Letter of the Day – Let’s pool cash to help needy

I am always amazed at the generosity of people whenever there is genuine need. This is such a time. If people want to give significant sums,as regards to their own financial position, they really want confidence their hard-earned money is going to the right place.

Undated file photo of money. The Labour Party have launched their manifesto for the 2017 General Election with a raft of employment measures, ranging from a ban on controversial zero hours contracts to ending the cap on public sector pay.

We have a universal benefit system which, while not perfect, is in place and could be used with reasonable cost to reach those in need. People who never expected to be unemployed will now find themselves in this position. In these exceptional times could not a voluntary fund be put in place to supplement the existing national benefit fund?

There are many people in Britain today so very thankful that they can manage. Many of those will be curtailing their activities, not attending clubs, theatres, bars, having holidays, not eating out. It would be good if all those still getting the same incomings and not supporting unemployed family members ould sit down and work out how much they are saving on their weekly expense.

They could give this spare money to the benefit fund weekly, knowing it would help all the people who normally work hard and serve us and are in this predicament through no fault of their own. It would help struggling families now faced with feeding their children more often now they are off school.

Extremely rich people could be confident that the money was going to those in need and give sums in gratitude for their good fortune and contribute to the future wellbeing of the country.

If everyone who was in a position to do so could give to this fund then we really could be the One Nation which was hoped for at the recent general election.

Celia Hobbs

Peebles Road
Penicuik, Midlothian

Park the metres

Having listened to the presenter of The World at One on Monday struggling to work out how long two metres is, a solution came to me in a blinding flash. Since we all use feet and inches (ask any schoolchild how tall he or she is and they will tell you in feet and inches), it would be an excellent idea for our own SNP administration to translate Boris’s advice to stay “two metres” away from other people by telling us to stay six feet apart.

Come on, SNP. You know it’s common sense!

Andrew HN Gray

Craiglea Drive, Edinburgh

Unfair to oldies

I am 81 with COPD and now confined to my home. As requested I did not panic buy. I used to travel by bus two or three times a week to buy fresh. I am of that generation who respect fairness. Now it is not even possible to register for online shopping with Tesco, M&S, Waitrose or Sainsbury. Believe me, I have tried and tried. Sainsbury at least are upfront and state they are not taking any more customers on for the present.

My brother, outside Edinburgh, also an OAP, did manage to register with his local Tesco a week ago but tells me there are no delivery slots this week, next week or the week after that and the first available Click and Collect slot is 5 May. So not content with “panic buying” it seems that people are now “panic booking” slots. No doubt they probably knew how to book one every week for the foreseeable. I cannot imagine what it must be like if you are not as “able” as I am.

Another way to kill off us oldies! How do we eat? Suggestions to me on loo paper please, at least that would be something.

Elizabeth Grahame

Edinburgh

Ask nicely now

In their letter to the Chancellor, Fiona Hyslop and Kate Forbes ‘’demand’’ that the proposed Job Retention Scheme be extended to the self-employed (your report, 25 March). A worthy cause, no doubt. But in the new spirit of coronavirus togetherness and co-operation, one would have thought the tired and grievance-ridden cliches of the SNP, such as ‘’demand,’’ would have disappeared. Of course, they are playing to their hardline audience. But ‘’request’’ and ‘’ask’’ are perfectly acceptable substitutes for the belligerent ‘’demand”. It merely sows more doubt into the minds of those reluctant to trust anything they do or say.

Alexander McKay

New Cut Rigg, Edinburgh

Not OK computer

Re: the letter from David Cole-Hamilton (25 March). The 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak was reported to Ministry for Agriculture Fisheries and Food (MAAF) on 19 February by the vet Craig Kirby after a routine inspection of the pigs at an abattoir in Little Warley in Essex.

The leading FMD experts were Prof Frederick Brown of the US Institute of Animal Health and the Dutch vet Dr Simon Barteling. Both argued that vaccination was the key to rapid control of the disease rather than mass slaughter.

But Prof Roy Anderson’s team at Imperial College, who used computers to model human diseases, was chosen to oversee the FMD outbreak. It demanded that all animals within a 3km zone around known cases be slaughtered.

