Readers' Letters: Katrine water didn't double lifespan

Isambard Kingdom Brunel consulted on the Lock Katrine aquaduct

The aqueduct was built and finished in 1859 after consultation with those English experts Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Robert Stephenson. Big reasons for its construction were to supply industry and to fight fires. While protecting Glaswegians from the worst effects of the 1866 cholera pandemic, it had no beneficial effect on life expectancy, which diminished in the years after its construction; from 1821-27 it was 35.37 and from 1870-72 it was 32.27.

And the First Minister doesn't need permission from Boris Johnson to establish quarantine hotels, following the example of countries like New Zealand, which have used them successfully to control the virus. After all, health policy and its implementation has always been fully devolved. If it chose, Scotland could lead the way on this; a good example is the rapid and successful driving forward of effective food safety measures across the UK by the Secretary of State for Scotland against the hesitation of English ministries after the 1996 central Scotland E.coli O157 lethal food poisoning outbreak.

Hugh Pennington, Carlton Place, Aberdeen

Masking sense

Jeff Ace, chief executive of Dumfries & Galloway NHS trust, has made a video appeal stating that the D&G hospital service is overloaded with local Covid-19 patients, 90 per cent of whom have the new English strain of the virus.

Perhaps it would help if effective face masks are required even if shields are used indoors. It was very apparent in Dumfries that as soon as wearing facemasks in shops was made law virtually everyone complied. So can the law be strengthened to reduce transmission further by specifying which types of mask can be used?

Both blue Medical and Surgical certified masks are now readily available. The difference between these two mask types is that Surgical mask are treated with water repellent, which can prolong useful use.

The American Association of Science has posted an article, “Low cost measurement of face mask efficiency for filtering expelled droplets during speech” which lists the effectiveness of various types of mask. The most effective are Fitted N95 masks which remain reserved for hospital and similar usage. Those masks let no droplets through in tests. Almost as effective are those blue Surgical masks. Masks with valves should not be used as the exhaled air is not filtered.

Uncertified medical-looking masks reduce droplet count to 20 per cent compared with no mask, although all multilayer cotton masks performed better. Knitted masks and bandanas (handkerchiefs) were not particularly effective. It would be particularly simple to require those working behind plastic shields and wearing face shields to wear effective face masks as well and to ban masks with exhaust valves.

The new English virus strain is more infectious than previous Covid, which means that fewer virus particles (such as those in aerosols which float long distances indoors) are required for an infection to be established.

Ken Carew, Minden Crescent, Dumfries

Volunteer force

Giving an injection is easy and only takes a few seconds. Most people could be taught how to do it in an hour or less. Add on a bit of time for training in putting on and taking off PPE etc, but this shouldn’t take long either. Why isn’t an army of paid or unpaid volunteers not being trained and deployed to village halls, gymnasiums, GP practices and currently vacant schools to administer thousands of Covid immunisation injections at each centre daily, under the supervision of doctors and nurses? Millions of immunisations could be carried out very quickly with such a mobilisation of volunteers. Or is the problem limited availability of vaccines? If so, we should be told, and measures taken by the Government to boost production of vaccines.

Tom Johnstone, Station Road, Roslin

Deliver dream

Why is the SNP riding high in the polls? No bad press and a constant drip drip of Westminster gripes and bitching about democracy? Why no bad press? Have they made no mistakes, or maybe it simply means that they have done nothing. Well, education has gone backwards, the NHS is a mess and our economic growth lags behind rUK. But come independence, when they are in power, things will be different! Free of Westminster we could have bailed out RBS, we could have supported the country’s workforce through this pandemic. Our economy would outstrip the UK. I think not.

And as for democracy and having our voice heard, if they achieve independence their first act is to try to rejoin the EU, ceding their long-cherished independence to Brussels bureaucrats. During the entire Brexit saga they moaned about leaving the single market. Yet their first act would be to leave the single market that is their biggest market place – the UK (63 per cent) while the EU accounts for just 16%. And they voted against the EU/UK trade deal despite forever moaning about the risk of No-deal. Talk about looking both ways at once.

