Readers' Letters: Lack of mandatory Holocaust education in Scottish schools is shameful

Keir Starmer recently restated his commitment to Holocaust education in England, where it is mandatory for all school pupils. This is standard practice among the world’s developed democracies. Yet Scotland remains an outlier.

The decision to teach pupils about the atrocity is left to the discretion of individual schools and teachers, and the content that is taught is largely unregulated. There is no robust data on the scale of its provision.

And while my attempts to ask Scottish Government officials about the scope of Holocaust education in Scottish schools were waved off with vague reassurances of its ubiquitousness, this does not align with what I observed in my own school just a couple of years ago, where Holocaust education could fall by the wayside owing to something as simple as time constraints. The young people I consulted about the topic when I was a Member of the Scottish Youth Parliament conceded that their study of the Holocaust was largely restricted to a screening of The Boy In the Striped Pyjamas.

A group of child survivors behind a barbed wire fence at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern Poland, on the day of the camp’s liberation by the Red Army, 27th January 1945 (Picture: Alexander Vorontsov/Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images)

I was glad to see Holocaust education being discussed in letters in The Scotsman recently, but the elephant in the room must be addressed directly: Scotland is falling behind due to the Scottish Government’s unwillingness to commit to mandatory Holocaust education. It is shamefully letting down a generation of pupils, as well as the memory of victims of the Holocaust.

Daisy Stewart Henderson, Glasgow

Threat to business

The ongoing deceptionpropagated by the Prime Minister and his Chancellor that the UK economy is a basket case has been well and truly ridiculed by the OECD, with UK growth forecasts for 2024 being upgraded for 0.4 per cent to 1.1 per cent.

This is the largest upgrade of any country in the G7. As a result, UK growth is likely to be the second highest in the G7. It is abundantly clear that the increase in taxes certain to be announced in the Budget are entirely driven to meet the continuing demands of the Labour Party paymasters, the trade unions.

This far-left Government will continue throughout their term to meet inflated wage demands, impose penal workers’ rights and will drive out the wealth and job creators. The damage this Government will do to UK business will be self-evident in a very short time.

Richard Allison, Edinburgh

Join the dots

Do Labour politicians not think before making comments? Two recent examples – firstly, Pat McFadden MP said at conference that Britain is a great place in which to invest. Has he forgotten the party line that Britain is broken due to “14 years of Tory misrule”?

Then Ed Miliband MP attacked landlords, saying that more regulation was needed for tenants, after “14 years of Tory misrule”. Has he forgotten that the last example we saw of poor landlordism was from a Labour MP in London! Can they not join up the dots?

William Ballantine, Bo'ness, West Lothian

Help the needy

Hard as it is to believe, almost 35,000 people who are being paid the annual Winter Fuel Allowance are based abroad.

Avoiding the harsh UK winter in a warmer climate does not suggest hardship to me. It does not induce the image of some poor old soul shivering mid-winter in a cold house. All it does is manifestly suggest that the payment should indeed be targeted.

I have received the payment for a number of years and always felt a tinge of guilt as, though far from being well-off, I was not in real need. So, I have no problem at all with it now being given only to those in genuine need.

Alexander McKay, Edinburgh

Not kilty?

Oh dear. Ni Holmes attempts to conscript Rabbie Burns into the separatist movement by quoting from one of his songs (Letters, 25 September).

In 1795 Burns would have sworn an oath of allegiance to George III on joining the Dumfries Volunteer Company, formed to resist invasion from revolutionary France. He may have done so again when he later became a customs officer. Although passionately egalitarian in outlook, there’s precious little evidence Burns had Scottish nationalist leanings.

Ni Holmes asks whether His Majesty will address Holyrood “dressed in a kilt in a shameless display of cultural appropriation.” So presumably, all kilted Sassenachs and other “foreigners” at ceilidhs and Burns Suppers are also guilty of “cultural appropriation”?

King Charles had a Scottish grandmother and is distantly descended from James VI. Does this ancestry not give him some right to go around in Highland dress?

