BBC interviewer was left puzzled by failure to endorse colonial viewpoint

It was fascinating to hear Imran Khan spell out his views courteously about the future of Pakistan’s relationship with Afghanistan despite John Simpson’s attempts to put words in his mouth. I say he dealt with the interview courteously because he had to repeat himself several times to express his views despite John Simpson’s obvious hostility.

When Imran Khan said several times that the most important thing for the people of Afghanistan was peace and stability, Simpson clearly wanted Imran Khan and the other key neighbours – Iran, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to condemn the Taliban. At the end, Imran Khan said that the Afghans, including Afghani women, were very strong people and didn’t take kindly to outsiders telling them what to do!

John Simpson’s conduct of the interview perfectly encapsulated the old colonial viewpoint of “we know best”, despite Britain’s blundering around in Afghanistan since the 19th century. Anyone who knows a little of imperial history in the region, could tell you that the Afghan people have seen all invaders off, with their fierce independence and expert knowledge of the magnificent and rugged terrain of Afghanistan.

Watching the John Simpson and Imran Khan discussion reminded me of the BBC’s many attempt’s to analyse the independence campaign in Scotland. It showed the same intransigence about accepting a different point of view and the same negativity about listening to points of view that it doesn’t agree with! A reminder also for myself is that those who ignore the lessons of history are liable to go on and repeat them.

Maggie Chetty

Glasgow

NEWS of BBC boss Tim Davie’s (above) £75,000 pay rise should give us all another reason to reconsider paying the BBC licence fee.

People over the age of 75 lost the right to free TV licences last year, with only those who receive pension credit not having to pay the annual £159 bill. In Scotland, we subsidise the BBC to the tune of more than £200 million a year but we only get 51% back from the hard-earned cash Scottish licence holders pay in.

If only 6500 current BBC licence payers could be persuaded to divert their £159 a year from the BBC to an independence-related fund, this would raise more than £1,000,000 a year. 6500 people is less than 10% of the SNP’s membership. It is just over the number of people claimed to have attended the latest AUOB march.

Of course this raises the interesting question – who could we pay instead of the BBC? The fund would really need to ring-fenced in the true sense of the word, not woven into the accounts of some corporate body. Believe in Scotland currently seem to be leading the charge, perhaps they should be the main beneficiaries.

Surely it is not beyond the wit of the combined independence movement to come up with a solution to this problem. Maybe we just need to reform the Yes campaign with representatives from all the interested organisations. With less than two years to the indyref2 date currently favoured by the First Minister time is not on our side.

John Baird

Largs

BLAIR clone “Sir” Keir Starmer is the most unimaginative, unimpressive hack leader of the Labour Party in some time. His turgid cliche-ridden frankly boring conference speech was very much in that vein. It was humdrum claptrap lecturing people that nothing will change. Trying to carve himself out as some sort of slightly less toxic English nationalist than Boris Johnson. There were peans to the war criminal Blair. So scared is Starmer he won’t bring himself to admit that Brexit has been an unmitigated unprecedented disaster.

That he can’t even overtake Boris Johnson the most criminally incompetent buffoon in UK history as Prime Minister in the opinion polls show just what people think of the prosaic tedious Starmer. Starmer is taking advice from the twice resigned in disgrace Peter Mandelson.

The only discernible policy Starmer has is that he is a committed and unrepentant Unionist. He has not the slightest intention of respecting the will of the Scottish people to leave the Union. His advisers have been spinning that Starmer can win 25 seats at the next election in Scotland. To that end a ruse has to be thought up. Gordon Brown is being dragged out of his cold storage crypt to propose super duper all singing all dancing “federalism “. In essence Brown will repeat the same lies he has been telling since 2014 that were not and will never be delivered. This is the Labour equivalent of the Nigerian email scam.

Brown, Blair and Mandelson are the people that “Sir” Keir thinks will win him power. The fact that these three has-beens are all the Labour Party have to offer shows their intellectual bankruptcy. The union has nothing to offer. If Scotland remains it will be a choice between being governed by the clown Boris Johnson or the hack corporatist Starmer.

Alan Hinnrichs

Dundee

I WAS horrified on Sunday watching Keir Starmer on the Andrew Marr show – car crash interview does not adequately describe it.

When he was asked about the trans issues and Marr quoted the Labour MP saying “only women have a cervix” his response was that this was “something that should not be said”.

What has happened to us we have not only gone down the rabbit hole we have been nuclear fused, brains fried and biology denied – the flat earth society has nothing on the current biology deniers.

