Letters to The National December 19: Unionists baying for an increase in taxes is just howling mad reaction

I’m sure the Unionist establishment are overjoyed that Labour in Scotland are, in defence of the union, fulfilling the traditional Scottish role as cannon fodder but the traditional Labour supporter in Scotland expects their team to be opposing and fiercely attacking the Tories. But not a cheep.

Should we warn Scottish Labour — or just allow it to blindly wander along the road to oblivion?

Dave McEwan Hill
Argyll

AFTER the Scottish budget and listening to Murdo Fraser’s response did my ears deceive me further I read in Fridays letters page a certain Keith Howells saying something similar. Is this the new face of conservatism and a party of more tax or just desperation to find someone somewhere that might vote for them in May.

Bryan Auchterlonie
Perthshire

WHY do we have to endure this nonsense from local councils and Cosla every year? They have known that year on year cuts were promised from as far back as the Tony Blair years, but still insist in this annual ritual of whining.

I live in Labour/Tory/Lib-Dem controlled East Dunbartonshire, who for many years now have been trying to privatise as many services as they possibly could. But ask them to reduce the amount of administrators who earn more than the First Minister of Scotland, they stay very silent. Even at the last election, we found out that several officials in Labour run Glasgow City Council were earning £460,000 per annum (I will give that a moment to sink in) and yet the front line are expected to endure the savings?

Jim McGregor
Glasgow

We ought to look again at our policies on global warming

I AM not convinced that global warming is solely man-made, and while we do consume too much energy, plastics and food we don’t spend enough on defending ourselves from the impact of global warming. It’s as if getting your house flooded is your punishment for burning too much fossil fuels.

In the next five years the UK will give £5.8 billion to the International Climate Fund but will only spend £2.3bn on domestic flood prevention. Britain’s share of global carbon emissions is 1.5 per cent and China and the US produce 40 per cent between them. The amounts should be reversed.

Policies which enable SSE to claim £600,000 in a month for not producing wind energy are putting Scotland at a competitive disadvantage and create the conditions for the recent steel mill closures. We should be investing in shale, nuclear and hydro electric and not on wind turbines, legislating for less packaging and more energy saving, and spending more of the £5.8bn on defending the country against the weather. And well done to the UK Government for cancelling the uneconomic Carbon Capture white elephant.

Allan Sutherland
Stonehaven

GORDON MacIntyre-Kemp is his usual lucid self in emphasising the problem of uncontrolled bank lending in our economy (The National, December 18) and the prospect he paints of the next economic collapse is truly chilling.

On one point however I would question his analysis.

Gordon refers to governments “all over the world” having to bail out their banks after the last banking crisis. But so far as I know there were no banks needing bailed out in Australia or New Zealand, or in China, Japan, India, Indonesia, or anywhere in South and Central America, or in Africa or indeed in Canada, despite of that country’s very close economic ties with the United States.

I think it is a mistake to suggest, as Brown and Blair do, that the UK economy was a well run system caught up in a global banking collapse. It was in fact, as your Gordon suggests, the victim of the other Gordon’s economic incompetence.

Peter Craigie
Edinburgh

YOUR recent article and letters concerning Calvinism and Covenanters has been both educational and enjoyable. Thank you for giving this, and other Scottish History topics space in your excellent newspaper.

I read Elspeth King’s letter with interest, as I did the reply from Sandy Thomson. As he correctly says the Solemn League and Covenant was a treaty but it was also a religious covenant, replacing the National Covenant and forming a Covenanting army.

This is the covenant James Graham, Marquis of Montrose refused to sign and which resulted in civil war in Scotland.

While there is no definitive proof either way I would argue that the Solemn League and Covenant gave rise to the Covenanting force (and their bloody excesses) and coined the phrase Covenanters.

James Graham was the first signatory to the National Covenant which called for freedom to worship but he was never a Covenanter.

Ann Ballinger
Cumbernauld

I WAS very distressed to read the report, Call for probe into ‘massacre’ (The National, December17) relating to an alleged massacre of Shi’ite Muslims in Zaria, northern Nigeria.

