AS usual, the New Year’s Honours list shows a new tranche of people eligible to vote in the House of Lords.

The Conservative Party have long been saying that we must cut the cost of administration and reduce the number of MPs in the Commons, but at the same time, under successive Tory governments, the number of lords has risen. During his tenure David Cameron created 117 new peers. and the total eligible to vote rose to 826.

Despite attempts in the early part of the decade to reduce this number, the House remains stubbornly unchanged.

The Lords is the probably the largest legislative chamber in the world, only rivalled by the National Peoples’ Congress in China!

It is the only revising chamber larger than the parliament responsible for presenting it with legislation to revise. It is not cheap to run.

Its members are entitled to an attendance fee of £300 per day and they get that fee simply by registering their presence. We should question the need for a second chamber at all.

In Scotland, any bills passed by the parliament will only be reviewed by law officers to see that the parliament has the powers to pass that law. Amendments and revisions are all dealt with in the main chamber.

So perhaps we should end the political patronage in the honours system by abolishing the Lords completely.

If not we can make it irrelevant by becoming independent.

Pete Rowberry
Duns

IN promoting gentle persuasion and refusing to acknowledge the very real need for a Plan B, doesn’t Pat Lee miss the salient point of self-determination, and that is the reasons why it is necessary (The Yes movement must put aside differences to secure independence, December 27)?

It’s laudable to pursue a positive campaign of gentle persuasion, but for that to succeed you need to wean a politically disinterested populace away from the view that if there is no urgency, then why bother?

And you also need a dominant power able and willing to set aside its own agenda and be persuadable, which in our case we’ve been told won’t happen; so with no imperative why should it do anything against its own interest?

Like it or not, independence can only be won by injecting some urgency, with people persuaded, and as long as they come to believe, particularly among the grass roots, that it is infinitely preferable to the status quo.

I’ve just been told in a casual conversation that an independent Scotland would be bankrupt. No rational argument, just a regurgitation of the mantra of the vested-interest mainstream media.

The proposal is that Scotland, which is resource-rich and with a plethora of talent and ingenuity, somehow alone could not administer its own affairs while there would be 116 out of 234 countries smaller than us in population, who can. How ludicrous is this?

Those doubters denigrating the ability of Scots to manage our own affairs insult me. Don’t we need to understand why the status quo fails us? Don’t we need a concise list of the problems created by our being members of the UK Union, and how independence resolves them?

Don’t we need to see the accounts of the nation now, and a projected comparison with what it would be with independence over the short and medium term? Don’t we need to be reassured that pensions and benefits are affordable and that our institutions like the NHS are secure? Don’t we need to call Westminster’s bluff – that if it can maintain trade with its biggest trading partner, the EU, after Brexit, then there’s no logical reason why Scotland can’t maintain trade with rUK after independence? Don’t all the arguments being made by Brexiteers apply equally to independence?

History records that independence in the overwhelming number of cases occurs when the populace demands it; it then becomes the imperative, and has rarely been won lightly.

To achieve it we need to demonstrate how the Union is failing us and how independence solves the problems.

Without understanding the problems, why would Scots recognise the need for the solution that independence is?

Jim Taylor
Edinburgh

SCOTLAND looking ahead to 2020 presents quite a daunting prospect and we should all be preparing as best as we can, but how do we prepare for the unknown?

The unknown is Brexit and the consequences that may follow ie shortages in food, medicines, the availability of labour and future EU tariffs, are of major importance to our wellbeing and our economy.

With 2020 approaching, we are often told never to look back, always look forward, and learn from previous mistakes!

So as we look ahead to 2020, when Scotland will be taken out of the EU against her democratic wishes, the withdrawal negotiations and transition period getting under way with urgency, can we be assured the Westminster Conservative Government has learned from past mistakes and will be reserving a place for Scotland at future negotiations, in the interest of democracy?

Catriona C Clark
Falkirk

ISN’T it hypocritical that the opposition parties (by that I mean non-SNP) criticise Nicola Sturgeon for her unfettered glee at Jo Swinson’s defeat?

Did anyone object to the 2017 response from the Tory Party when Alex Salmond and Angus Robertson (two massive SNP members) lost their seats? Aye, one rule for them and another for us – some things never change.

But for the 45% of us who voted SNP, Nicola’s reaction was a dose of much-needed hilarity in what was a very bleak and gloomy election.

Rosemarie Hogg
Cromarty