Letters: If the National Front appear at schools they can be arrested

But why are the police not called upon to arrest these perpetrators, the moment they set foot near any schools? ‘Incitement to racial hatred’ is still a crime under the Race Relations Act unless this has been watered down.

And does this kind of behaviour not qualify as child abuse when it is offered to minors? Can we imagine any group being permitted to distribute pornographic literature to children in the streets without swift action being taken?

It is not just that there is no place for this in Scotland today, as all those quoted have agreed. There needs to be a complete crackdown by the law on this blatantly abusive behaviour that denies any rights to a number of Scotland’s residents and citizens.

Iain Whyte
North Queensferry

I’M not sure what issues you are having with the National Front in Scotland (do they still exist?) but I want to take issue with you and your editorial. The far right are assumed to be fascist parties.

You say that the far right are in government in Bulgaria and Poland.

That’s news to me and for the people of Poland and Bulgaria too.

Both are led by conservative parties that are similar on many economic and social issues to the Tory Party and though the Tories are a bad lot you wouldn’t call them a far right party.

Chucking the term ‘far right’ about demeans the term and lets the true fascists off the hook.

Elijah Traven
Hull

THAT the National Front plans to target schools is telling, of course: they hope their feeble arguments will win over those with less experience of ther world. I hope Scots schoolchildren will send them packing.

John Macanenay
Glasgow

Voting No did not protect pensions, it’s the SNP that will do so

IS it just me, or was a main plank of the Better Together IndyRef1 campaign a scaring of Scottish pensioners to vote No because the SNP were bad and pensioners would suffer if the SNP succeeded and Scotland gained independence?

Fast forward 12 months from Better Together lies and we have Conservative Liam Fox at the Tory Conference advocating the slashing of pensioner benefits immediately.

The reason he and his Tory acolytes think that cutting pensioner welfare quickly is a good idea is that, they say, by 2020 many will be dead and won’t vote against the Tories.

Those still alive will be that addled in the brain they will forget which party cut their life support in 2015/2016. Unbelievable. But it is true.

So is it not time for any decent human being in Scotland to reassure pensioners that the SNP Government has already put in place laws to save Scots from the worst ravages of the bedroom tax; the SNP Government is putting in place laws to protect the disabled and vulnerable from Ian Duncan-Smith’s deadly welfare cuts. Therefore it is reasonable to let Scottish pensioners know they have been lied to by the Tory elements of Better Together and are in line for deadly cuts.

It pains me to say this, but that is what happens when you vote No in a referendum that gave Scotland the chance to get away from the wretched Tory Westminster Raj.

Scottish pensioners really need reassuring that the SNP Government has a proven track record for fairness and protecting the poor, the vulnerable, the disabled, and now right to the top of the agenda, protecting pensioners here as well.

Alastair Stewart
Hamilton

OH, how depressingly predictable. When Russia raised the military stakes in Syria by a fair few notches in order to prop up its failing client Assad, and right on cue there was correspondence in The National about how it’s really all the fault of those dastardly Yankees!

The RAF kills two UK-born jihadists in a drone strike and there follows a public outcry, yet Foreign Minister Lavrov blithely announces in a press conference that Russian intervention in Syria is intended to wipe out several thousand of his fellow citizens (mainly Chechens) and no-one apparently raises as much as an eyebrow.

The origins of the Syrian conflict are complex. Yes, there has clearly been fallout from the illegitimate Second Gulf War and its woefully-mismanaged aftermath. But it is hardly progress to be heavily militarising support for a vile war criminal like Assad, whose sole interest is preserving himself from the same fate as the late-unlamented Ceausescu and Gaddafi. If we in the West are being hypocritical, it is only because we would really rather prefer to leave most of the nasty work of tackling Daesh in Syria to the Russians and Iranians, while we hold our precious noses and look the other way.

