The polls are suggesting that there is a real possibility that Reform UK may become the official opposition after next year’s Holyrood election. I believe that giving Reform that degree of power would be an absolute disaster.
For instance, one of Nigel Farage’s policies is to take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Nearly 300 organisations signed a joint statement marking the 75th anniversary of the ECHR. The statement highlights how recent political attacks on human rights overlook the British values of fairness, dignity and justice.
These values obviously do not inform Reform’s priorities. Nor are they Conservative values under the current leadership. Even Keir Starmer seems reluctant to adopt them unless pushed to do so by the electorate and his backbenchers.
Neil Mackay said in his article “Scotland will be Starmer’s Waterloo … unless he takes this one daring gamble” (The Herald, November 13) that “if Labour’s guiding mission isn’t eradicating child poverty then what’s the point of the party?”. While for instance Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made such eradication a priority, Keir Starmer is having to be persuaded to repeal the two-child benefit cap imposed by a Conservative government. “It should have come naturally to the [Starmer] government in its first days,” says Neil Mackay. Compare its performance in relation to disability benefits and the taxation of wealth.
How the Labour Party has fallen, having abandoned, to all intents and purposes, its social democratic principles which were essential to protect those at the margins of society from the harsh impacts of neoliberalism.
John Milne, Uddingston.
Your Party offers hope
As an independence-supporting socialist, I was pleased to read the article about the new Your Party ("Corbyn’s party set for Holyrood", The Herald, November 17). Scotland has been crying out for a progressive socialist party since the advent of Blue Labour. The sight of Labour politicians sharing a stage with the Tories during the referendum debates spelled the end of my support for the party that was drifting towards the right in its quest for popularity and power.
If there is the possibility of a left of centre coalition (Your Party and the Greens) then I would feel that we are moving in the right direction and the possibility of independence could be closer to reality than at present.
Scotland is historically a socialist country and hopefully being given the opportunity to vote for a new and progressive socialist party will restore hope for the future.
Ian R Robison, Aberdeen.
Read more letters
- Labour has gone too far in trying to out-Farage Reform UK
- The real reason that Labour is struggling. Clue: it's not Brexit
- Could this be a clear direction of travel for Scottish education?
Consider the refugee children
Having read the details of Shabana Mahmood's latest proposals in The Herald ("Consent for asylum system ‘could fall apart if illegal migration not tackled’, the Home Secretary warns", The Herald, November 17), I immediately tried to put myself into the shoes of a refugee child, in her second year of secondary school, at one of the excellent schools near me. She has a younger brother in primary seven and another sister in primary five. Her parents have been here as refugees for 11 years; she came here as a one-year-old child, just learning to walk.
She returns home this evening to find her parents in distress. They have just received a letter from the Home Office telling them that the family must remove themselves from this country (she thought it was her country) within two months. Her father (a nurse) is in fear for his life because he made enemies while resisting a brutal regime, and they are still there. Her mother is a doctor and knows the relationships with patients and colleagues she has made over the years here will be lost.
My first thought was "for the love of God", my second thought was "just try that up here in Glasgow or Edinburgh or even in Ayr, Mrs Mahmood".
John Jamieson, Ayr.
• Re Clark Cross’s letter (November 17) consigning migrants to warehouses: he does realise, doesn’t he, that that these migrants are living, breathing human beings?
Alastair Clark, Stranraer.
Indy answer to immigration
The first “boat people” were Vietnamese refugees fleeing that country after the fall of Saigon. Many landed in Australia and the Australian Federal Immigration Minister changed the terminology from Irregular Maritime Arrivals to Illegal Maritime Arrivals, then the jargon went from “refugees” to asylum-seeker because the term “refugee” had cultural connotations that engender sympathy. Now a new generation of “boat people” are arriving on England’s southern coast, leading to the upending of political norms in dealing with a problem that Brexit exacerbated. Reform has led the “kick ‘em out” race and Labour and the Tories are desperate to catch up, with policies on asylum that both would have utterly condemned a short decade ago. Scotland can escape this unseemly dive into the gutter with a simple Yes vote to restore our sovereignty. With a normal international border an independent Scotland would have an immigration policy that would work for our country and also help deal with county line drug-dealing gangs. As members of the EU, we would be able to return illegal migrants to where they came from.
GR Weir, Ochiltree.
Cumming has the script all wrong
The thespian Alan Cumming supports Scottish secession generally but for three reasons in particular (“Cumming in independence call: Westminster should get boots off our necks”, The Herald, October 13).
First, because the SNP and Greens at Holyrood voted to have another referendum. Like many separatists, Mr Cumming does not understand that Westminster is the sovereign parliament and Holyrood is a devolved, subaltern assembly. Second, that "we" – but he lives in the US – "tried to make it better for trans people to live in Scotland" and that was vetoed by Westminster. Mr Cumming’s lack of concern for women’s privacy, dignity and safety does him no credit. Why should women have to undress in front of men and cede primacy in women’s sports to biological males?
Third, he deplores Westminster’s vetoing of the ill-thought-out Deposit Return Scheme. Some of us are perfectly happy with a kerbside bottle collection and do not want to have to lug bottles to some shop to return them.
This is all summed up by his intemperate instruction to Westminster: "get your boots off our necks". He isn’t the only Scottish nationalist to use utterly inappropriate language about Scotland’s position in the UK, which was endorsed by a majority of Scots in 2014. If only they were better informed.
Jill Stephenson, Edinburgh.
Betrayal of the Highlands
Highland MP Angus Macdonald says that the cost of heating his Highland constituency office is 24p per kwh compared to 6p per kwh for his Westminster base ("Highland MP flags unfair fuel costs", The Herald, November 13). On the Isle of Lewis, where I am a trustee of a community building, our heating cost is 35p per kwh. No wonder Na h-Eileanan Siar have the highest rate of households in fuel poverty. And what do the people of the Highlands and Islands get in return for paying these massive electricity costs? We get the environmental destruction that follows massive wind turbines and all their associated infrastructure. Red-listed birds and peatlands – one of the best carbon stores in the world – are expendable. As are the rural population; not many votes in the north. Politicians in London and Edinburgh, none of whom pays 35p per unit of energy, make the decisions. They extol rain forests in faraway countries while they can’t wait to bring the heavy machinery and the concrete to what is left of rural Britain.
Catriona Campbell, Isle of Lewis.
• The SNP sacrificing the Highlands for England’s net zero push is unforgivable. Scotland already produces more renewable electricity than it consumes, yet Highland households pay the highest prices in the UK. High prices to fund our own destruction by the industrialisation of our beautiful landscape, our wild places and nature.
The SNP is throwing the Highlands, its own people, under the bus of our colonial masters. This is not Scottish nationalism; it is complicit exploitation and it is surrender.
Right now, with the current flood of planning applications, our communities are being ignored, democracy forgotten and our lifeblood tourism imperilled. In England, they would never dream of doing this to the Lake District or Hampstead Heath, but here the SNP is sacrificing its own people, its own land and wildlife, its own tourist industry and communities for foreign shareholders and bill payers down south.
I suspect that this betrayal will be the SNP’s epitaph.
Paul Johnston, Tore, Rosshire.
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