Monthly Archives: December 2015

Twas the last letter to the Herald before Christmas (no £) EU referendum

NOT for the first time – and we have to fear not for the last – the people of Scotland are being misled regarding the nature of their vote in the forthcoming EU referendum (“Cameron could rip Scotland out of Europe, warns SNP”, The Herald, December 17).

The SNP may contend that “Scotland will be ripped out of Europe against its will” but the fact is that Scotland will vote as part of the UK, and not as a separate country. For this purpose, the border between England and Scotland has the same significance as those between Norfolk and Suffolk or East and West Sussex.

All UK citizens as British subjects over the age of 18 will have the identical right to a vote of equal value regardless of where we happen to be located, and any pretence that any one part of the UK has greater or lesser significance than any other is just that – a pretence.

In the case of the SNP, the pretence appears to be part of its agenda which seeks to hoodwink the Scottish public into believing the fiction that Scotland is a separate sovereign state – a proposition which that same public has already rejected.

Maybe it should do something more significant. Perhaps it could get the Forth Road Bridge fixed?

Peter A Russell

Herald letter (no £) – Carmichael

(Or: “Just Grow Up Everyone”)

THE Carmichael case has done us all a favour. It has confirmed what every mature and intelligent voter already knew: you cannot trust politicians to tell the truth on every occasion, and therefore everything that they tell us should be approached with a healthy scepticism.

Who in post-referendum Scotland would’ve thunk it?

Peter A Russell

Herald letter: Forth Road Bridge. (No £)

THERE are two clear and important messages to emerge from the current Forth Road Bridge fiasco (“Share your car or work from home, bridge drivers urged”, The Herald, December 7, and Letters, December 7, 8 & 9).

The first is that when governments provide free stuff, it always has a cost elsewhere. This was the case in free university tuition (paid for by scrapping more than 140,000 further education college places) and is now the case in scrapping bridge tolls at a time when all budgets were under pressure.

The other message is that the SNP has mismanaged the maintenance of one of the major strategic traffic routes in the country, amongst many other things. (Incidentally, such a failure would cause any other party in any other times to lose the election in May: however in the post-truth politics of 2015 Scotland, their poll ratings will probably go up.)

Peter A Russell

(See Herald letters for predictable on-line comments outrage, i.e., “it wiznae the SNP…”)