WHAT is it with these “royals”? First we had the BBC opening their news bulletin on Sunday afternoon with Wee Baldy Bill’s long-suffering wife presenting the trophy at Wimbledon, the BBC proudly announcing this before even mentioning who had actually won the tournament, and then adding the winner’s name almost as an irrelevance!

Then later the same day we see the lad himself at the Euro finals when his country, Wales – well he is after all the “Prince of Wales”, despite the huge majority of Wales not wanting anything to do with him – was not even the finals, never mind the final? Words almost fail me on this absolute nonsense.

READ MORE: I protested the King's Speech in Parliament Square – here's why

Then today we had his father, the world’s greatest pretend eco warrior, opening the new parliament in London! Talk about complete “royal” overload as these greedy, grasping fakes try frantically to try stay even remotely relevant when half the people in England – and more importantly its their younger generations – don’t want a “monarchy” at all, and with three in four Scots also against this medieval, money-grabbing embarrassment to everyone on these unhappy islands.

No wonder the vast majority of clear-thinking people in Scotland can’t wait to break away from Westminster’s greedy tentacles and another country’s truly pointless “monarchy” and reset the relationship we have with our great neighbours, whose lives are also been ruined by a tiny, outdated, greedy, grasping, truly horrid little clique of the worst people we could ever want to be in charge of us.

I hear Republic, the anti-monarchy group, had hundreds of their protestors out on the streets of London today to chant “not my king” as Charlie Boy flounced towards the “State Opening of Parliament”. And what a state it truly is as we are told there’s no money for teachers, doctors, housing, dentists, unpolluted rivers, non-criminal energy prices, to fix our roads, for a pension that’s not a slap in the face and a truly miserable retirement, no money for the Waspi women, for the schools, the hospitals, the railways etc etc etc, but they can find tens of billions for aircraft carriers that don’t work, imaginary train lines and faulty PPE contracts.

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And of course there’s more than a billion a week for armaments, and there’s money to waste on these official pantomimes like the State Opening of Parliament but they can’t divert just over two weeks of their disgracefully enormous armaments expenditure to get rid of the truly abhorrent two-child cap? What an absolute mess these islands are currently in, with none of the peoples in any of the countries/provinces even remotely happy with Westminster or state rule.

Here’s hoping we get a leader with a backbone who chooses the right people to get us out of this recurring nightmare, as in reality all Westminster really wants is our huge resources to help cover the absolute mess of Brexit and 40 years of catastrophically terrible governance.

Iain K
Dunoon

IT’S not only Charles dressed up in funny clothes for the King’s Speech. Starmer was in borrowed ones. Sunak’s smoking ban and Sturgeon’s initiative on nationalising rail, for starters…

David Lammy, the new Foreign Secretary, is looking like a bit of a duffer representing the party that throughout the Tory administration failed to call for a ceasefire or ban the sale of arms despite the deaths of 14,000 children.

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Also, Starmer cleverly hung an albatross around Angela Rayner’s neck by making one of her first tasks the defence of deliberately choosing to keep millions of children in poverty by not axing the two-child benefit cap nonsense. But then I suppose they don’t want to look too much like Scotland in terms of caring for the desperate so soon after the election where anti-Tory fervour helped them to power on a very low voter turnout.

Not so much emperor’s new clothes as wolf in sheep’s clothing...

Amanda Baker
Edinburgh

ASSA Samaké-Roman’s regular column is so timely! Thanks for this regular, well-informed coverage. With far-right political formations gaining ground in Europe, destructive armed conflict in Europe/the Middle East and the looming US presidential election, it is crucial that we understand key elements of the fight back.

We are witnessing violent political attacks – not just the shooting of a presidential candidate in the US, but also daily attacks on trade unionists and civil society mobilisations elsewhere, particularly in France.

READ MORE: Assa Samake-Roman: French left can’t go on pretending they won’t have to compromise

Samaké-Roman encourages us to look beyond our own national preoccupations and consider our common challenges and to learn from how they can be successfully overcome. France is showing the energy which can enter debate from a vibrant, youthful leadership, especially from young women (Marine Tondelier of the Ecologists and Sophie Binet of the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) being two outstanding examples). They are exploring the frustrations of establishment intransigence in ministerial selection and refusal to compromise from some of their allies. All in a climate conditioned by a right-wing media. Sounds familiar? We need to understand and grapple with these issues.

So it is invaluable to read a regular well-informed column in The National about our European counterparts.

Cathie Lloyd
Edinburgh

THE headline to Caitlin Logan’s article on July 17 stated that “Government must ensure rights of non-binary people aren’t left behind”. I have said before in these pages that the only way to guarantee this is that the only rights are equal rights. Within this is the right to be different.

M Ross
Aviemore