Yes, it certainly ought to be the United Nations who should intervene in this grim fandango, but too often in the recent past (eg. Bosnia, Rwanda) it has proved utterly inadequate for the task, for well-known reasons. One suspects that calls for its involvement are often deliberately disingenuous, a convenient fig-leaf for selfish isolationism.Is it too much to ask that our attitude to foreign affairs should be securely grounded on fair-minded principle rather than merely an opportunity for absurdist political point-scoring? Are we not in danger of forgetting those at the very heart of the matter, the vast majority of ordinary Syrians whose modest ambition was simply to have a government that truly represented them, and to live their lives in peace in their own homes, free from any fear of arbitrary detention, maltreatment and death at the hands of any self-appointed Baathist thug or Islamist zealot?

Robert J Sutherland
Glasgow

CAMERON is sure to encounter his own Nightmare Before Christmas as he prepares to attend the European Council summit this week. Reports that the PM is set to back down on his proposed curb on EU migrants entering the UK in the ongoing EU renegotiations should hardly come as a surprise. The proposed ‘fundamental’ reform of the UK’s relationship with the EU in the run up to the EU referendum has become a rod that is currently breaking the PM’s back.

Proposals to limit EU migrants through imposing a cap were quickly rejected following objections, primarily from Chancellor Merkel. And now proposals to limit in-work benefits to those EU migrants who have been in the UK for four years look set to go to the wall, with no support from any other EU member state.

The Commons European Scrutiny Committee has added insult to injury, warning that Cameron’s desired proposals would not deliver the ‘fundamental’ changes in the UK’s relationship with the EU the PM is seeking. The issue of linking benefits to migration was always a sideshow, as those coming from the EU to the UK don’t come for benefits but to work. So, any attempt to curb migrants through restricting benefits will inevitably have little impact, a view most recently backed by economist, Sir Stephen Nickell, a senior member of the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

The wheels are rapidly falling off Tory renegotiation proposals, as many predicted, and talk of ‘strong fundamental reform’ of our relationship with the EU has become something of a damp squib.

Alex Orr
Edinburgh

IT amazes me that no-one has so far has mentioned that by lying, Alistair Carmichael has caused Parliament to run up a bill of £1.5 million for the inquiry into the leak

Surely this is conduct unbecoming of a minister that should be punished heavily by the parliamentary standards committee! I shudder to think how many children could have been fed this Christmas by this profligacy.

Steve Cunningham
Aberdeen

CATRIONA Grigg (Letters, The National, December 14) believes we can’t cherry-pick which bits of the Bible we accept. Why not?

It’s only a fairly arbitrary collection of books written by men, put together by other men, and described as the revealed word of God by yet more men.

Since evolution has not changed us much in the last 4000 years, how can you believe that men were any different then compared with now? Self-serving and power-hungry.

I don’t want to abolish religion, which has many good things to commend it. But let’s be reasonable!

Derek Ball
Bearsden

YESTERDAY’S issue of The National has a story on the FSA’s festive food poisoning awareness campaign (Turkey tips to avoid a poisoned Christmas, The National, December 15) .

It mentions a number of statistics on food poisoning cases, GP visits and hospital admissions, and contrasts this with a statistic from an unnamed source which states that 78 per cent of Scots think that they are unlikely to fall ill from food they have prepared at home.

However, a quick analysis shows that the 78 per cent of Scots are right.

Taking the cases of poisoning together with the numbers of GP visits and hospital visits gives a total of 49,300 cases, or 0.9 er cent of the population.

Therefore people are extremely unlikely to fall ill from preparing food at home.

D Myers
Edinburgh

AS a reader since the very first issue may I offer my congratulations on the new improved National.

It is much improved for a modest increase in price and I very much hope that you both hold present and gain new readers.

Now all we need is the Sunday edition! I am sure it will be along in due course.

Andrew Parrott
Perth

I HAVE purchased The National since the very first issue, like Mary Sutherland (in yesterday’s letters). It is a breath of fresh air and a great antidote to the rest of the media.

It has always been tremendous value at 50p and paying 10p extra is well worth it, especially with the enhanced coverage.