The computer programming human epidemiologist Anderson was soon joined by the surface chemist Sir David King – an odd choice of expertise on which to base a national strategy when Brown and Barteling were available.

By March the Agriculture Minister, Nick Brown, claimed the problem was under control; King said the same in April; but before it was over in November, eight million animals, ⅛ of all those in Britain – and most of them healthy – had been slain.

King made the headlines again in 2004 when he claimed global warming was more deadly than terrorism. The problem with computer models, as I’m sure Prof Cole-Hamilton will recall, is GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).

(REV DR) John Cameron

Howard Place, St Andrews

China was right

As a man who used to wear a white coat I disagree with John Cameron’s view (Letters, 23 March) that China’s “flailing despotic measures” didn’t reduce the incidence of coronavirus. They did. In spite of having 3,267 deaths, indicating the scale of the problem, person-to-person transmission has been stopped. Massive testing has been one of the main arms of their response. I wish we were doing the same.

Hugh Pennington

Emeritus Professor of 
Bacteriology
University of Aberdeen.
Carlton Place, Aberdeen

A dinosaur rises?

The coronavirus brings us temporary war socialism but it may make Neo-liberalism into a dinosaur. Consider how Tony Blair was hailed as a son of Thatcher. That neglects the fact that he was therefore brother of Murdoch, Haig, and Duncan Smith.

But the brotherly Neo-liberal bonds which were so insidious that Margaret Thatcher described them more as a religion than a philosophy were creating entrepreneurial wreckers every bit as dangerous as the trade union wreckers of a previous era.

Their new prophet was William Rees-Mogg with his Machiavellian book The Sovereign Individual. The intellectuals of Big Tobacco showed how black propaganda could be used for decades to fight the scientific consensus. With a similar relishing of the dark arts the climate deniers fought the corner of big oil. Margaret Thatcher’s dictum, “There is no such thing as Society”, was taken too far.

The English-speaking world had become a refractory furnace in which dodgy think tanks have reflected macho political sentiments back and fore across the Pond.

The similarity of sentiment between right wing politicians in the USA and the UK may 
not be obvious to those who think Donald Trump is a bit inane.

The present reversion to massive government intervention may be seen as the kind of war socialism which will be ditched as soon as we get these vaccines.

But the daunting task of recovering from global depression seems to demand the continuation of such policies long after the war.

Intellectuals are gathering behind the idea of a green Revolution. That idea may be the horses the poet Edwin Muir told us about in his poem set in the aftermath of a different catastrophe, nuclear war. Will interventionism become the new norm?

The historians of our era will be the judges of the much vaunted Neo-liberal era. They are already sharpening their pens.

Andrew Vass

Corbiehill Place, Edinburgh

No fooling us

As the dust settles on the Alex Salmond trial with a result that has clearly disappointed those who thought his imprisonment would bring about the demise of the SNP, it is interesting to note that those who oppose self-determination for Scotland appear to be desperately clutching at the final straw symbolising the survival of their long dysfunctional Union.

Of course, the”old guard’ of the SNP leadership are as vocal as ever, and in this personal watershed moment for their ex-leader it is no surprise that Alex Neil and Kenny MacAskill appear to be vying to succeed Jim Sillars as the go-to independence person for media reporters who seem keen to represent the current situation within the SNP as the “major split” about which besotted unionists dream.

While some misguidedly claim that essentially because Westminster has significantly more borrowing powers (two trillion pounds debt and rising) than Holyrood, this is evidence of a substantial benefit of Scotland remaining in the UK, more perspicacious observers realise we are fortunate in Scotland to have a government led by one of the most able politicians of our time; one with the resolute integrity to ensure that due process was followed in circumstances that undoubtedly, if they had arisen with any other major political party in government in the UK, would not have brought about such a rigorous conclusion (as repeatedly evidenced in the past). In stark contrast the arrogant Etonian who leads the UK will no doubt bumble on for a while yet and further distance himself from reality, as well as from the general public, but the electorate of Scotland will not be fooled.

Stan Grodynski

Cairnsmore
Longniddry, East Lothian

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