Distasteful and vulgar lottery is a symptom of a sick society

To put this jackpot amount into context, it would pay for 184,000 people who are losing the £20 Universal Credit uplift to be given a one off payment of £1000 each. That’s approximately the amount required to retain that weekly amount for almost a year. To put 184,000 people into context, the population of Aberdeen is 196,000, so if the jackpot winner wants to be totally selfless, they can hand nearly every person in Aberdeen a cheque for £1000. The mind just boggles at these statistics!

The high profile billionaires Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and others are pouring billions of pounds into space travel. William Shatner (Captain Kirk from Star Trek), was blasted into space in what must have been the most expensive fairground ride in history.

Clearly all the billions spent on private space travel could instead assist several of the main high profile charities throughout the world such as UNICEF, Save the Children, Christian Aid, and the Disasters Emergency Committee, etc. A hell of a lot of good could be done with that sort of money to help millions of suffering people globally.

READ MORE: Should £500,000 of our taxes really be used to fund a pub buy-out?

I know there will be many out there, although hopefully not too many that read this newspaper, that consider the contents of my letter amount to self righteous tosh. I can hear cries of “Communist, Marxist, Trotskyite”, etc. However, I don’t give a stuff about labels and being pigeon holed. Myself, and many others that are desperate to live in an independent Scotland, just want to live in a much fairer society than the monstrosity that is “Global Britain”.

The time for New Labour style tinkering with the system is over. The government of an independent Scotland must drastically do what has to be done to radically close the inequality gap. Done properly, it will “scare the horses” (ie the rich and powerful). However, I don’t want the first government of an independent Scotland to make the mistakes that Tony Blair made in 1997 when he came to power.

He crawled over broken glass to appease the “high heid yins” in England to get a reasonably positive response from the English right wing press. What was the eventual outcome? By the time the Tories returned to power in 2010 the inequality gap was worse!

Thomas Jefferson said, “The measure of society is how it treats the weakest members.” Quite!”

Ivor Telfer

Dalgety Bay

JAMES Withers, head of Scotland Food And Drink, interviewed last Tuesday morning for radio, stated clearly that Scotland needs immigration. He also took issue with Johnston’s conference speech that where he stated that immigration drove down labour rates, again not true, simply a “dog whistle” to his Conservative Party supporters.

As a devolved nation, we in Scotland do not have the control over who gets in, which has over time left us with the situation of an aging population. Looking back into the late 1960s post baby boom where family planning was even subject of TV sitcoms.

Possibly, the post-war inrush from “Windrush” Jamaica and the 1970s Uganda and settling and unsettling of England, causing the rise of the intolerance to immigrants, not helped by the racist television programmes like Till Death Do Us Part and On The Buses driving the anti-immigration movement.

Mr Withers stated that we in Scotland immediately need immigrants, with a five-year plan to move to a different delivery model, which could include increased use of automation and robotics. Whilst that is one possibly route, I prefer the route of humanity and being able to speak to a person. Coming from someone who spent nearly 37 years in automated cash dispenser systems, this may seem strange, but there is a minimum number of people required to ensure a country is stable and resilient.

Without control of its population, including immigration or migration a country will always be at risk of low term instability.

We need people to do stuff to keep our country active and buoyant. We need to take the steps to ensure this happens.

Alistair Ballantyne

Birkhill, Angus

THE Long Letter in last week’s Sunday National described boldly and correctly the political significance of language and accent. Unfortunately for Scotland this goes back before 1066, though the Normans were eventually, as Anthony Lodge says, the driving force. This is the sad story of our national languages, Scots and Gaelic which have been been under siege from English for all these centuries.

Gaelic was the nation-forming language and survived until the crippling blow of the post 1745 suppression. Scots came to the fore at the time of the War of Independence but equally was damaged by The Enlightenment after the unions with England.

The English of the Saxons which as the names attest were found in Tory voting places like Middlesex, Essex, Sussex and the historical Wessex were in the south. Their kin the Anglians lived in the midlands and north of England up to the Firth of Forth but were weakened and divided by Viking invasions and settlement.

In 1066 the Normans invaded and by force of arms conquered the Saxons and over the next few centuries their languages merged to form the flexible speech of Boris Johnson.

