Voters want answers to the key questions about independence

People have learned that Brexit has not turned out as promised, that the Westminster government did not plan properly and that they were not told the truth.

Apply that to Scottish independence! People do not want to go out of the frying pan and into the fire. They will need detailed plans of what will happen in all the areas. They will need to be told the downsides as well as the upsides and they will need to be confident that they understand all of the issues.

Brexit has made independence harder because Boris Johnson has made such a hash of it and people can see, daily, what is happening. This was not the plan but it is the outcome.

Forget Brexit itself and concentrate on explaining to people exactly what will happen in the areas Brexit has thrown up to explain what an independent Scotland will do!

Also start to address all of the areas that the Unionists keep hammering at – the border, currency, EU membership and if that involves the Euro and Schengen.The longer they remain unaddressed the more people will think either there is no plan, no thinking or that there is something to hide!

Lewis Saville

Perth

DAVID Pratt is a journalist whose work I respect; he’s often spot on. Alas, a wee bit less so on Thursday (What now for the West’s failing ‘war on terror’?, August 12).

The origins of Afghanistan’s current problems lie firmly with the disgraceful behaviour of the USA during the Cold War of the 1970s and 1980s. This effectively created the beginnings of Afghanistan’s problems today. By arming mujihadeen (jihadist) groups who opposed the country’s then government; which was probably the first fairly democratic one the country had ever seen.

Why? Because during the Cold War, that government was supported by the USSR. And the USSR (Russia’s socialist predecessor) was of course EVIL. Therefore, in US logic, any government it supported must also be EVIL. Even though it was democratically elected, or at least as democratically as any that country had or has yet seen. And it educated girls, for maybe the first time in Afghan history.

So what did the USA do? It ARMED the ‘mujihadeen’, who eventually toppled the government. Which was the intention of the USA. It was replaced by a succession of unstable regimes which, inter alia, ceased educating girls. And did a few other things your readers might not like so much. But they were OK; they were anti-communist.

Google “mujihadeen” if you don’t believe me. The US government may lie. History does not.

Dougie Harrison

Milngavie

WHEN governments repeat the failed policies of the past, I think there have to be reasons. Alcohol prohibition in the USA did not eliminate drink, it simply created very profitable and violent criminal gangs, and drove alcohol underground. So why did America and the UK later embark on the futile ‘war against drugs’?

Anyone who has witnessed court cases knows that most of the offences have a connection with drugs, be it in dealing or possession, theft and shoplifting, assault or abuse of partners and neglect of children, even murder. Banning drug use has turned many decent citizens to a life of petty crime and horrible death.

Other countries have adopted policies which have and are reducing drug consumption, and treating the problem as a health issue not a criminal one. So why does the UK government persist with the utterly failed policy of prohibition? I have a few theories which you may think a bit far-fetched. One, drug users are an easy group to vilify and the horrifying death figures are a handy rod to beat the Scottish government with, even though drugs policy is reserved to Westminster.

Two. All governments, but especially Conservative ones, don’t give a damn about people dying from drug use. After all, they reduce welfare costs and eliminate ‘wasters’ from society. A cynical view I know, but we’ve all witnessed the Tories’ callous disregard for poorer citizens.

Three, America will not allow the decriminalisation of drug taking, whether at home or abroad. Now, before you say Rick has lost the plot, listen to this. Many years ago the Australian government were planning to legalise cannabis. At the time the USA had a manufacturing plant in Oz which they planned to double in size with consequent job increases. The US said if legalisation went ahead there would be no investment; end of progress. Economic blackmail is less bloody than warfare and more persuasive: the US has a lot of investments in the UK ... just saying.

So what to do? When a law is bad, and proven to be bad over a long period of time, it needs to be changed. Westminster is not going to do that any time soon, but as Boris Johnson’s government has a casual regard for laws, I believe Holyrood should adopt the same attitude to this law. I think the Scottish government should set up, without fanfare, safe drug consumption rooms wherever they are necessary. I believe a nod to the mostly on-side Police Scotland to turn a blind eye would be morally indefensible to challenge. The Police could then devote more time to the real criminals, and the reduction in the tragic loss of life would demonstrate the common-sense and compassion of our SNP government to the world.

Richard Walthew

Duns

READING your article “Scotland to host world’s biggest UBI conference’ (Aug 10) had me thinking, perhaps an invite is called for! An invite to the PM Boris Johnson, giving him the opportunity to hear the case for the introduction of a Universal Basic Income. But then I had further thoughts, would the PM know what a UBI was, would he ever find himself dependant on one?

This conference is a great opportunity for Scotland and those attending, including the United Nations to promote and get a UBI introduced in Scotland. As reported in your article, the Scottish Government has already initiated studies by four local authorities and the First Minister herself has endorsed a UBI for Scotland. Scotland must recover from the pandemic and take control and to that end the Scottish Government has appointed a Covid Recovery Secretary in John Swinney MSP.

