What will COP delegates make of our progress? - Readers' Letters

Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings have been a spectacular failure to date. Carbon emissions have increased since their first meeting in 1995 with 99 per cent emitted outside the UK.

Foreign delegates will be bemused by how Westminster politicians are dealing with vehicle decarbonisation, says a reader

In Glasgow, UK politicians can confidently lead by example on carbon reduction, with British engineers excelling as always. The zero carbon experts’ Built Environment Virtual Pavilion will be amazing.

Whilst emphasising that the UK carbon emissions are minuscule in global terms we have to recognise that many other countries could not have afforded the solutions adopted in the UK. One therefore hopes that Brits will also demonstrate our more natural examples from which others could benefit most. The promotion of forests and natural wetlands, habitat recovery, improved land management and the protection of peatlands whilst allowing adequate provision for farming, future building development and open space.

Foreign delegates will be bemused by Westminster politicians dealing with vehicle decarbonisation choices as though they were on their first visit to Hamleys Toy Shop.

When they visit the countryside they will be horrified that Holyrood politicians have failed to address pollution from 'muirburn’.

They may also consider that the UK has dealt with carbon reduction to excess whilst drastically failing to properly deal with flood defences

Visiting engineers will be amazed at the location of wind turbines far remote from the loads which they serve.

No other country has allowed their best landscapes to be decimated in this way using hundred of kilometres of ugly and inefficient overhead transmission.

Whilst accepting that the impact of humans could be accelerating warming, we cannot ignore that climate change is occurring as part of the natural phenomenon of warming and cooling. It would be timely for COP to acknowledge James Croll from rural Perthshire, this being the 200th anniversary of his birth. As early as 1875 he raised awareness that there had been several ice ages with alternating warm periods.

JHR Hampson, Kinnesswood, Perth and Kinross

Land reform

Robin McAlpine in his article "Scotland’s grouse moor problem. How feudal land ownership is holding back capitalist entrepreneurs” (Scotsman, August 11) makes a plea for yet more land reform in Scotland.

He accuses politicians of being afraid of reform and placing rural landowners of being at the heart of a "gaping hole in our economy”. Politicians on all sides would find Mr McAlpine’s first claim as thoroughly bizarre as the Scottish Parliament has already passed two Land Reform Acts since its inception as well as other related legislation such as the Community Empowerment Act, and the current Scottish Government has made clear it sees land reform as being an ongoing process. The Scottish Government’s own research found that only 17 per cent of people see land reform as a major political priority, certainly not reflecting the impression Mr McAlpine seeks to give.

Depicting grouse moor owners as sitting in splendid isolation from the challenges of economic development would be comical if it were not so out of touch with reality. Mr McAlpine insists that clean energy and jobs are essential in the fight against climate change. On Scottish moors, there is substantial peatland restoration work happening on a daily basis to help combat climate change and as we move into August rural communities will reap the economic benefits of visitors to the moors as the grouse shooting progresses.

The reality is that grouse moor managers like landowners of all types and sizes across Scotland are playing their part to meet Scotland’s ambitious targets on biodiversity and climate change as well as supporting communities and the rural economy. To have a constructive debate on the future of land use, let’s base our discussions on the reality of what is being done rather than perception or ideology.

Sarah Jane Laing, CEO, Scottish land & Estates, Musselburgh, East Lothian

Grade inflation

The International Baccalaureate’s global average was steady for the first 50 years and is only marginally up for the two Covid years. As for A-Levels, the percentage of A grades held fairly steady form the early 1960s to the mid-80s at around nine per cent but thereafter they soared, reaching 27 per cent by 2010. By then the same percentage of pupils achieved an A* as achieved an A in 1984. This year was simply absurd: 45 per cent gained an A while 20 per cent gained an A*.

Any attempt to maintain standards is faced with an alliance of government, schools, exam boards, parents and pupils, all of whom want higher grades.

Understandably politicians and teachers want to boast about doing a good job but do parents seriously believe that a grade handed out to half the population will guarantee their child a place at Oxbridge and the professional job-for-life available to the tiny elite of Baby Boomers in the 1960s?