During the last official royal visit to Edinburgh, a dozen or so republicans, screaming abuse, were outnumbered by hundreds of cheering well-wishers lining the route.

Ni Holmes rather grandly concludes: “An independent Scotland with a society founded on social justice can have no more place for the inherited wealth and privilege of the monarchy than it has for food banks.”

This utopia would also provide a guaranteed universal basic income, electricity (along with most other things) would be virtually free, people could change gender on demand, ferries would be built on time and the Moon would be made of blue cheese.

Martin O’Gorman, Edinburgh

Let’s all strike

Speaking on Tuesday at a fringe event at the Labour conference, GMB leader Gary Smith branded the Government's flagship net-zero pledge “bonkers” and “fundamentally dishonest” – and claimed it was “not rooted in the real world”. He is absolutely correct, and he further added that one million jobs are at risk.

The direct jobs at risk are in the oil and gas sector, the car manufacturing, steel production and numerous other manufacturing jobs, plus all the jobs downstream which rely on these industries. He accused politicians of “exporting jobs and importing virtue”. How true. The UK needs a national strike to curb the Net Zero Dictators who threaten our jobs, our economy and our freedom. Go get them, Gary.

Clark Cross, Linlithgow, West Lothian

Happy days

What an interesting article on the proposed sale of Carbisdale Castle, the latest twist in its long history of Victorian scandal (your report, 25 September). The long story of the Castle is worth an article on its own, it would make fascinating reading. Amid all its splendour, I have a happy memory of staying there when it was a Youth Hostel in the 1950s for the huge sum of half a crown (twelve and a half pence) per night. What a privilege!

Sandy Macpherson, Edinburgh

Israel’s friends

Isn't it time that all those Labour and Conservative Friends of Israel, including the favourite to become the next Tory leader, Robert Jenrick, spoke out about Benjamin Netanyahu's actions against the ordinary people of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon who have been slaughtered in their thousands by bombing?

Why the silence about Israel's flagrant breech of international law which bans booby traps, which the pagers in the Lebanon terror attack were. When every booby-trapped pager beeped the respondent looked down to see what the message was, and, if not killed outright, was blinded. Surgeons were faced with the grim task of removing hundreds of sightless eyes.

How can anyone who claims to be a friend of Israel stand by and say nothing, or parrot the absurb propaganda phrase “Israel has a right to defend itself”? Increasingly, the only friends Israel has are the arms companies supplying it with weapons.

William Loneskie, Oxton, Lauder, Berwickshire

Good value

Labour MSP Jackie Baillie is completely wrong when she claims people in Scotland pay more for less under the SNP (Perspective, 25 September). Labour blames Tory Westminster policies for the UK £22 billion “black hole” and forthcoming austerity but this also impacts on the Scottish Government.

As Wes Streeting said when challenged on the much poorer NHS performance in Labour-run Wales, “all roads do lead back to Westminster because even though this is devolved, decisions taken in Westminster have an impact on the NHS across the whole country”. Brexit plus high energy costs and inflation have destroyed public services throughout the UK and Labour’s plans for increased privatisation of health services will mean less money for any Scottish government.

For slightly higher taxes, people in Scotland get much better public services than in England or Wales, not least in NHS performance, with falling waiting times, and more doctors, nurses, dentists and hospital beds per head of population, plus much better paid public sector staff, including teachers and police officers.

More affordable homes have been built in Scotland than in England or Wales. In Scotland we have less homelessness than elsewhere and less compared to the last year of the Labour/Liberal Democrats Executive.

We have fewer people in poverty than in England or Wales and the education attainment gap is closing, with a much lower pupil-teacher ratio than elsewhere.

Also, dualling of the A9 would be much more advanced if the Unionist parties hadn’t voted in 2007 to move the transport budget monies set aside for the A9 into the Edinburgh Tram project, which the SNP opposed as the business case never stood up, a view now vindicated by the news that Edinburgh Trams operating losses have hit £55 million.

Mary Thomas, Edinburgh

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