Readers' Letters: Clear as mud efforts are completely meaningless

It is a sad reflection on the fickle, short memories and apathy within Scotland that the Scottish electorate is prepared to tolerate the SNP using the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) under the guise of playing the victim (again).

John Swinney is the Minister for Covid Recovery. (Photo: Getty Images)

Further proof if it were ever needed that the SNP are only interested in a confrontational power grab headline regardless of the need or benefits to Scotland s children who are to be used as their political pawns, this fabricating of grievances for the sake of grievances should be seen as exactly that.

After John Swinney’s sideways promotion from the Curriculum for Excellence debacle he left behind as Secretary for Education for his newly created position of Minister for Covid Recovery, which was akin to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, you would think and hope Nicola Sturgeon and resident cabinet member the Lord Advocate would then seek to work together and towards clarity and open transparency with the Scottish secretary Alister Jack.

Instead their clear as mud efforts are being described by Lord Reed as "completely meaningless", which is also an accurate description of those responsible for this further embarrassment that is the Scottish Government, and a reminder to voters of us having another five more years of this to endure.

Allan Thompson, Bearsden

Wild goose chase

As Dennis Forbes Grattan points out (Letters, 4 July) our UK Covid-related debt has risen to nearly £2.2 trillion, with Scotland's share at about 12 per cent.

How could the UK, including Scotland, possibly afford 12 per cent of at least £3 trillion by AD 2050 on the wild goose chase of zero carbon as a token contribution to "fighting climate change"?

The UK's share of the Earth's man-made CO2 being negligible at 0.0000065 per cent, any impact on climate would likewise be zero. Charity begins at home!

Charles Wardrop, Perth

Speed kills

The theory of everything means everything has a beginning and an end. When will poverty and violence end? Countless people cycle because of poverty.

With over 100 innocent UK cyclists being killed every year, we have an army of not-right drivers, saying: “They had it coming, they don’t pay road tax; they jump red lights, and ride three and four abreast.”

Aren’t today’s kids facing a terrible future? Like cancer, we have many types of hate crime. For me, a lifelong cyclist, the hating of zero-emission cyclists is worst.

If speed merchants Sir Lewis Hamilton and Sir Chris Hoy, plus Sir Bradley Wiggins and the NHS, were to stand up and say “Speed limits are maximum, not minimum”, it would surely accelerate the reduction, if not the end, of road deaths.

Allan Ramsay, Radcliffe

Big Fish

Last summer, Nicola Sturgeon told us she was on the way to eradicating Covid in Scotland; now the World Health Organisation tells us Scotland is the Covid capital of Europe.

It's also, under the SNP, the drugs death capital of Europe. Maybe, despite her record of relentless failure, she's become a wee bit too fond of being a big, if ineffectual, fish in a not very large pond?

Martin Redfern, Melrose

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