ON Radio Scotland on Thursday morning there was a very fair and balanced report on the Scottish Government. Surprise, shock and amazement, readers will correctly think. However, the article was regarding electric cars, an almost neutral political issue in Scotland.
Largely there is no doubt that electric cars are better for the environment – unless you live next to a lithium mine. But who can afford them? Only the affluent. Why then all these subsidies? Or to look at it another way, most of my friends can’t afford an electric car. In the wider area around where I live, most can only afford an older car, which has higher taxes, fuel costs and so on. Despite being hard workers, they can’t afford a subsided electric car but their taxes are used for subsidies on private green transport.
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Another example of the poor paying the rich.
Aye it’s great to rant on about being ethical. Time it was made more clear: to be environmentally friendly you need a fairly high degree of disposable income. That is not possible to those being paid the minimum or so-called living wage.
I never mentioned those relying on public transport to get to work. Low pay even puts a car beyond them. Some of those use the train – an environmental method, surely? Well, not in rural Scotland where diesel trains run, and mainly with less than 30% occupancy. Why not electric, like mainland Europe? The British government persisted with coal-powered trains a good 50 years after modern, caring countries went electric. Indeed Norway and Sweden electrified the Lulea-Narvik line more than 100 years ago. That’s way beyond the Arctic Circle and very sparsely populated.
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But subsidising public transport on a European scale is beyond Brit mentality, which we are superglued too. A society where the poor must subsidise the rich has been inherent.
Aye, I agree with being green but not paid by the less well-off who receive no benefit. Allowing England’s nationalists to leave us would be a start. Get Scotland back on the international stage and we can break this wealth gap.
Bryan Clark
Maybole
“PETER Hendy denies pro-Union meddling in Union Connectivity Review” (thenational.scot, Jan 25) but can he explain why it is only the attitude to the Union of cross-border travellers from Scotland to other countries in the United Kingdom that is considered to be of enough significance to be identified specifically in the committee’s report?
The Union Connectivity Report does in fact cover aspects of travel outside the UK as well as travel between the nations in the Union, but the committee appear to have been particularly selective in its choice of instances where it has measured public opinion.
In a survey of an unquantified number of people who travelled from Scotland to any of the UK nations once a month or more, it was found that 70% were more favourable to the Union than others. This fell to 50% for those who travelled less often.
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The report covers the Trans-European Network without mentioning the survey of 2,679,513 Scots who might have travelled to another country in the EU at some time, which found that 62% were more favourable to the European Union than others.
In spite of the detail on the effect of air passenger duty on international air travel from Northern Ireland via Dublin, there is no information on how many users were more favourable to the United Nations.
John Jamieson
South Queensferry
WHY is the UK Government considering spending a billion or more on an experimental nuclear fusion plant to be built in Ayrshire or one of four sites in England (Tories consider building new nuclear plant in Scotland – despite Scottish Government opposition, thenational.scot, Jan 22) when it can’t even seem to afford a half-decent energy-efficiency programme? UK households will be paying an extra £1.5 billion in heating bills over the next financial year, thanks to cuts to home energy efficiency support made by the Cameron government.
The government’s radioactive waste advisors say fusion will produce significant volumes of low- and intermediate-level waste, yet: “the recent call for expressions of interest to accommodate siting the STEP facility makes no mention of management of the arising radioactive waste.” They also mention dangerous radioactive hydrogen or tritium emissions into the environment.
If it ever works, fusion will arrive far too late to help us tackle climate change, and clearly won’t be anywhere near as environmentally friendly as claimed.
Pete Roche
Edinburgh
A WONDERFUL ode on Burn’s Day to the PM from Shona Craven (To a louse, on seeing one sitting on a green bench, Jan 25), one, most certainly, of which Rabbie would have been proud to have claimed as his own.
Christine Smith
Troon
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