OCCASIONALLY random posts appear on my social media feed. A few days ago one appeared from Natalie Donn-Innes MSP, who I understand has the impressive title of Minister for Children, Young People and the Promise. 

The post actually originated from her local (Renfrewshire) Toy Bank and said: “This week hundreds of referrals have come in for local children and we need your help. We have completely run out of toys for boys aged 3-11 and have no gifts for teenage boys either. All other categories of toys are running dangerously low too.”

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I confess this has firmly stuck in my head for the past few days and I will make a donation this week if I can find a local toy bank. 

I was born in the 1950s, my parents have since passed away. My father worked in a local factory, apart from several years of forced unemployment in the late 1960s. 
My mother mainly stayed at home, as you did in those days, to look 
after us. 

I suspect times were financially tough but to be honest, as a child, I never actually realised that they were. We lived in a council house. There was always food on the table and a warm home most of the time. Central heating came much later but a “two-bar” electric fire could be relied on to heat at least one room in the house. I suspect gas and electricity were more affordable back then. At Christmas an elderly Christmas tree with dodgy lights and some paper decorations came down from the loft – but we always had presents.

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It is now 25 years since the Scottish Parliament came into being and 17 years since the SNP came into government. It is heartbreaking to hear that in the year 2024 there are so many weans in our land who may not see a present at the bottom of a Christmas tree in a few weeks’ time unless a charity comes to their aid.

We have Universal Credit and the much-mentioned Scottish Child Payment. The Scottish and UK Governments are quick to talk in terms of millions and billions spent on all manner of projects, from foreign wars and ferries to farms harvesting electricity from the wind. Despite advances in technology over my lifetime, many pensioners now cannot afford to both heat and eat. Food banks and now toy banks are one of our major growth industries. All of this points to a basic and continuing failure of BOTH governments.

John Baird
Largs

IF Charles Dickens were alive today I reckon he would have been moved to write a 21st-century Christmas Carol. Instead of workhouses we have food and heat banks. We have families where working parents earn such low wages that they are the 21st-century working poor. The captains of industry and especially those in the energy supply and creation sectors earn in a year what the working poor would make in  several lifetimes. 

We still have Lords and Sirs who expect to be treated like the royalty that still hangs round the neck of modern society, albatross-like, amassing even more wealth while parents decide to miss meals so their children can eat and be kept warm. And all the while we are told there is a black hole which must be filled with working people’s hard-earned meagre wages. God forbid you raise taxes on the super-wealthy, for they bankroll the election campaigns of successive  Westminster governments to ensure a firm grip on how society operates in order to ensure their prominence at the top of the pyramid of life.

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Thus this perpetuates inter alia such nonsense as the expensive House of Lords, which is merely  a club stuffed to the brim  with former politicians well past their 
sell-by date, and donors to the English political parties, where the daily honorarium of around £360 is gobbled up tax-free by grasping hands and where eager mouths feast on the subsidised food and drink.

The products of private schools walk straight into Oxford and Cambridge despite not having sufficient grades but the son or daughter of the common man must undergo a gruelling interview despite having excellent grades.

Plus ca change, as they say. The poor remain poor. As Scrooge stated: “Are there no prisons, no workhouses ... perhaps the poor might die to reduce the surplus population!” And that cut to the Winter Fuel Payment – especially at the start of the lengthy Scottish winter, coupled with the price of energy to heat many low-income Scottish households – simply serves to amplify what Dickens described in Victorian England ... a hand-to-mouth existence.

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So the class system is still with  us. As long as Westminster is the bauble and plaything of the wealthy, nothing will change. As for the current crop of Westminster politicians, most have been bought with cash from donors and huge corporations who care for themselves first and shareholders second. Our world can go to hell in a handcart in the future as long as these carpetbaggers have a pleasant life while they are on the planet. 

What is needed is a seismic change in society. Otherwise in 3024, if Man is still alive, a future correspondent will be citing Dickens’s work again. God bless us, everyone!

Peter Macari
Aberdeen