In the early 1970s, I had the privilege of being seconded from Glasgow College of Building to Amadu Bello University, Zaria to assist with the development of the first honours degree course in Quantity Surveying in Black Africa.

In December 1974, the first students graduated from the course to become the first indigenously educated quantity surveyors, one of whom was a woman.

To me, Zaria was an exciting place and at no time did I ever experience any form of discrimination. Teaching at Amadu Bello University was an intellectually stimulating experience and over 40 years later I still have contact with some of my former students.

Thomas L Inglis
Fintry

THOUGH I support Flag Up (Building on our Jamaican ties) it is a pity that Jamaica has broken ranks from its Caricom neighbours all of whom share Scotland’s historical influence and need development support.

As a former long-time resident of Jamaica, I understand well that the Scottish-Jamaica narrative is long and complex in detail however the Morant Bay Rebellion was 1865 not 1895 and Haiti is not an island.

I have advocated (in several letters to your sister paper The Herald) that Scottish universities should offer scholarships to Caribbean graduates and that the Greenock sugar warehouses should become Scotland’s Atlantic Heritage Museum including an enslavement section.

It is a paradox however that Scotland’s early capitalism was founded on slave-grown sugar and tobacco both of which have contributed to our dismal health heritage.

As for important Scot-Jamaicans virtually ALL post-colonial PMs have strong Scottish roots. Bustamante PM No 1 (born Clarke) had a Scottish grandfather as did PM No 2 Donald Sangster as did PM No 3 Hugh Shearer. Then PM 4 Michael Manley shared the Clarke link as Bustamante was his uncle and then PM 5 Edward Seaga had a mother with a Scottish father. (He wrote that it was his Scottish grandfather who had imbued him with his anti-colonial feeling.)

It is remarkable that Jamaica (with an intense sense of cultural nationalism) has at least nineteen Masonic Lodges under the supervision of the Grand Lodge of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Jamaica unquestionably is an Afro-Celtic society however it shares this heritage with other post-colonial Caribbean states and should not seek to negotiate development policy unilaterally.

Thom Cross
Carluke

Westminster replicating the cruelty of Irish famine ‘genocide'

There are shameful similarities between the brutal actions of the Westminster Government in 1840s Ireland during the famine that saw one million people starve to death on the doorstep of the then wealthiest nation on earth and the present day Government under David Cameron. The Irish were unbelievably blamed for causing the famine and “hell mend them” was the response from London.

As those poor people died en masse the Crown stood by and contributedto one of the biggest famine genocides in history while the surrounding fields were blooming with corn and barley awaiting export to England. Today in Westminster in the fifth richest country on earth the unemployed, the disabled and the terminally ill people on benefits are being treated similar to those in 19th century Ireland.

They are being stigmatised as scroungers and blamed for causing their own problems by Cameron, Osborne, and Duncan Smith which is a bit rich when you consider that Cameron was born into a rich family who accumulated their wealth when they were compensated for their slaves when the slave trade was abolished? And Osborne whose family had nice little earners with offshore accounts, and Duncan Smith, a nobody who married into wealth? How any of these people can attend church on Christmas Day when they know the suffering they are inflicting on others?

Louise McArdle
Lanarkshire

SCOTTISH Finance Secretary John Swinney’s budget was indeed a Budget for hard-working families and a budget opposing the austerity cuts of Westminster. Something the Labour Party were unable to recognise. For hard-working families, the decision not to increase the basic rate of income tax was very welcome, and for everyone the massive input to the NHS budget is surely welcomed.

But there was some aspects of this budget that were unfortunate spending and should not have been necessary, that of the spend to mitigate the UK Government’s bedroom tax, along with the need for an additional £38 million to the Welfare Fund to mitigate the effects of George Osborne’s welfare cuts. As the Scottish Government promotes polices of social justice for all, mitigating austerity and welfare cuts becomes a necessary spend for John Swinney and the Scottish Government.

Catriona C Clark
Falkirk

The editorial (The National, December 17) states that “Swinney had little room for choices in his draft Budget”.

