Readers' Letters: Edinburgh Airport is fleecing customers with drop-off charges

Yesterday’s Scotsman reports on the increase in the price of the drop-off zone at Edinburgh Airport, the reason given for it being that airport authorities want to encourage the use of public transport. This may be applicable for Edinburgh residents, but the airport also serves the whole of Fife, and a number of Dundee residents also regularly use it.

How do the airport authorities expect these users to travel with their luggage by using public transport from Edinburgh? Car use is the obvious choice. The bus from Fife only covers a small part of Fife, for example, it never comes to Kirkcaldy and Dunfermline, both main towns. In addition, for many elderly and disabled people it is almost impossible to use public transport from Edinburgh.

Recently Airport authorities have also applied a charge for luggage trolleys, which used to be free. These acts are nothing but the act of fleecing the public who use Edinburgh Airport.

Dropping off and picking up passengers at Scotland’s busiest airport will cost £6, an increase of £1, from Monday (Picture: Lesley Martin)

Hasan Beg, Kirkcaldy, Fife

Ferry curious

Referring to the Glen Sannox and the Glen Rosa, First Minister John Swinney has said: “I apologise unreservedly to island communities for the delays in those two ferries.”

Apologising goes beyond the usual expressions of regret since, implicitly, it acknowledges fault. Given that he has been a minister throughout this debacle, I wonder what faults he acknowledges and is now apologising for?

Is it for the the decision to specify two very large, unnecessarily complex dual fuel ferries? Or is it for awarding the contract to a shipyard which did not have the capability to build them? Perhaps it is for failing to have the port infrastructure adapted to accommodate them coming into service (despite them being six years late)? Or is it for persisting with the unaccountable, bureaucratic model involving three public bodies, Transport Scotland, CMAL and CalMac, in the procurement process?

Perhaps someone could ask him.

George Rennie, Inverness

Children failed

There is nothing new or radical about the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s call for radical reform of the Scottish education system to “future-proof” it. In fact, it represents nothing more than the conventional wisdom of the Establishment.

Anyone calling for a move from a knowledge to a skills-based system hasn’t been in Britain these last 40 years. Indeed, young people are so susceptible to every passing conspiracy theory or government fad, precisely because they lack even the most basic knowledge.

For example, anyone who had been taught the basics of biology would know that carbon dioxide is the stuff of life. No carbon dioxide, no photosynthesis, no life on Earth. They would then be sceptical, to say the least, about the current Net Zero hysteria.

Shockingly, it is normal for a young person to leave school having never been exposed to a single play by William Shakespeare, the greatest playwright in the English language. No doubt any drama inflicted on them will have been selected for ideological reasons.

Anti-racism relies on propagandising – “brainwashing” might be a better word – young people with a highly selective, one-sided view of our history. Britain’s pivotal role in the Industrial and Scientific revolutions is never spoken of. Likewise, the vile social evils such as suttee, slavery and cannibalism, which the British Empire suppressed.

Also, young Scots today are mostly completely ignorant of those many great Scots who went before them. They simply haven’t heard of, to name but a few: Adam Smith, David Hume, James Hutton, Joseph Black, Thomas Cochrane, David Livingstone, James Clerk Maxwell, Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie, John Logie Baird or Alexander Fleming. And this scandalous ignorance under an allegedly nationalist government!

Before the educational reformers started work over 60 years ago, Scotland had a world-class education system, markedly superior to England’s, which decade after decade produced men, and latterly women, who went on to change the world for the better.

Young Scots needed an education which focuses on giving them a knowledge of our history, our language, mathematics and science, which gives them a pride and confidence in their country and themselves.

Otto Inglis, Crossgates, Fife

Low marks

Fraser Grant (Letters, 9 January) treated us to a reprise of the SNP playbook on the subject of schooling. Its standards are to be improved by a new “Centre of Teaching Excellence”.

