BBC is cheating us out of Scottish lunchtime news on a daily basis

I watch the BBC lunchtime news too, Monday through Friday. News programmes are scheduled as 1-1.30pm for the “national” news and 1.30-1:45pm for the “news where you are” on BBC Scotland. However, the “national” news always runs over by three minutes and regularly by four. This means the Scottish lunchtime news loses three to four minutes. And it gets worse because the Scottish news is cut by two minutes at the end to show trailers of what’s on later that day. This means the Scottish news is cut by five minutes and regularly six. So our 15-minute news bulletins – instead of being 15 minutes long, as advertised – are always less than 10 minutes long and regularly less than nine.

The “national” news is always given its full 30 minutes, plus a few minutes more, without any apology or explanation for running over into the published time for the Scottish news. Am I being pedantic? I don’t think so.

Prior to this, the “national” weather forecast presenter can stand in front of a weather chart showing the whole of the UK and blithely, with a wave of her hand towards the Welsh border, tell us what the forecast for the “West Midlands” will be. On a map of the UK I’d say the West Midlands is nearer to Dumfries & Galloway or west-central Scotland.

READ MORE: Who could replace Laura Kuenssberg as the BBC's political editor?

The point is that English children are taught and brought up knowing without a doubt that “the West Midlands” are roughly where the weather presenter pointed to. If she had been standing in front of a map of England, I would have no complaints but on a map of the UK she is wildly out.

And it is the same with 99% of folk south of the Border, including well-educated MPs. The only folk who believe they are British are Scottish and Northern Irish Unionists, who don’t seem to mind being patronised and held in contempt by Westminster. Roll on independence.

Iain McClafferty
Livingston

THE article in The National about Scots by the author Colin Burnett concludes that the stigma against Scots is classism (‘Why is there such a stigma around the Scots language?’, Oct 19). I would go much further than that. The active attrition of Scots and Gaelic is historical and it would require the skills of Hamish Macpherson to lay out the injustices that have been inflicted on them.

Even before James VI went south from a kingdom that was wholly Scots and Gaelic the process of anglicisation had started, the Scots Makars being influenced by Chaucer. This process was pushed forward by the predominantly southern printers who used spellings they were used to, which were English ones.

The loss of the Scottish royal court as a patron of the arts was the next blow. Also owing to the Reformation the English Bible was adopted as the chief reading matter of the devout. The Word of God was never Scots. After the Scottish Parliament flitted to Westminster the educated classes worked to expunge Scots vocabulary, grammary and pronunciation from their speech, a process which goes on today as Colin Burnett observes. By this time English education was in control and the forces of physical punishment were used to prevent the use of Scots and Gaelic along with the threat of academic failure.

People went on using Scots for speech, poetry and song nonetheless, though it became various in character. Efforts to use it for prose attract vigorous criticism, which is political and has an element of classism.

Bluntly, it is imperialism. The larger power has been using every method for hundreds of years to overcome the lesser and in the process even trying to dictate what words we should use.

Iain WD Forde
Scotlandwell

YOUR correspondent Bernie Japs rightly complains about the state of Princes Street in Edinburgh and the apparent lack of anyone with a vision for the street.

In 1971 as a young traffic engineer, I designed the traffic signals which were subsequently installed in 1972. In designing them, I tried to minimise the number of traffic signal poles, and those in the side streets were carefully located behind the Princes Street building line. To help to accommodate the needs of pedestrians, the pedestrian crossings were made two to three times wider than the standards then prevailing. Crucially, we saved the need for 24 policemen (two shifts of 12 officers) to be employed on points duty at a cost of £24,000 per annum. The traffic signals cost some £26,000 if I remember correctly, so very good value for money and it meant the police officers could be more usefully employed.

However, even then, I felt we could do a lot more and I worked on proposals to reduce Princes Street to a simple two-way road essentially for buses and taxis only. The footways on both sides would then have been made very much wider. It could have been achieved quite readily at the time, but I left Edinburgh Corporation in 1973 and moved to work in Glasgow, which was much more receptive to radical ideas. That is another story.

Ian Lawson
Milngavie