Readers' Letters: Edinburgh doesn't want a city only fit and young can access

“Residents want us to be bolder, they want us to go further, and they want things to move faster!” So says Councillor Scott Arthur, talking about new plans for a savage cutback in car use in Edinburgh (your report, 30 January).

Councillor Scott Arthur claims closing ever more roads in Edinburgh city centre is a popular move with residents (Picture: Lisa Ferguson)

To which one can only reply – “Utter nonsense”. Very few people in Edinburgh hold this view, and it will sound the death knell for access to central Edinburgh for anyone other than fit and healthy people. The old, the disabled, young parents with prams and buggies, these and many others will be totally discouraged from visiting the town centre, or travelling across town from east to west and north to south. Buses are a nightmare for the old and disabled, we can't walk far, especially in a very hilly city like Edinburgh, and destroying many parts of the city with new tramworks for years to come at eye-watering expense is an act of folly.

What we need is a major scheme of road repairs and cobble removal to make our streets fit for driving (and cycling) and fit for the 21st century.

This terrible plan will ensure only the survival of the fittest in our great city, and to bleat that it is what the citizens want is a total fabrication.

Brian Bannatyne-Scott, Edinburgh

European intrigue

These plans to limit access to Edinburgh city centre are all very well, but for those of us with mobility issues and therefore often car-dependent, are a bit of a nightmare.

I would like to think that they have been well thought out, but seeing the recent traffic calming measures I do have my doubts. The European exercise based upon letting the traffic sort itself out still interests me. It may be impracticable in a city the size of Edinburgh, but then so is cutting Edinburgh in half, as appears to be suggested.

D Gerrard, Edinburgh

What a state!

Stuart Smith enthuses about how successful a separatist Scotland would be (Letters, 29 January). There’s mention of oil, digital technology, life sciences, tourism and “the highly successful financial sector”. How “successful” would these industries be when hamstrung by the increased level of taxation necessary to maintain existing expenditure on social welfare and public services, once the Barnett formula is removed?

Can Mr Smith give even one example of a financial services sector anywhere on this planet which has thrived under a far-left government like the SNP/Greens? What about the additional impact of a hard border and a weak currency on trade, competitiveness and economic stability?

As for oil and gas, it doesn’t seem that the current nationalist leadership have much interest in extracting these resources; just as well we’ve got all those foreign-made wind turbines to keep the lights on!

Mr Smith mentions the Faslane submarine base and RAF Lossiemouth. Given the dangerous times we live in, he rightly states that the UK is keen to hang on to them. Since the peaceful, nuclear-free People’s Republic of Scotland would have no use for such installations, thousands of civilians once employed at these sites or in support and supply roles could presumably retrain to work either in renewables or our ever-expanding civil service?

Mr Smith grudgingly concedes Labour could win a Holyrood majority but predicts that “Labour will be presiding over a Scottish nation, half of which do not want to be in the UK”. A house divided cannot stand; perhaps Mr Smith is implying we’ll need to look at a two-state solution?

Martin O’Gorman, Edinburgh

Waste of money

The points made in The Scotsman editorial calling for increased spending to build up national UK defences are very well taken (30 January). Increases in taxation might be justifiable if these are deemed essential, despite their inevitable contribution to economic depression.

However, since the huge spending on our token net zero policies is a total, futile waste, a money transfer to our defences makes vital good sense. Accordingly, Parliament must repeal the self-harming Climate Change Acts.

Charles Wardrop, Perth

Blinkered views

Scotland will join the rest of the UK to ban disposable vapes – a first. However, surely our well-paid politicians should have seen the problems before allowing them to be sold.

Surely they should have realised they would be given to young people. Surely they should have known they would be thrown away. Surely they should have known that they would end up in landfill and contaminate.

Clark Cross, Linlithgow, West Lothian

Skewed priorities

Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is going on NHS salaries for “diversity” employees. Then there is money being spent, including from NHS Lothian, to make amends for historic slavery and to combat racism. Perhaps this might be justified if there was spare money but as we are all painfully aware there is a huge waiting list in Scotland for operations. More taxpayers’ money is also being sent to Gaza. The number of homeless Scots is rising fast. The drugs problems are intensifying.

The word “priority” is often used by the SNP/Green administration but one has to ask if anyone in the Scottish Government actually knows its meaning?

Gerald Edwards, Glasgow

Flood of memories

Talking of ferries yet again (your report, 27 January), in 1953 I lived on a farm near Girvan. On 31 January that year both myself and my bicycle were thrown against the side of a bridge on emerging from the shelter of the trees/hedge of our house roadway.

In Girvan house windows were blown in and sizeable stones were carried from the seashore over the Girvan/Stranraer road and a drystone dyke to land in one of our fields.

As we learned later that day the Stranraer/Larne ferry went under and even later (no TV etc in those days!) that the storm (nameless of course) had caused havoc in the south of England, Belgium and the Netherlands with much flooding and loss of life – 135 from the aforementioned ferry alone and thousands of domestic and other animals.

The storm was a wake-up call for the strengthening of Holland's sea dykes (10 per cent of farmland was flooded) and for the planning of the London barrage (opened in 1984).

Apart from no name for the storm there was no mention of man-made climate change or screams of “since records began”. How things change!

A McCormick, Terregles, Dumfries

Holier than who?

Brian Wilson’s piece “Sturgeon played politics with Covid and now we all know it” (Perspective, 27 January) is a prime example of the pot calling the kettle black. Just as the Labour and Tory parties in Scotland slavering over the “revelations” emerging from the Covid Inquiry are no doubt thinking how they will affect their electoral chances, I should be surprised if the SNP didn’t consider the political effect of decisions they were making. I have no objection to this, they are all politicians and that’s what politicians do. But please spare us the “holier than thou” pitch.

What I do object to is trying to turn the Inquiry into a tribunal at which those who were engaged in government can be “held to account” instead of a forum to see what lessons can learned for the future. I have been surprised not to see in the reports any mention of the officials before the Inquiry being asked what, if any, changes in procedures they think might be helpful .

One further point. In his tirade about the deletion of WhatsApp messages Mr Wilson says they were about “how and why decisions were made”. I am intrigued to know how he is able say what deleted messages contained and I trust he will pass on to the Inquiry whatever means, technical or clairvoyant, he employed.

S Beck, Edinburgh

Lesson plan

Outbreaks of infection are to epidemiologists and microbiologists as earthquakes are to seismologists. Studying Covid outbreaks has given us an enormous amount of information about how the virus spreads, and scientists have been very busy putting such information into the public domain; more than 125,000 scientific papers about Covid were published during the first year of the pandemic.

The information from them lets me assure A Lewis (Letters, 30 January) that we know for certain that a much more important transmission route for the virus is by aerosols that travel in the air rather than exhaled droplets that fall quickly to the ground, and that touching contaminated door handles is much less important than either. Studies of the enormous outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise liner in February 2020 moored off Yokohama (712 cases,14 deaths) gave such information very early in the pandemic, for example.

The Diamond Princess also showed the importance of age as a risk factor for lethality, and that infection without symptoms was common. An important remit of the Covid public inquiries is to investigate how effective the authorities were in using this kind of information to develop and implement virus control policies.

I agree with A Lewis that by rectifying any shortcomings we could be better prepared when the next pandemic strikes. But as the chair of two inquiries into lethal outbreaks (E.coli in Scotland in 1996 and South Wales in 2005) I am a cynic, my inquiries demonstrating that while we are good at learning lessons, we are just as good at forgetting them.

Hugh Pennington, Aberdeen

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