Letters: City must put taxpayers ahead of private business

Yet they are looking at giving council taxpayers’ money to the Russian multi-millionaire who was going to spend £51 million on Tynecastle. Ha Ha.

Other teams in Edinburgh have just got on with redevelopment without running to the council.

The £20 million-plus that Hearts are in debt for should be considered as well. This man seems to think council tax- payers owe him something.

We cannot get involved with private companies. If Hearts want a new stadium let Mr Romanov pay for it himself. In the case of the trams, firms went out of business but did the council get involved with them? I think charity begins at home not in Russia. This is going too far.

Dougie Baillie, Edinburgh

Groundshare is not on the cards

The suggestion in your headline in the Edinburgh Evening News of October 24 which read “Cardownie offers Easter Road club a switch to Sighthill” could not be further from the truth. I did not suggest that Hibs should share a stadium with Hearts and the accompanying article quotes me as saying: “There is no indication from Hibs that I am aware of that they would be interested”.

I am also on record in a previous edition of the Edinburgh Evening News saying that I did not think that Sighthill Park was a suitable venue for a stadium.

Also, for the record, I do not support the concept of one Edinburgh team as John Gibson fancifully suggests. If you cast your mind back I was involved in the “Hands off Hibs” campaign and was instrumental in offering the council-owned Meadowbank Stadium to Hibs to fulfil their fixtures, which helped to kill off Wallace Mercer’s bid – no cries of pro-Hearts bias then.

Councillor Steve Cardownie, deputy leader, Edinburgh City Council

Multi-choice vote is the only option

Much has been written about the potential confusion caused by a multi-option referendum on Scotland’s constitutional future, most recently from Liberal Democrat leader, Willie Rennie.

Multi-option referendums on constitutional change are, however, not unusual and have been undertaken in a number of places. For example, Newfoundland, then a British colony, held a three-option referendum in 1948 to decide whether it should enter the Canadian Confederation, remain under British rule or regain independence.

The eventual decision by Newfoundlanders was to enter the Canadian Confederation. Ironically, while originally it was deemed there should only be two options on the ballot paper, the British government intervened and overruled the convention, and decided that confederation with Canada should also be on the ballot paper.

Indeed, in other parts of the world – for example, in Switzerland – multi-option referendums are common. The establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1997 was itself based on a referendum containing three options.

Most political questions are multi-optional, as is the case in Scotland, and when there are a number of constitutional arrangements to choose from, those such as Mr Rennie should not be so blinkered as to close these down.

Alex Orr, Leamington Terrace, Edinburgh

Distraction claim doesn’t add up

The Liberal Democrat Mike Crockart says an EU referendum would be a “dangerous distraction” for the coalition government in tough economic times (Interactive, October 29).

A strange thing to say considering that last year, when we also faced tough economic times, the coalition government was falling over itself to shove the “AV” vote in our faces.

Or do they only moan about being distracted in tough economic times when it suits them?

Alan Lough, Boroughdales, Dunbar