Readers' Letters: Leave it to historians to tell the true story of slavery

As Mark Boyle comments (Letters, 5 January), ignorance about history and of slavery is ubiquitous nowadays. It is often the primary vehicle used to attack the United Kingdom, as Foysol Choudhury did in his article of 3 January. Our museums should, indeed, tell the story of slavery – and tell it “warts and all”.

It should be made plain that every society had slavery until the abolitionist movement started in this country. North African slavers preyed on Britain and Europe for centuries from the 1600s. One-and-a-half million Europeans ended up as their slaves.

The slavery which existed in the Empire in the 18th century had vanished in the 19th, and yet we still get attacked by those whose own societies practised it. It is fascinating as a way of distracting attention from their own history.

Take Bengal, which became Bangladesh in the 1970s. It had huge numbers of slaves before we British made it illegal. Indeed, Sir Henry Bartle Frere wrote in 1883 that “when the emancipation of the slaves was contemplated in British India, (they) far exceeded the number of the same classes in all the slaveholding colonies and dominions of Great Britain and America put together”.

Members of the public walk past a Black Lives Matter street sign in Edinburgh in June 2020. Activists hung alternative street signs on several streets and buildings with ties to Scotland’s slave trade around the city

Like Mr Choudhury, I am against racism and all for the true story of slavery – and abolition – being told in our museums. Perhaps we should ask someone qualified to tell that story. How about a historian?

Andrew HN Gray, Edinburgh

Bankrolling death

At this start of a new year we can take an optimistic view of the future – if we are blind and lobotomised. The race towards extinction grows ever hotter, and the technology of industrialised killing makes ever more spectacular advances.

The old-fashioned Trident will be replaced with the exciting new advanced Dreadnought system, new hypersonic aircraft will deliver hydrogen bombs so quickly that their targets won’t even know they have been launched, there will be undreamt of developments in the realm of cyber warfare – miniature drones and other amazing gadgets. We are bang on course for global suicide. And that is not taking imminent climate chaos into consideration.

In this fatal game our mutual co-operation is essential – and has ever been thus. We can see our future by looking at our present. Consider the unseen financial ramifications behind Trident. The Russian equivalent of Trident is the Dolgorukiy class submarine. This is manufactured by a company called Sevmesh, which receives its financing from the state-owned VEB (Vnesheconombank) bank. Being “state-owned”, however, doesn't always mean state-funded, as an archived press release from 2011 shows.

In April of that year VEB signed an agreement for a syndicated loan worth $2.4bn, from 19 banks – and they were all outside of Russia. These included Barclays and HSBC, both UK banks which are also both directly funding Trident via investment and financing arrangements with Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems, and Babcock.

Most noticeably, this list of backers includes the Royal Bank of Scotland. The bank that we, the public, hold an 84 per cent stake in after the 2008 financial crash. Thus, a bank that invests in ten companies involved in Trident, is also a financier of Russia's VEB bank, and bankrolls the Dolgorukiy submarine. So RBS bankrolls Britain’s nuclear “deterrent” and the Russian one too. And to add insult to injury, we pay for both these, via taxation. We are paying for our own extinction.

Brian Quail, Glasgow

Cracks showing

So Stephen Flynn thinks the Prime Minister should “pay public sector workers what they are worth” (Scotsman, 5 January). I can envisage Nicola Sturgeon putting her face in her hands and saying “what is he saying” as she reads it.

So does that mean there is more money in Scotland to pay public sector workers “what they are worth”?

Take note: the internal rebellion within the SNP has started.

J Moore, Glasgow

Longer holiday

Richard Allison (Letters, 5 January) forgot to mention that, despite a worse NHS crisis in England, Westminster’s Christmas recess lasted four days longer than at Holyrood.

Also, England has had six changes of health ministers in the last five years yet the NHS continues to decline due to lack of Tory investment, which has knock-on Barnett consequentials for Scotland.

The Scottish Government has made a far higher pay offer to nurses, who are already better paid than in England, and has more GPs per head of population than elsewhere in the UK, but many of the NHS problems are outwith the control of the Scottish Government.

