MY late mother, who lived to almost 90 in reasonable health, latterly with several interventions by the Scottish NHS, used to say “age doesn’t come itself”. As a 64-year-old male I read the announcement that average life expectancy in Scotland is still falling with a degree of sadness, fear and trepidation.
Male life expectancy in Renfrewshire, where I live, is now 75.56 years. In effect I currently have a 50/50 chance of seeing the year 2034, and by that time half of those males of a similar age to me will no longer be with us. Suddenly adverts for funeral plans and will-writing services become a little more relevant.
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I note that in neighbouring East Renfrewshire average male life expectancy is 79.94 years. For a brief moment I consider a house move of a few miles to gain an extra five years of life. Of course it is not that simple – if only it were. If we were to map income levels with life expectancy the correlation would be obvious.
These facts are Scotland’s shame and should be front and centre of any renewed, post-Rutherglen independence campaign. Our fellow citizens are losing years of their lives while our parliament debates the merits of gender recognition and dreams of a nation warmed by unaffordable heat pumps powered by foreign-owned wind turbines while leaving what remains of our oil and gas reserves under the sea.
Advances in medicine are being overtaken by advances in poverty. I do wonder if the post-Covid difficulties in obtaining face-to-face GP appointments and the length of our hospital waiting lists is having an adverse effect on Scottish life expectancy. The basic fact remains that for too many years we have simply not trained enough doctors, nurses and other health professionals. Many of those we do train choose to leave Scotland.
It seems that devolution is now doing little to improve the overall health of the nation. We can only hope that perhaps with independence we might start to improve the situation – preferably before 2034, please.
Brian Lawson
Paisley
THE discussion in James Walker’s article in Sunday’s National on transport in Glasgow strikes me as depressingly unambitious (Catching up on city’s bus service, Oct 8).
Having lived is both Denmark and Queensland, Australia, and experienced integrated rail, bus, ferry and metro systems, all accessed via one tap-on, tap-off card state-wide, I feel that aiming for discrete city solutions in Scotland is missing a significant trick.
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Denmark and Queensland, both with populations similar to Scotland, enable ticket-free public transport on state-operated networks across their territories.
With a bit of imagination and a return to a system similar to the old Scottish Transport Group, abandoned in the free-market shambles of the Thatcher years, travel throughout Scotland, including incorporation of the multitude of concession cards into one travel card, could bring a bit of sanity to the piecemeal mess we currently see.
Maybe the Scottish Government could sub-contract the job to Lothian Buses? They might even manage to organise building a couple of ferries.
Cameron Crawford
Rothesay
WHAT a load of rubbish was written in Monday’s comment about electric cars headlined “No charge: Why the UK isn’t ready for electric cars”.
That any journey should be attempted in an electric vehicle (EV) which only has “around 85 miles on a full charge” is beyond belief. But of course it adds to the current trend of describing EVs as unfit for purpose which is perpetuated by the media.
We have had the pleasure of driving an EV since 2019 which has a range of 290 miles on a full charge, and would never set out on a journey of any length without being fully charged. In fact, although we have driven from Fife to Caithness, a distance of 230 miles and still have had 35 miles “in reserve”, we normally stop en route and have a bite to eat while the EV is being topped up.
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In four years of very pleasurable driving we have only once found a charging point to be out of order. On one occasion when at a charger in Tain, a car came beside us with three young women in it, who had driven from Kent, and they were very complimentary about the facilities for EVs in Scotland.
Perhaps attempting the journey described in a Nissan Leaf was hopeful, but there again, without doing so would have prevented Rachael Revesz from writing her less-than-complimentary comments about the infrastructure for EVs.
Paul Gillon
Leven
RACHAEL Revesz’s article chimes with my experience of electric vehicle charging provision in north Edinburgh. Charging points are left out of service for many months. Nobody at the Scottish Government, Transport Scotland, ChargePlace Scotland or Edinburgh City Council seems inclined to accept responibility or do anything about it. Everybody just shrugs. It’s not good enough.
Graeme Purves
via thenational.scot
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