My thanks to all concerned in the production of this informative newspaper.

Shirley Robins
Dunoon

THE veiled woman who caused a trial to be postponed at Dunfermline Sheriff Court, by refusing to reveal her face when asked to do so by the Sheriff, raises important issues for Scots Law.

As Muslim women continue to advance in the legal profession, it is only a matter of time before we have a veiled sheriff, veiled procurator fiscal, veiled accused, veiled defence solicitor, veiled witness and possibly even a veiled forewoman of a jury in court.

What legal rights would a non-veiled accused, an atheist perhaps, have to see the face of his or her accusers and the sheriff who will pronounce the verdict and sentence?

Ian Stewart
Convener, Atheist Scotland

GEORGE Foulkes plans a Senate for Holyrood, presumably to advise and consent to legislation from any elected Scottish Government.

It seems to me unlikely the Scottish people would want to go down that road. However, if the people did will additional legislative scrutiny, an alternative to an upper house might be some kind of Legislative Council.

It could be composed of, say, twenty legal and constitutional experts capable of pointing out any unintended consequences of legislation.

Being appointed and not elected, such a council would have no powers to strike down or amend bills.

They would therefore advise only but not consent.

Nevertheless it would be a brave, or rash, government that would disregard the advice of such a body.

Peter Craigie
Edinburgh

The Long Letter

Calvinists and Daesh: Brutality on a different scale

CHRIS Bambery (“A Caliphate for Calvinists”: The author of the original article responds to the criticism of our readers, The National, December 15) is broadly right in pointing to similarities which sociologists of religion attribute to the destabilising effects of the process of modernisation on religion, effects that are now belatedly sweeping the Islamic world as it moves from being a culture of secondary orality (when only a few highly educated scholars knew the scriptures ) to being a culture of mass literacy and mass communication where every Muslim no matter how ill-educated fancies himself as a sheikh of Islam.

But he is totally wrong in the entire order of scale and brutality in comparing those whose puritanical Christian faith motivated them to fight the Crown for a purer Reformation, with the extremists of Daesh.

Yes, people fought, were persecuted, and died as martyrs for their Reformed faith after 1560. Yes, those who fought the Crown attempted to establish a kind of puritanical theocracy in the 1640s and 50s. Yes, Andrew Melville, Principal of Glasgow University, did attempt to pull down Glasgow Cathedral in 1579 as a “nest of popery” but no, he did not succeed.

Yes, the murder of the Episcopalian Archbishop Sharpe was an atrocity, but it is remembered today exactly because it was an atrocity, and condemned by both sides.

Nowhere in the history of Scotland’s Reformed faith were there atrocities on a scale and level of brutality as are committed today by Daesh. To compare the religious fanaticism of the 17th century Calvinists to that of Daesh and modern day Islamic extremists is a grave error of historic judgement.

But there are broader sociological similarities sweeping the Islamic world today as once swept the Christian world in the response to modernisation, particularly in the revolutionary effects of mass literacy. This may seem ironic and counter-intuitive.

For most of its history Islam (like Christianity, pre-Reformation) was a religion of praxis, a way of life, and most Muslims today will affirm that this is still the case. The mere recitation of the words was deemed sufficiently meritorious just as in the Middle Ages Christians would recite Latin chants they barely understood. Despite this, violent jihadis read it in translation, and attempt to interpret it “rationally” (i.e. literally and without context) to find inspiration for their cult.

When I taught sociology of religion I was fortunate to have several Muslim students. A comment I frequently heard from them was that they wished Islam had a pious scholarly authority figure similar to that of the Pope and an organised structure similar to that of the Church.

We may scoff at organised religion today, yet it has resulted in us eventually keeping a lid on religious fanaticism during the time when we underwent the instability of modernisation. One of the achievements of the Covenanters was to settle an established rational ordering of religious authority – the Presbyterian system – in Scotland in 1690... a structure which was relatively democratic for its time and still remains so to this day.

Dr Mairianna Clyde
Edinburgh