Many senior clinicians left the NHS as they felt penalised due to the UK taxation rules on their pension scheme as there was no incentive to enable skilled and experienced staff to continue to contribute to the NHS in the run-up to and beyond retirement age.

According to analysis by the Nuffield Trust, the UK has 4,285 fewer European doctors than if the rising numbers who were coming before the Brexit vote in 2016 had been maintained.

Many health care staff left after Brexit and Keir Starmer’s comments on too many foreigners in the NHS, with no plans for European freedom of movement, won’t encourage them to return, while Labour’s shadow health minister, Wes Streeting, told a Tory newspaper he was willing to fight the health unions battling for the jobs, pay and working conditions of their members, in order to push through reforms with more privatisation of the NHS.

Mary Thomas, Edinburgh

Missing ministers

During the Covid emergency, Nicola Sturgeon was never off our TV screens. She dispensed the wisdom, or otherwise, of the medical establishment, who scarcely had a look-in.

Now that we have an A&E emergency, and a general NHS problem that is endemic, she is not to be seen. Nor is the health minister, Humza Yousaf. Should not one or other of them be telling us every day not to clog up A&E services with seasonal flu that can be treated with rest, fluids and paracetamol?

Instead, we have Jason Leitch sent out to bat for the administration, telling us to wear face masks (Scotsman, 5 January). Should our elected politicians be hiding behind an unelected medic when the situation is catastrophic?

Jill Stephenson, Edinburgh

Pumped up

Green MSP Patrick Harvie has admitted that his back-of-a-fag-packet plan for the replacement of domestic fossil fuel heating systems may not be suitable for 40,000 rural homes.

Mr Harvie is in for a big shock in the coming years. He is about to find out that a significant number of homes in Scotland cannot afford nor do they want costly, noisy and inefficient heat pumps installed. Try coming up with a properly planned, workable and affordable plan which will help to reduce emissions and not force people into debt which they can ill-afford.

Ian Balloch, Grangemouth, Falkirk

Hidden message

The statement by Jeremy Hunt (“Energy bill scheme unsustainable”, Scotsman, 5 January) made no reference to the impact on electricity consumersonce gas (currently 10p/unit) has been phased out in preference to electricity (currently 35p/unit).

As domestic consumers obtain around 80 per cent of their energy from gas then a green transition will see a massive escalation in energy bills. Scots should note the warning from the Chancellor that such costs cannot be sustained by any government, hence the present energy costs will be the new normal when fossil fuels are no longer available.

Ian Moir, Castle Douglas, Dumfries & Galloway

Work-shy Scots?

If after 15 years of SNP rule we have 150,000 Scots of working age who have never worked for even a day, as reported, then Ms Sturgeon’s demand to be judged on her record in education really bites home.

When Aristotle wrote that one sign of a genuine democracy is the absence of the need to beg he surely didn’t mean that the idle would be paid by the active not to work, as seems to be the case in today’s Scotland. In a properly set up education system no-one under 21 possessing sound mind and body should be allowed to abandon some form of full-time schooling without first having attained a respectable level in some sort of economically desirable and saleable skill.

The saying that apples don’t fall far from the tree explains why idleness seems to run in families and certain cultures, but that neither excuses nor condones it. One function of a good education is to beneficially interrupt the cycle of the work-shy tradition.

Surely the public funds now spent on enabling and supporting laziness could instead be devoted to stimulating and enabling worthwhile economic activity self-reliance?

Tim Flinn, Garvald, East Lothian

Hillsborough Law

Can anyone be even mildly surprised that the SNP have rejected any chance of Scotland joining the UK-wide Hillsborough Law? This would ensure those members of the public affected by major disasters would have the right to legal and other aid to tackle public bodies in court and follows on from the disaster at Hillsborough when a large number of football fans were killed some years ago. With embarrassing complacency the SNP case is that things are different in Scotland and this new law is unnecessary.

The SNP’s knee-jerk rejection is reminiscent of their dislike of conducting the last Census in conjunction with the rest of the UK. This ensured a complete and utter disaster. All done in the cause of being more nationalistic, somehow more “Scottish”.

Alexander McKay, Edinburgh

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