Letters: Britain is not racist — it's the BLM protests that are stirring up racial tension

How are we, as the people of Scotland (that equal partner in the Union, remember), to view this? Scotland has the lowest recorded racial crime since 2004 at a time when folk are correctly more willing to report it.

Yes Glasgow had tobacco barons but no slave ships sailed from Scotland and, in the late 18th and early 19th century, slavery was the dominant moral issue.Today four per cent of Scots are non-white. We welcome proportionately more refugees than anywhere else in the UK. Our bestpaid Scots are those of Chinese and Indian origin. Glasgow made Nelson Mandela a Freeman of the city when London called him a terrorist. The SNP Government has made diversity and anti-racism a cornerstone of its administrations. Scotland does not have an anti-immigrant party.

Are we really living with a dystopian racist nightmare to our south? I don't think so. Major recent European and British academic research has concluded that the system is no longer deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities. Ten of the 11 co-authors of the recent English research were from an ethic minority background, and their 258-page report offers informed research, not the divisive rhetoric of Mr Banjo.

Since the ghastly events in Minnesota, BLM protests in England have stirred up the worst racial tension seen in a generation, while a minority see racism in every scenario. Government Minister Kemi Badenoch has said Britain is one of the best countries in the world to be a black person. European research has similarly remarked that the UK is a beacon as a successful multicultural community. Yes, racism must be stamped out and tackled where it exists; though the deplorable Brexit violence against Poles and Czechs was not racist. Today geography, family, socio economic and social class backgrounds have far more impact than racism. 

John V Lloyd, Inverkeithing.

THE CURSE OF MYOPIA

WE are all familiar with the phrase "fine words butter no parsnips". We have now had two good examples of that saying within one week andweek and both are pretty galling.

Sir Kevan Collins, appointed by the PM to come up with a policy which clearly would need funding to bring pupil levels of education back up to normality, resigned his position as education tsar when he saw how little the Treasury would lend to executing his catch-up programme.

Then the G7 talked big about nobody being safe until everybody was safe and then promised to provide by the end of 2022 a derisory one billion doses of the vaccine where 11bn would be needed to flatten the pandemic.

Such insouciance or blindness to the practicalities suggests that the UK Government is treating the educational deficit imposed upon a large cohort of students rather lightly and the seriousness of the Covid situation has not registered fully with the fat cats of the richer countries.

Until our leaders get their ducks in order, we in Britain are going to reap the whirlwind of neglect in relation to the failure to hand over sufficient funds to remedy the the shortfall in education while globally there will be constant and continuous exposure to new variants which will weaken the efficacy of the vaccination programmes being rolled out in our more affluent areas.

Why is myopia the curse of our Western democracies?

Can't they see that they need to be more proactive and energised to defeat the march of this blight upon the lives of those affected in both those sensitive areas?

Denis Bruce, Bishopbriggs.

THE problem with vaccinating the world’s population will be the inability of many countries to organise and implement the process.

It is therefore critical that this task is supervised by the United States and European countries, otherwise plane-loads of vaccines will simply expire in storage due to failed distribution or lack of refrigeration.

Malcolm Parkin, Kinross.