SNP control issues should worry us all

While I might disagree with the likes of Tam Dyell, it is vital that we have politicians who are not afraid to speak their minds, something Tam did and in doing so raised questions that the public, if not the government of the day, wanted answered.

That is going in Scotland, and going fast.

It is just one more thing that this government has  destroyed: local government emasculated, universities afraid to speak up, a police force that appears to defy the government at will, an NHS database that will be open to myriad public bodies and a spy in every family – the list goes on.

Sooner or later the apologists for the SNP’s attack on democracy will see from personal experience that they have been duped but by then I suspect writers like Brian Wilson will have been silenced as we will have one party, one police force, one point of view that is allowed.

Perhaps a “grand coalition” at Westminster might provide us with a measure of democratic protection.

I am sure that the SNP would call “foul” but it would be a government that even a majority of Scots would have voted for and thus would be truly democratic.

(Dr) Roger I  Cartwright

Turretbank Place

Crieff

Given the SNP’s new disciplinary code that turns its MSPs into mere lobby fodder; and granted that there is no  perfect voting system, perhaps the time has come to phase out “representative” governments in which we choose others to do our thinking for us and replace it with “direct” government?

The recent referendum proved that most of us are well capable of making the informed and correct choice for ourselves, in which case parliamentary intermediaries are redundant, and ever more so as we the people are just as educated and informed as them; possibly more so.

I suggest future Holyroods meet annually merely to check that referendum-preferred policies are being correctly implemented by the appropriate civil service department, the role of political parties now being to devise and cost rival policies around a given concern for us to debate and approve/reject.

And as to choosing these new-style MSPs? Why not at random as for jury service? It’s my experience that God usually makes a better choice than we humans.

Tim Flinn

Haddington

East Lothian