That may be not only true but obvious if he chooses to stick to “conventional taxes”. He would have much more choice if he were to consider bringing in a land tax. It is simple, effective, fair and efficient. Each person pays a charge for the piece of land they own.

Flat dwellers would pay very little, house dwellers a wee bit more, while those owning many acres would pay even more. Land is a gift of nature.

That, should be acknowledged and the revenue raised from the use of it put towards paying for public services. This would enable Mr Swinney to vary the basic rate of income tax downwards and help those suffering from low wages.

Catherine Gilchrist
Bowmore, Islay

I enjoyed reading The National in its original form. I don’t like the new format and I may stop buying it.

On a different matter, although I have voted for independence and the SNP for that reason, I am very disappointed in the course the SNP are taking e.g the ferries, the railway network and now hitting councils. My job is now seriously at risk and really it’s unnecessary.

Paul McGhee
Glasgow

He lives his life of milk and honey, with an ego well unfurled; has a mindset that his mega money, shall let him rule the world.

Such nonsense and such arrogance, no reason or no rhyme; not everyone is going to dance, like fools in his pantomime.

Scotia showed him what we’re made of, erased his smiles of glee; no forelock tug nor cap we’ll doff, to a clown of tyranny.

If we never saw his face again, should we never hear his voice; a drop of grape or the grain, we would take while we rejoice.

Donald open up your selfish eyes, learn a word that’s said “Gazumped”; to you defeat is a huge surprise, yet we smile “cause you’re Trumped”.

George Robertson
Edinburgh

The Long Letter

Media’s lionisation of McIlvanney is hardly his doing

WELL that must be a record, attacking a man and his reputation two days after his funeral (Colin Stuart, Fife, Letters, December 18).

What Mr Stuart may have missed was that the lionising of Willie McIlvanney by the Scottish media (mainly) since his death was not done by McIlvanney himself, he was blameless in the exercise.

It is a spectacle that emerges on the death of every public figure — and with unknowns like Mr Stuart too, who will no doubt be lionised by family and friends when his time comes and a picture will emerge of a man without warts, as happened with McIlvanney, not an image that fitted him as a human being, nor one he ever claimed for himself.

I would disagree, as he would have himself, with the picture painted of him since his death, because he was more than the one-dimensional character depicted by many, but he could hardly be blamed for what other wrote about him after his death.

Neither did he ever claim to be finest writer of the last or this century, the man just wrote and let others judge the quality.

More to the point, far from being lionised, he was given considerably less recognition than he deserved throughout his life, for reasons that remain unclear.

He did not court the literati and the literati like to be courted, indeed when he was given a prize for The Kiln he remarked that being praised by the literati was like being patted on the back with a stiletto. What he had was the appreciation and admiration of his writing by the people who buy and read books, something the literati dislikes, that was the furrow he ploughed alone and he was happy with it.

And sad to see the old parochial nonsense emerging with questions on how much someone born in Kilmarnock knew and should write about Glasgow, that kind of thinking is an embarrassment, and a very Scottish one, sadly. Using this test would disqualify many of the finest writers of this or any other century.

For instance, James Joyce lived most of his life abroad, are we really saying he should not have written Dubliners or Finnegan’s Wake or that his work was invalid? I was born in Glasgow and write about it, but McIlvanney certainly spent many more years there than I did, so which one of us would Mr Stuart like to disqualify from writing about the city — both perhaps?

And why should he be compared with any other writer? That George Mackay Brown was an excellent and talented writer, and Neil Gunn, Sorley MacLean and a great many others, none of this is in doubt, but it seems totally irrelevant to raise their spectres in order to denigrate McIlvanney.

Mr Stuart also misses an important aspect of the McIlvanney legacy, that he inspired so many others to write without even trying. There are many, many others from backgrounds similar to his, considered factory fodder by the education system, who would not have dared write had it not been for the example he set.

If Mr Stuart doesn’t like McIlvanney’s writing, I suspect it says more about Mr Stuart than it does about McIlvanney, but it is his right to say so and one McIlvanney would have defended. However, that is hardly a valid reason to pen such a dismal critique of a man he clearly never knew.

Meg Henderson
Address Supplied