No-one wants to deny anyone else their rights, but denying biology and women’s rights to safe spaces is not the way to do it. We seem to have a very, very small group of people who have persuaded people in power of their cause and so they have been blinded to reality and the facts of life. Men wanting to be women at the expense of women is just the new misogyny of our time.

It worries me that the SNP have teamed up with the Greens because the environment and climate change are no longer their prime objective, indeed: Gender Realignment Eclipses Environment Now is the best description of the Greens (I did not think this up but I think it is brilliant) and I have to wonder if the environment was just a vehicle used to push gender reforms/madness.

Winifred McCartney

Paisley

ON Wednesday evening at around 5.20pm, radio presenter Mr John Beattie – a rugby hero of mine – dropped the ball just short of the score line.

He was dutifully reading out texts received from his listeners. He is supported by a production team who are supposed to screen out the dross.

They failed big time on Wednesday evening. Then Mr Beattie repeated a similar comment on Thursday around 5.30pm, whereupon a wee women took him to task. Thank goodness.

On Wednesday he read a text from Tommy from Dundee. Tommy asks why the folks losing their £20 benefit uplift this or next week are so shirty about it. Could they not simply give up their mobile phone contract?

On Thursday around the same time Mr Beattie resurrected the theme, adding in couldn’t they just stop smoking.

The wee wifey nailed him, explaining that without her mobile she couldn’t commune with the benefits system. Surely he knows that everyone else seems to know phones are needed to access to the internet and the mobile phone is the cheapest method of getting on to the web.

Why doesn’t Mr Beattie remonstrate with Virgin Money, who are shutting up shop in some of the remote locations, forcing account holders to use internet access to continue business with them?

Alistair Ballantyne

Birkhill, Angus

IT’S bad enough when my democratic rights are ignored, and I regularly end up with a government I don’t vote for. But it’s been getting worse over the last few years and months, much worse.

Bye Bye EU, a Bill of Right that’s more like a swag bag, a new austerity programme hiding behind NI increases, a cut to welfare, the fuel cap being increased and fuel prices almost certain to go north. Are you worried yet about the economics of it all? Wait a bit, it gets ever worse.

Not content with denying me democracy, these Tory overlords have taken cronyism to new levels, like scum floating to the surface. (Scum: a layer of dirt or froth on the surface of a liquid). I refer to the news (October 1, Tory donor set to enter HoL) that Malcolm Offord, with a penchant for donating directly to Michael Gove, a failed MSP candidate, will be ennobled thus affording him the opportunity to lord it over us thrice.

Once from the HoL, secondly by becoming a Minister in Johnson’s government (neither opportunity being afforded via public acclaim and the ballot box) and lastly through the direct route now so favoured by so many in power: the politics of corruption.

Now before someone shouts: politics of envy, no, I don’t envy the ermine wearing ones in the least. I don’t envy people who succeed in their professions through diligence and hard work. But chumocracy before democracy?

This weekend, we are minded that the social and structural landscape of the UK is so very dark. We’ve got to the stage that the army will start driving civilian lorries to do something undefined since the acknowledgment of addressing a ‘shortage’ and ‘crisis’ seems to be in short supply in both UK Government and mainstream media. UK use of the army is set as an example of good government taking appropriate actions. Scotland calls out the army and we’re a failed state. That’s just another example of a lie repeated often enough to become an alternative truth, and in the process it reenforces : Scotland, know your place, bottom of the pile, back in the box, take the scraps thrown your way.

Security and safety for women and young girls are today’s headlines, rightly so, wrenched from shared anger, fear and frustration. Those headlines are back again, but for how long? Next week, next month? Trust in those in power, meant to govern, to protect, is rightly questioned, challenged, and now most definitely in short supply, fuelling a crisis. But what will change as women and young girls continue to be instructed to moderate our clothes, our actions, our language, our choice of where we go, and when. We are told how to respond to actions, words, deeds that should never occur in the first place. We change?

And the ever present terror, misogyny continues, unchanged, so the next and next generations of women and young girls will learn to live with fear in their daily lives. I fear the future. I fear there won’t be a mind change in Scotland, that moves us to legally regain our independence, as we move to self governing, providing the relevant focus for the future, not one manipulated through numbers that emanate from outside Scotland.

Can Scotland find the courage that moulded a young girl, a teenager and her family who learnt that “Our courage was stronger than our fear. And that what really changed our lives ……was fear”, a remark from Malala Yousafzai, post the failed murder attempt on her, ultimately forcing her family to flee their homeland.

Selma Rahman

Edinburgh