Recovery gives us an opportunity for a whole new start and we must install confidence in our citizens, citizens who have endured much uncertainty and need reassurance, something a UBI can do. Only last month we heard of the harrowing drug deaths in Scotland and in an effort to address this crisis the Scottish Government has appointed a Drugs Minister in Angela Constance MSP. Drugs and insecurity of income are inextricably linked and we must tackle this crisis head-on.

Your article had MP Ronnie Cowan say, now is the time for the introducing of a UBI, he is right. As a country in recovery from Covid, we must reach out and put in place the support needed and a UBI can be a huge part of this. But for Scotland going forward in recovery a UBI and Drugs are issues where the Westminster Government are holding Scotland back, because ultimately, Westminster has control of any future for a UBI and Drugs Policy. No consent from Westminster, Scotland cannot roll-out a UBI, no consent from Westminster for the establishment of safe consumption rooms for drug users in Scotland. Yet it has been reported that safe consumption rooms are established and ready to open, yet sit unused amidst the harrowing drugs crisis.

Why can’t we get on with it, why can’t we take control for the good of our citizens, let’s demonstrate our determination to put Scotland’s citizen’s first. But back to my initial thinking on sending the PM an invite, maybe if we did demonstrate our determination it would shock him into attending, but maybe I’m having second thoughts and should save myself the price of the postage stamp !

Catriona C Clark

Falkirk

THE first part of Hamish MacPherson’s excellent “Did Burns inspire Scott’s literary career?” states he’ll have about 5000 words to tell his story “Honestly, nearer 500,000 would be needed to tell it all.” No doubt he has read Paul Scott’s biographies. on Wattie’s biographies on this complicated and dual personality. Scott worked himself to death in order to pay for his Clan lands in the form of his Abbotsford estates. He not only wrote everlasting and moving Border Ballads he wrote some excellent histories, most notable in his lighthouse tour of Scotland.

He was a high Tory and a romantic Jacobite with an undoubted love of his native heath. “Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, ‘This is my own, my native land!’ How many of today’s low Tories could ascribe to that noble sentiment? No doubt Hamish has read Paul Scott’s works on his duality. He will be more familiar with Robert Louis Stevenson’s take on the Scots’ duality, such as the Jekyll and Hyde statue of many Scots attempts to Anglify themselves. It took a dashing Ozzie, Errol Flynn, to play the part of the gay, in the original split meaning of the word, Jacobite, and an English actor, Bill Travers, his dour Presbyterian brother, left to manage the family’ Durisdeer estate, in the celluloid version of RSL’s Master of Ballantrae to portray this Scottish dualism.

After the so-called “Union” of 1707, aspiring Scots sent to London for an elocution tutor to teach them to tork like wot they do. They sent him an Irishman named Sheridan. It is said that his native Dublin, as well as Inverness, had the best English going, due to them both being English garrison toons. This was the origin of the pan loaf Scots of Morningside and Madam Coocaddens yearning to be Madam Kelvingside.

I wonder if Hamish has read the late DR James D Young, Labour historian and Stirling University lecturer who researched Scott as a Magistrate and Dundas’s spy paymaster to informers in the Radical Insurrection of 1820. Though he did build the Radical Road to employ the pauperised revolting weavers. Young also pointed out that it was Scott that dug out, after Burns’s death that he had sent twa confiscated canons to the French Revolution. Dundas may not have been a slaver, but he was still a tyrant running Scotland as an armed camp for his English masters, keeping working-class Scots in abject misery and slavery. If for no other reason, his statue still deserves to be toppled in the same manner as the staged toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in occupied Iraq.

Burns himself was a mixture of Jacobitism and Republicanism and took the hated revenuer’s joab to survive and carry on with his poetic licence. His grandfaither, Burness, was oot in the ‘15 Jacobite Rebellion. He was an employee of the martial and patriotic Keith faimily and groundkeeper in Dunotter Castle. His sons moved to Edinburgh and split to Ayrshire where Burns was born. MacDiarmid himself said he was a Republican when sober and Jacobite when he was drunk.

I leave Hamish in peace noo, to get on with his work. I am sure he won’t disappoint.

Donald Anderson

Glasgow

SO let’s get this straight, just before enough of the populous of the USA woke up to smell the coffee to oust Trump last November, just prior to that he was “leader of the free world” (an excruciating term!). Johnson was the prime minister of the UK, Putin the president of Russia, Xi Jinping the president of the Peoples Republic of China, Orban the prime minister of Hungary, Bolsonaro the president of Brazil, Modi the prime minister of India, Lukashenko president of Belarus and Duterte president of the Philippines.

I could go on and on with many more wholly unsuitable leaders, for various reasons, of countries of the world but I’m sure you get my drift. Given this, does anyone really consider, COP 26 or no COP 26, we have leadership throughout the world to do what it takes to stop us all being surrounded by flames or neck deep in water? I think not!

Sorry to ruin your weekend!

Ivor Telfer

Dalgety Bay, Fife