Ask yourself why, after 14 years of the SNP in power, is Scotland not a better place than England? The SNP argue everything that is wrong in Scotland is the fault of Westminster. Are they arguing Westminster is stopping investment in Scotland? It would make the case for independence irresistible if during their 14 years in power they had delivered at least some of the dream. Why haven’t they? Perhaps they have, perhaps Scotland today is exactly what it will be like under independence – failing services, lower growth than the UK, bigger deficit. What’s the old saying, if something sounds too good to be true...

Brian Smith, Forteviot, Perth

Labour is limp

News that the Labour Party under Sir Keir Starmer has no intention of trying to re-join the EU, thus abandoning freedom of movement in Europe. This, combined with his outright rejection of any democratic Scottish Parliament mandate to hold an independence referendum, shows that he is just another London establishment figure and there is no route back to the EU via Westminster.

Labour is now just another Brexit party as they backed Boris Johnson’s flawed EU trade deal which is unravelling by the day. Scotland’s food and drink producers called for a six-month Brexit extension to sort out teething issues but were ignored by Westminster, who have always considered them expendable.

Westminster only allowed five hours debate, at very short notice, of over 1000 detailed pages of EU trade arrangements – but that was better than the 15 minutes the Tories allowed to debate the impact on devolution under the UK Internal Market Bill power grab.

On democratic standards, Christine Jardine (Perspective, 11 January) has a very selective memory of campaigning in Edinburgh West where the SNP’s Michelle Thomson was subjected to disgraceful personal attacks by the Liberal Democrats in 2016, and Alex Cole-Hamilton’s dubious allocation of expenses between regional and constituency costs were rightly examined by the electoral Commission.

Mary Thomas, Watson Crescent, Edinburgh

Patriotic twins?

Disturbing parallels are ever-clearer between Scotland under Nicola Sturgeon and the USA under Donald Trump.

There may be legal action taken against the latter in light of his involvement in the attack on the Capitol last week and the row erupting between Sturgeon and Alex Salmond may go the full distance too.

Twitter has closed down Trump's account through which he expressed himself, without let or hindrance, in much the same way as Sturgeon is allowed free access to every household in Scotland through her daily, unfettered BBC TV and radio broadcasts. This is as unacceptable in Scotland as Trump’s tweets were in the States.

When "patriots" attacked and sacked the Capitol Building in Washington, I was struck by the many Confederate flags being borne aloft by those who believe that Trump’s “win” was "stolen" by the liberal left.

In Scotland we are used to mobs waving the Saltire flag from which the Confederate flag derives, marching in our towns and cities to cow us into submission. One of the leaders of the attack on the Capitol even wore face-paint, not unlike Mel Gibson in Braveheart.

Like American “patriots”, Scottish “patriots” only believe that democracy is right if they win and will not accept the defeat they had in 2014 because the situation “has changed”.

Of course it has. It always does and this allows a ready excuse not to accept defeat. Like these American "patriots", Scottish nationalists also think they "wuz robbed".

The break-up of the UK or the USA that these movements respectively advocate are only of benefit to the enemies of democracy.

Dave Anderson, Broomhill Road, Aberdeen

Times past

With reference to the useful letter on the “Good Old Days” from Colin McAllister (January 8), explaining why the UK tax year ends on April 5, it may be of interest that the Civil and Legal New Year’s Day in Scotland was changed to January 1 in 1600, though England (and the other British Dominions, according to Whitaker’s Almanac) continued to use March 25, Lady Day, until 1752.

By definition, the historical year, of course, began on January 1.

On the continent, most countries made the change to January 1 much earlier, from 1522 (Venice) to 1583 (The Netherlands) – though Russia delayed until 1725 and Tuscany until 1751.

Bill Hume, Muir Wood Rad, Currie

Write to The Scotsman

We welcome your thoughts. Write to [email protected] including name, address and phone number. Keep letters under 300 words, with no attachments, and avoid Letters to the Editor in your subject line.

A message from the Editor

Thank you for reading this article. We're more reliant on your support than ever as the shift in consumer habits brought about by coronavirus impacts our advertisers.

If you haven't already, please consider supporting our trusted, fact-checked journalism by taking out a digital subscription.