Dr John Cameron, St Andrews, Fife

Disengaged tone

It’s unfortunate Education Minister Gavin Williamson forgot his A Level grades recently. Maybe they were stored on his phone which suddenly became “broken”, rendering the information unusable. The Tory government has certainly been unusually unlucky with phones over the past few weeks.

D Mitchell, Edinburgh

Attainment gap

Perhaps Richard Allison (Letters, 12 August) can enlighten me as to when Scotland had the world’s leading education system as it certainly wasn’t in either of our lifetimes. If he was serious about tackling the education attainment gap, which was narrowing prior to Covid, he would be demanding that our Scottish Government got the full powers to tackle poverty and inequality – the main reasons behind the attainment gap.

The attainment gap is much worse in England and a report by the Institute for Government on the Department of Education’s handling of school assessment in England during the pandemic is highly critical and illustrated the superior performance by the SNP leadership in the crisis which funnelled money through local authorities with much better outcomes.

The good news is that a record number of over 31,000 Scottish students have obtained places at Scottish universities this year.

Any Scottish Government can only partly influence the fate of children through the education system. With independence we could follow the Scandinavian model and drastically cut the gap between the richest and poorest in society, which is surest way to reduce the education attainment gap.

Mary Thomas, Edinburgh

Vaccine app

I was delighted to see The Scotsman (“Vaccine app delay leaves Scots second-class citizens”, 12 August) highlighting the SNP's sheer incompetence in producing digital proof of vaccination as I have been complaining to my MSP for months about this matter.

However, my delight turned to despair when I read that the paper proof of vaccination is not accepted by various agencies. I hope to visit family in Belgium very soon and now wonder whether I will be allowed entry into hospitality venues there.

Friends in England and several EU countries simply cannot understand why we are still forced to piddle about with bits of paper while they have been so much further advanced for some time now.

Meanwhile, I have lost count of how often I have heard people asking why we can't have at least an adaptation of the app used in England. But then they realise that the SNP have a dogmatic insistence on being different and an aversion to anything that's tagged with "England" or "English".

Malcolm Parkin, Kinross, Perth and Kinross

Casus belli

The list of Afghans seeking asylum grows, as does that of retired generals and others pleading their case.

It is to be hoped that the cost in perpetuity of resettling interpreters and their families will be borne out of the defence budget, and in particular the funding of those units which neglected to have their troops learn the local language. The army might have been more successful had it taken this trouble.

Former employees of the British are far from being the only people now at risk. They, like many of the others, were ultimately serving Afghanistan, not Britain.

Those with a well-founded fear of Taliban justice have something Afghanistan badly needs and which is sadly lacking in much of the army western experts designed and built for that country: motivation to fight the Taliban. We should be training them to handle a rifle, not offering them a magic carpet ride to a relatively prosperous exile.

So many Afghanis are seen as needing sanctuary as to call for a significant sharing of our homeland. The Taliban advance thus constitutes a claim and an incursion against UK territory. We should be treating this as a casus belli while we still have friends in Afghanistan to fight alongside us.

John Riseley, Harrogate, Yorkshire

Takes the biscuit

The death knell has unfortunately been sounded for the McVities staff in Glasgow (Scotsman, 12 August) with the failure of the Scottish Government to present a viable option for the company to continue their presence in the city.

The SNP just don’t understand that businesses need security and stability to invest. Nicola Sturgeon and her incessant talk of another independence referendum does not offer that. Excess capacity in the UK was the reason given for looking to close the plant. Until the SNP and their supporters wake up and smell the coffee while eating a McVities biscuit made in England, Scotland’s economic future looks bleak.

Jane Lax, Aberlour, Moray

The joke’s over

We now learn that David Millar's vow to sing along with the Rangers' Loyalist song book was a (woeful) attempt at humour (Letters, 11 August). Methinks the gentleman protests way too much.

By the way, I didn't say he would sing along with the Billy Boys on his proposed jaunt into Loyalist territory, I asked whether he would.

Gill Turner, Edinburgh

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