We know by now that anything with “excellence” in its title is to be viewed with scepticism, as teachers’ own pejorative description of the “Curriculum for Excrement” tells us. In true SNP fashion, it is yet another discussion forum, or talking shop. As for the replacement of the SQA, it seems that it will be staffed by the same people who have already failed there.

Then we have Mr Grant’s laudatory account of the SNP’s attempt to mark its own homework, with claims that literacy and numeracy are at record levels. That isn’t what the PISA reports have found. Mr Grant dismisses PISA, yet it is all we have of objective testing, since the SNP regime withdrew Scotland from the rigorous TIMSS and PIRLS international reviews of maths, science and literacy several years ago, because they showed up the growing decline in Scottish standards. PISA scores in Scotland have declined steadily from 533 in year 2000 to 471 in 2022 for maths, and from 526 in year 2000 to 493 in reading in 2022.

Mr Grant cites a narrowing of the attainment gap. Closer inspection reveals that this is not because the performance of children from deprived backgrounds has improved but because that of children from affluent backgrounds has declined. As for 95.9 per cent of school leavers being in “positive destinations” three months after leaving schools, it would be interesting to have a breakdown of these “positive destinations”.

It is an open secret that there are serious problems besetting Scottish schooling, problems for which the SNP administration has no viable remedies.

Jill Stephenson, Edinburgh

Mismanagement

I am deeply disturbed by the way things are being managed in this country. Forget Donald Trump. He is a menace in his own right, but the extreme left-wing approach which is being put in place by Keir Starmer's Government is alarming.

We have a Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who has managed, even more professionally than Liz Truss, to stuff the economy. From clear signs that things were turning the corner, with encouraging prospects of economic growth and a reduction in inflation, she has effortlessly succeeded in presiding over an almost overnight loss of confidence in the markets. She is ruthlessly pursuing those who have money and those who would encourage enterprise.

The attack on one of the UK's most successful industries, education, beggars belief. Freedom of speech in academia? Not on your Nelly. Encourage private education, which costs the nation nothing, but makes billions? Forget it.

And Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner thinks there is nothing better for business than to increase their costs and liabilities and to reduce their competitiveness. I have been expecting 1979 to reappear by the end of this disaster of a Government, which is visiting the same spendthrift incompetence that we have had to endure in Scotland ever since the SNP came into power.

Peter Hopkins, Edinburgh

Playing with fire

Unusually I find myself in almost total agreement with your editorial (“Pray Trump is still the same old blowhard,” 9 January), but I fear it is too late. Casting a cursory glance over the letters page, Trumpian trigger phrases like “liberal elite” and “fake news” are already infecting our political discourse and, as your correspondent John V Lloyd points out, much of our broadcasting news is devoted to stories about the US. I find these developments particularly painful as I was closely exposed to the rightward drift of US politics from an early age and one of the attractions of Britain for me when I moved here in the early 1980s was its fairer society and the sophistication and intelligence of political debate.

Sadly, that is no longer the case, at least in England, which is why I made the decision to come to Scotland, 170 years after my relatives departed following the Lowland Clearances. Those bandying about the inflammatory phrases and nurturing a culture of grievance are playing with fire.

Marjorie Ellis Thompson, Edinburgh

Desperate Don

President-Elect Donald Trump may be clever and subtle enough to fool the media, but to us more sensitive sorts it seems he is just desperate for headlines.

Why is the media pandering to him? Ignoring him until he actually does something is the way with such attention-seeking, immature wannabes.

Daniel Ogilvy, Perth

Words to unite

Donald Trump’s talk, before he has even assumed office, about Canada, Panama and Greenland, will just make the rest of the world – particularly the BRICS and the Global South – resent and loathe (even more?) the USA (Unilateral Sanctions Agency).

That said, for someone in politics, Trump’s position is so very refreshingly open and honest!

But nevertheless, his comments are quite breathtaking and horrific!

The International Community must, of course, unite to stand up against him.

Joe Moir, Aberdeen

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