quite spectacular results at the end of last year when Scotland produced more than 100% of domestic electricity for three months running from wind farms.
I never can understand why, at First Minister’s Questions, in response to complaints from Ruth Davidson about almost anything under the sun, Nicola Sturgeon always seems to say: “We know it’s not quite right yet but we are doing this to sort it – or – have done that to sort it.” To my mind she should be saying something like: “Well it’s not perfect yet but let’s compare it to how much worse it is in England under your boss!”
Gordon Millar is quite right to list what the SNP have done in Scotland that Westminster has failed to do in England. Imagine coming out of university with a debt of £27,000 hanging round your shoulders, and you need to get that paid as well as trying to get on the property ladder; or paying your rent and feeding yourself. It is a massive burden on every student in England that those in Scotland don’t have.
People need to be reminded of the measures taken to mitigate the bedroom tax at every turn, and every immigrant that is kicked out of Scotland by Westminster needs to be mentioned in Holyrood. Not only that but we need to be calling people on the phone now, and asking if they voted No last time, and if so, why? And have they changed their minds and can we count on their support next time round?
There must be hundreds of SNP members who, like me, have a telephone contract that allows unlimited free calls on Saturdays and Sundays. So let’s get some lists from some central body and start calling round. An hour on a Saturday and an hour on a Sunday by 10,000 callers would cover around quarter of a million households every weekend. It’s not a case of “We’ve never had it so good”. But it is a case of “We’re having it so much better than rUK; and we could do so much more with independence”. We need to tell them how it is, and we should really get started now.
Charlie Kerr
Glenrothes
I HAVE a lot of sympathy for Ashley Douglas (SNP’s LGBT hypocrisy is nae cause fur Pride, July 20), but we need dissension in every party. Otherwise, we are in 1984 or Brave New World. I marched for gay rights in 1974, so have a lot of sympathy for Ashley’s cause, and her frustrations. But forbidding a party to enlist views opposite to your own is not democratic. All political parties must reflect a range of views and no one party has a monopoly of “good views”, not even the SNP!
Liza Russell
Germany
CATHERINE Lloyd (Letters, July 20) writes that the word “welched” should not be used in your paper as it “refers pejoratively to Welsh deceit and dishonesty from an English point of view”. But no, the “deceit and dishonesty” came entirely from Edward I of England.
Edward borrowed money from Jewish moneylenders to fund his subjection of Wales. Mission complete and repayment due, he proclaimed The Edict of Expulsion expelling all Jews from his kingdom. And so “welched on the deal” came into use.
Andrew Orr
Edinburgh
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