Letters: Swimming cuts will sink activity for many children

Reasonable? No. Children paying the price for this inept council's incompetence? Most definitely yes.

We are constantly reminded how our nation's youth is sitting in front of computer games racking up future health problems.

And the council's wisdom is to do what? No less than encourage youths to sit in front of computer games by pricing swimming pools, football pitches and others out of reach.

This isn't austerity, it's a fundamental shift in the very fabric of our society, socially engineered by national government's naked Tory dogma, and achievable only on the back of the wholesale shift of a Lib Dem party abandoning its principles and embracing Toryism – power before principle.

Isn't it inept, or worse, of this council to continue to chuck money at the diminishing tram line while slashing and burning the social fabric of our city?

And isn't it insulting that we are expected to swallow the tripe from our local officials when they bleat that it's not their fault, blame it on Westminster, when they have been responsible for the budgeting over many years, and profligate mis-spending that's seen our city descend into their constructed mire?

It's about choices. Isn't it clear that the interests of those who pay the taxes in this country aren't even on the radar when they are being made?

Jim Taylor, The Murrays Brae, Edinburgh

Be careful with the public's cash

THE recession was caused not by ordinary folk, but by those who run the country's finances.

Yet it is not they who suffer the effects of the coming severity of cuts in public services.

Easy for wealthy folk to without or with less knowing they are spared the wait for housing or vital local services.

At the same time David Cameron spends thousands of pounds of public money on a photographer. Time to ca' canny with other folks' money.

Trevor Swistchew, Victor Park Terrace, Edinburgh

Let Lothian Buses run the tram line

UNCERTAINTY shrouds the future of Lothian Buses' public ownership status amid the on-going Edinburgh trams fiasco. Nearly 400 million of the 500m Scottish Government funding has already been spent with only 24 per cent of the original tram infrastructure completed by the developer Transport Initiatives Edinburgh (TIE).

Merging Lothian Buses with the trams operator into a new body called Transport Edinburgh Limited (TEL) is being spun as a means to offset losses on the tram development by milking the profits of the bus service. It won't work.

Unite will resist any attempt to manoeuvre Lothian Buses into an amalgamated transport body. We have no doubt this will increase fares for the travelling public, and lead to reduced services.

Unite is campaigning for:

• Lothian Buses to remain in full public ownership;

• The disbandment of TEL;

• The delivery of a debt-free tram line by TIE to be operated by Lothian Buses.

Lothian Buses is the jewel in Edinburgh's public transport crown; it is the envy of cities across the UK and should remain in public ownership. By handing over a completed airport-city-centre tram link to the management of Lothian Buses, this can best ensure the continuation of affordable and profitable public transportation services in our city.

Rab Fraser, chairman, Lothian Buses branch, Unite

Seeing red over green gesture

CHRIS Huhne, our Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, is offering farmers 1500 – 2000 an acre to allow solar panels to be installed in their fields.

Forty acres spare? Pass GO and pick up 80,000.

If farmers do not grow food and rear livestock then we will have to import.

What is green about that?

Clark Cross, Springfield Road, Linlithgow