Some Saxons and many Norse, Britons and Anglians were forced into Scotland where they and their tongues formed Scots and Scotland. This became the language of resistance. It still should be.

Ramsay Macdonald and Tom Johnston recognisably were Scots. But that is not enough. If more Scots was used in public life what better way is there to announce that we are a separate country. What more forceful but peaceful way is there of being independent than speaking our own languages?

Then my first sentence would have been – “The Lang Pistil in The Sabbath National spak bauldlie an richtlie o the polietikwal poust an beirin o langage an souch.”

Iain WD Forde

Scotlandwell

RICHARD Allison has not been paying attention if he doesn’t know that Scotland’s Covid response has been much better than that in England or Wales (Letters, Oct 14). Scotland was unable to lockdown before the UK, or extend it when needed, as we did not have the necessary control of our borders or borrowing powers and an independent Scotland could have done so thus saving thousands of lives.

It seems only one delegate from Scotland actually contracted Covid as a result of attending the Nike Conference. Details were immediately reported to the UK and Northern Ireland governments in respect of their delegates and they too chose not go public and possibly identify the patients involved.

An investigation into the Nike Conference Covid outbreak was held and on March 20, 2020 the Chief Medical Officer reported that “the Incident Management Team were successful in curtailing spread and led to the eradication of the particular viral lineage with no evidence of any wider outbreak associated with it in Scotland since that time”.

The Scottish Government is the first in the UK to hold a public inquiry and no doubt the Nike conference outbreak will be considered together with much larger issues later this year.

Fraser Grant

Edinburgh

IAIN Wilson asks if £500,000 of our taxes should really be used to fund a pub buy-out.

Yes, in this case.

I played in a folk session there years ago when the owners were local and connected to the Knoydart community, and many musicians travelled to play there, to support the community, over the years.

I had since heard that the next owners reduced the service to sporadic opening hours, bookings for private visiting parties, no interest in continuing the previous hub and social centre that had existed before.

I recall a wild long weekend with a session in Mallaig, a dance in Inverie village hall with more musicians than could fit the stage, then a late session in the Old Forge.

We were hosted by the locals, and welcomed with great warmth and generosity.

The ceilidh that followed on Eigg, then the two nights playing on Rum, and then playing strathspeys on the upper deck of the ferry as we returned into Mallaig harbour, our tunes echoing from the sides of the Armadale boat remain as magic memories of the cultural links made possible by venues such as the Old Forge; vital places that can lure musicians and tourists alike, and connect remote areas to “Greater Scotland!”

Bruce Curtis

via thenational.scot

LET me first say that I have no problem with justified criticism or honest opinion.

Alan Hinnrich’s letter last Sunday contained neither of the above, but was full of insult directed at Nicola sturgeon, her government, John Swinney and SNP MPs.

How does his letter advance our cause of independence or convince any person who is genuinely uncertain of the need for self-determination in order to detach ourselves from the Tory intention to destroy our democracy and make our contract subservient to the rule of Westminster?

Bobby Brennan

Glasgow

IF we’re going to win our independence, Team Yes needs everyone playing for each other regardless of personal differences or differences in how or when we’d prefer things done.

This must be obvious to us all when we pause and take time to think about it.

Realistically there are those, even among us (we’ll possibly never know who they are – and we don’t need to) whose purpose is to cultivate disharmony and division among us and set Yessers against Yessers.

READ MORE: Our Scottish Government should be allowed to consult on any topic it wishes

All we need to do to prevent such disharmony and division is stop and re-focus every time we’re tempted to attack other Team Yes players – no matter what personal beliefs or whoever may be inciting us to do so – regardless of what those “dissenting” folk may have “achieved” in the past.

We are all in this to win our Independence and to do that we need all our players onside, as a team and covering each others’ backs - despite our personal differences – just like any other successful team.

We’ve come so far and now more than ever need to be strong and resolute enough to resist any temptation to provide the anti Independence movement with the “divide and rule” that they are relying on.

Let’s all truly continue our cause as All Under One Banner – and avoid divisive lapses in our discipline.

James Dippie, AIM For Yes Garnock Valley & West Kilbride, Dalry