ALMOST on the day the Scottish Government added £4 to a bottle of spirits and considers even banning corporate logos from beer glasses in a probably vain attempt to reduce Scotland’s harmful level of alcohol consumption, one of their MSPs called for the lifting of the ban on alcohol in football grounds.
If my calculations are correct, SNP MSP George Adam was aged 11 at the time of the football riot he acknowledges led to the ban on alcohol. I am old enough to remember those very bad times, where carrier bags bulging with beer cans and half bottles of whisky found their way on to the terraces of our football grounds to be consumed during the almost two hours of a match.
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There is currently alcohol on sale in football grounds but only in corporate hospitality suites and only before and after the game and, of course, in numerous public houses around football grounds. However, during the game itself alcohol is not permitted in the stadium – even for corporate hospitality spectators.
The ban has led to safer football games to which we were happy to bring children and young people. I have no desire to sit for two hours with my grandchildren adjacent to someone consuming what could be unlimited amounts of alcohol.
I sincerely hope the Scottish Government will not be persuaded by Mr Adam’s deeply flawed attempts to turn back the clock and re-introduce alcohol to football grounds.
Glenda Burns
Glasgow
PLEASE please please, alcohol must not be allowed to be sold at football games ever again! Football is different in that thugs don’t follow rugby, and the only thing worse than a thug is a tanked-up one.
Drink on the back of a last-minute contentious game-winning VAR decision is all that it would take to cause a riot at an Old Firm game. The SNP would be damned to high heaven by the lickspittle mainstream media if this were to happen!
Steve Cunningham
Aberdeen
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MSP George Adam has stated that “football has moved on since the riots of 1980”. Really? What about the mess each year in Glasgow at the end of the season, and the fear that local people have when football fans decide to celebrate?
Football and alcohol has always been, and will always be, a toxic combination.
Andrew Currie
Renfrew
READING Rhoda Meek’s column on Sunday (Marr’s anti-Gaelic error invokes the usual ‘strawman’ arguments, Sep 29), I was reminded that when we visited Tiree a couple of years ago, we went to see the broch near Vaul on the north of the island.
An “information” board (the quote marks are deliberate!) told us that in the sixties a professor had studied the remains and “concluded” that the broch was built by incomers from England who ruled over the local population.
What of all the other brochs around our north and west seabords? Clearly a mix of ignorance and blind prejudice!
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I was put in mind of a primary school teacher I had in the late fifties/early sixties who was English though teaching in Scotland. He informed us bluntly that Scotland had no history, no arts. My mother later remarked that he was just too lazy and ignorant to bother informing himself.
Just like so many others, what I have since learned of Scottish history and literature has been largely by my own efforts. Is it surprising that those who aren’t motivated to make that effort simply don’t understand our country?
Robert Moffat
Penicuik
ON Friday I took the 0815 train from my local station Maybole to Ardrossan. The total fare was £4.70. As of Monday it is now £18.40.
On Friday the train to Ayr wasn’t busy; Ayr to Kilwinning quiet; Kilwinning to Ardrossan about half full.
Yet the clowns or clones of clowns want these trains even emptier by re-introducing high fares.
They state that not enough folk used the temporary ending of cheap fares at peak times to justify their “cost”.
Well, empty seats are more costly than cheap seats.
Why are the Scottish Government so hell-bent on giving the Brits reasons to tell us we are incompetent fools, despite their rail system being worse and privatised?
I love the idea of Scotrail in public ownership. But since this happened the service in the deep sooth has got worse.
Am I just an idiot who fails to understand basic logic? You retake control and improve. You do not take over and be lazy and incompetent. Yet our government are doing that to the detriment of the public. and feeding the Brits with all they want to discredit us.
So sad.
Bryan Clark
Maybole
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