Letters: Vicious ‘bedroom tax’ cuts will cause havoc and misery

In East Lothian alone, 788 households will be affected when benefit cuts of £7.50 to £13.50 a week come in.

If then you are unable to afford the new rent, the options will be trying to find cheaper, smaller accommodation, taking in a lodger, or eviction.

Can you imagine the devastating effect this will have on their lives?

What sort of people are they who thought up this vicious scheme? Are they unaware of the havoc caused? If so, it shows how out of touch they are with reality. If they are aware then it show they must be the most hard, callous people, devoid of normal human feelings.

Yet they appear on television saying how much they care. What humbugs.

Anthony Delahoy, Silverknowes Gardens, Edinburgh

Clean up politics and start again

MPs, MSPs and MEPs seem to have begun to believe, like medieval kings, that they and their peers have a divine right to rule.

The path most take to their political seat is university, to political assistant, to party apparatchik, to candidate – and they have created a ruling class that springs largely from middle-class “professional” families, diluted by a scattering of upper-class barrow boys and debs who grab the top jobs.

Our representatives are simply not a representative sample of the population, and it is about time they were.

Change electoral law to exclude all who cannot demonstrate an unbroken ten years of adult life (after education) outwith the realm of politics before they are allowed to be candidates for election to anything!

Laws which bear mainly on ordinary people should be framed by ordinary people, not fatally inexperienced, self selected nabobs from the university and hobby farm.

The concept of the “professional politician” is a death sentence for a democratic society.

Time to clean the stable, and start again.

David Fiddimore, Calton Road, Edinburgh

Professor, what have you done?

Perhaps Professor Richard Williams (A great city in abject decline, News, February 18) would care to let us Edinburgh citizens know what he has contributed to this city during his 13 years here.

Tom Reilly, Esslemont Road, Edinburgh

Independence would boost city

Until the 2011 SNP landslide victory, Edinburgh was always lukewarm to the SNP and even more sceptical towards independence.

This always surprised me because no Scottish city is likely to benefit more from Scotland taking its place in the world as a sovereign nation than our capital city.

As the capital, Edinburgh would be the obvious choice for large companies and countries who would need a headquarters in one of Europe’s most prosperous nations.

Becoming a visible nation rather than an invisible region would also help our artistic community.

South Korea and Japan became renowned internationally for their horror films and the baton has lately been taken up by Scandinavia.

Films make money and create a buzz about a country which leads to tourism.

How many movies does Scotland currently make a year? Not very many is the answer. The anti-independence campaign is designed to keep us in our place, nuclear weapons on the Clyde and the oil flowing south, not to mention maintaining our talentless Unionist Westminster MPs’ right to claim their expenses.

It’s time to take our country back and if we do, Edinburgh will be a major beneficiary.

Gavin Fleming, Grassmarket, Edinburgh

Scotland is bigger than you think

I AM continually surprised by the number of people, who should know better, who refer to Scotland as a “small” country.

Scotland has a longer coastline than England, and a longer coastline than the Eastern Seaboard of the USA, hardly indicative of “smallness”.

Most importantly, when territorial waters are taken into account, Scotland occupies a larger area of the globe than England, which is conclusive proof that, at least compared to the country to our south, we cannot be described as “small”.

Joseph G Miller, Gardeners Street, Dunfermline