Letters: Public assets are not there to subsidise football club

While services for the most vulnerable members of our community are being cut and while we have a crying need for social housing in this city, our elected representatives are spending their time and our money in an effort to prop up a football club.

While I have no interest in Heart of Midlothian FC I do have an interest in the public assets which our elected officials seem to think belong to them to do with as they please.

I am also a believer in the democratic process and am confident that those behind this lunacy will be held to account by those who have it within their gift to remove them from their perceived positions of power.

Ian McNeill, Gilmerton Dykes Crescent, Edinburgh

Spending priorities must be questioned

Given the huge financial pressures we now face, the Royal Society of Edinburgh is entirely right to urge the Scottish Government to re-assess its spending priorities.

Cutting affordable housing budgets by a third and the capital budget for health projects by more than half over the next three years will not help to build the sustainable recovery Scotland’s economy needs. Nor will it help deliver long-term career opportunities for the 25,000 modern apprentices the Scottish Government has pledged to support each year.

As the RSE rightly points out, restructuring Scottish Water would free up a substantial sum of money which I would argue should be reinvested in priority areas of capital investment. The Scottish Government has earmarked direct loans to Scottish Water worth £440 million over the next three years. Re-investing this money to bolster the government’s capital budget would support skills, jobs and capacity in Scotland’s strategically important construction industry, while creating a lasting legacy in the shape of the core infrastructure our economy needs for future growth.

Michael Levack, chief executive, Scottish Building Federation, Crichton’s Close, Holyrood, Edinburgh

Collection service is waste of money

So Malcolm Chisholm and various other MSPs, councillors etc are opposed to the externalisation of council services (Letters, October 27). As a small business I have been paying a weekly charge to have my waste collected by the council.

It recently managed to collect it only two weeks out of twelve. I wrote to the council in advance to say I would pay only for the collections made. No response. When I did pay only for the two collections I wrote explaining why. No apology, just a final notice for the balance. I wrote again, explaining the situation once more. No apology, just a threat of court action.

Is that what Malcolm Chisholm and his co-signatories regard as “public services delivered efficiently by public servants”? I don’t. Extortion, perhaps?

Kit Campbell, Kit Campbell Associates, Chuckie Pend, Morrison Street, Edinburgh

UK values are lost among immigrants

The Dutch government intends to abandon multiculturalism and “shift priority to the values of the Dutch people”.

Their bill’s phraseology must chime with most UK citizens, if not our politicians; e.g. “integration will not be tailored to different groups . . . it is not the government’s job to integrate immigrants.” Incomers will have to learn the host language and obey all Dutch laws.

This is to prevent “parallel societies”, where incomers refuse to integrate.

Consider Britain: we have schools where not a single pupil speaks English as first language, while councils provide documents in a plethora of different tongues – fertile ground for parallelism.

Wilful political intransigence and incompetence has sunk Britain in the social abyss of allowing immigrants to beg illegally on our streets.

The Dutch have the will and determination to preserve their cultures but I fear Britain’s traditions are already doomed; and immigrants themselves are not the people responsible for that.

Robert Dow, Ormiston Road, Tranent