I WAS quite fascinated to see the front page on the minimum wage (More than 100,000 Scots are being paid below the minimum wage... The National, December 22).

At the time I was in the canteen of an employer that I am doing temporary work for via an agency over the “festive” period.

This agency will hopefully be paying me £7.00 per hour – above the UK minimum wage but well short of the Scottish Government’s living wage.

But how does £7.00 per hour translate in real terms? My shift is eight hours but 1.5 are deducted for breaks and there is nowhere within distance to go without transport. They rule there is a 40 minute break with an extra five minutes per hour. Aye, what can you do in five minutes?

And then there’s transport to get there. I’m only 15km away but that is two buses at a cost of £8.10. Once these costs are taken into account, the take-home is around £4.67per hour.

This is an aspect of low pay that I say needs close examination. I would like to give The National full details but one is afraid as it could mean pay being stopped through having the audacity to question.

Name and address supplied

TREASURY figures just released from Westminster have revealed a bit of seasonal spending by the Chancellor George Osborne.

Public borrowing for the month of November (2015) was a whopping £14.2bn, a pre-seasonal increase spend of £1.3 billion on the same month of last year.

This massive spend by Osborne clearly indicates he is in the spirit of the season of goodwill, but it also indicates that he is not on target to achieve even his own predications for the economy this Christmas.

Where exactly is this increased spending going? Who are the seasonal benefactors? With Osborne’s consistency in cutting the welfare spend, the needy and vulnerable do not feature in his goodwill spend this Christmas.

So in this festive season, who is winning from the Chancellor’s Christmas spend?

Catriona C Clark
Banknock, Falkirk

THANK you for your coverage of Ian Bell’s funeral yesterday (Tributes of love and respect for colleague and friend Ian Bell, The National, December 23).

My husband and I were part of the small group who watched his hearse go past the Parliament.

We really felt we had to do something to show his family how sad we all are at his loss and that we are with them in their grief.

I took my stepson’s dog Mack along to show a wee bit of solidarity with Ian’s dog Echo. In his piece in the Sunday Herald, Sean, Ian’s son, said how lost he was.

I think we’ll all be lost for a long time without Ian.

Ruth McCabe
Winchburgh

FOLLOWING the announcement that the Forth Road Bridge was to reopen, Labour’s Jackie Baillie said: “There are serious questions about how the bridge ended up in disrepair in the first place.”

However, I wonder if she was in the chamber of Holyrood on November 17, 2005, when Tricia Marwick MSP posed the following question to First Minister Jack McConnell: “Does the First Minister recognise or even acknowledge the strategic importance of the Forth Road Bridge for the whole of Scotland? Does he understand that, at the very least, the bridge is facing frequent closure for repair, that heavy goods vehicles are likely to be banned from it from 2013 and that the Executive needs to have a plan B in place?

“Will he therefore give an undertaking that the work on the case for a new Forth crossing will begin now?”

McConnell declined to commit to examining the case for a new bridge, describing the suggestion as “particularly stupid” and “particularly daft”. He preferred to await the analysis of the structural problems expected from Feta in 2006.

History now tells us that the Labour/LibDem administration refused to commit to the building of a replacement crossing. That decision was taken by the SNP administration after coming to power in 2007. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but a little less hypocrisy from the opposition in Holyrood would be appreciated.

Douglas Turner
Edinburgh

ALL of a sudden “precautionary measures” are a good idea for the Forth Road Bridge. It was closed for 18 days, 8 of which were for the actual repair, the remainder for planning, preparation and inspection.

If this repair had been planned the preparatory work could have been done while the bridge was open and potentially the actual repair could have been done at weekends or at night.

Transport Minister Derek Mackay has confirmed this because now – while the bridge is open – additional splints are being fitted to the other seven trusses. Presumably these “precautionary measures” could have been carried out at any time over the past five years – to all eight trusses – without having to close the bridge. This would have avoided the disruption and business losses and greatly reduced the actual cost of the work.

Any “triumph out of adversity” self-congratulation for doing the job in half the time should be tempered by this. The bridge will not be open for heavy vehicles, and perhaps never will.

Age is no excuse either. The Golden Gate Bridge is half as old again as the Forth bridge (78 years old, the Forth bridge is 51 years old) and carries 60 per cent more traffic.

The Golden Gate has never been closed for more than two days, even during earthquakes.

Allan Sutherland
Stonehaven

Staying positive after childhood abuse

I READ the article (Scots expat to run from Germany to Glasgow in aid of children’s charity, The National, December 15) about the charity run planned by John McGurk. It is an incredible amount of work to help Children 1st by a survivor of the worst abuse imaginable and by those who were meant to be caring for him.

I heard the story first-hand, from my late mother, on the endemic child abuse that happened in Sisters of Nazareth children’s homes when she was there long-term as a child. A cousin alluded to the family story, and I asked my mother about it – harrowing and by the people meant to be “caring”.

My mother said she tried not to let the abuse scar her, and lived a positive life. With physical abuse, psychological abuse is its ugly cohort. The current Pope Francis has taken steps to try to apologise to victims of clerical abuse. There must be many still silent about abuse of the past.

Help, action and always being sensitive and mindful of victims should be a priority.

Finally, thank you to all the great voices fighting for Scotland. A good festive season to all, and a further enlightened equitable Scotland in 2016.

Name and address supplied




Letters to The National, December 24, Part 2: After the Elgin gas blowout, we're back to the pre-Piper Alpha days