I HAVE a great respect for Common Weal and am pleased to see them running with an idea I launched some 20 years ago (Call for citizens’ panel as check on Holyrood, The National, December 28).

I have, however, a serious concern with their methodology.

The technique I had proposed was the gender-balanced use of the “jury selection” system, which is as near random as it can be. However, while declaring that a random selection process be employed, Common Weal then go on to suggest that the selection would be “weighted”. This implies bias.

Currently, MPs, MSPs, MEPs and local councillors are all chosen by private, invisible, unelected groups who only offer for election the people they want elected. Common Weal’s “weighting” would give a freedom to these shadowy selectors to “get the right people in place.”

This certainly happens now! All elections are of people chosen by these techniques, and more times than not their choices are good, but it allows subterfuge, it allows collusion and, in this case, it could develop a framework for producing a politically weighted panel, which I believe is quite different from the intention of the Common Weal.

The jury selection process should be used as is with a “weighting” only for gender. This would produce a revision panel free from political selection which should remain, under penalty, outside political organisational interference.

Politicians often discard good ideas because they come from “the other party”. This is not a good way to behave and is not the way forward for Scotland.

Christopher Bruce, Taynuilt

IT was great to see Common Weal prove themselves – as they have done many times previously – as being true to their own description of themselves as a “think and do” tank.

Their proposal for a second chamber in Holyrood is well overdue. Since the re-establishment of Scotland’s Parliament, I have felt that a second chamber is sorely missing. I was surprised that no such proposal was given much serious consideration in the 1990s and the parliament’s early years.

During this time, I heard many arguments that the committee system at Holyrood was so strong and powerful that it would fulfill the role of acting as a check and balance on the legislating chamber. However, committees too, are part of the legislature, and are dominated by the governing party.

In the years when we always had coalition Scottish Governments this was perhaps fine, though my suspicion that a committee system dominated by the majority party cannot effectively function as a scrutinising, critical counterweight to the governing party's (or parties') point of view has been borne out by many who have attended such meetings.

So, the fact a second chamber is needed is something I agree with. And while the idea of members being appointed – or, worse, being there because of who they were born to – is anathema to any modern democracy, I would question Common Weal’s proposal to choose members at random.

How do they propose to enforce this? Will it be like jury service, where you can be fined if you don’t have a legitimate reason for attending? And how much time do they propose this will take up? I don’t want part-time, half-hearted scrutiny of the laws I am expected to live under. Will people be paid? Surely they must. What will their employers say? Will they have a job to go back to and/or be given time off without being hassled from them, or trying to secure this compensation? And is “randomness” really fair?

Patricia Waits, Bridge of Weir

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Suicide prevention must be a key health priority

EARLIER in December, the Commons’ health select committee published a powerful report into suicide prevention in England. It concluded there had been a failure to translate the Westminster Government’s suicide prevention strategy into actual improvements and that “the scale of the avoidable loss of life from suicide is unacceptable”.

Suicide is rarely treated as a priority for governments, yet there is no doubt it is a major health issue that takes the lives and futures away from too many of the people we love. Between 2009 and 2014 nearly 4,500 people died from suicide in Scotland. As well as the huge impact that has on so many families across Scotland, suicide remains the single biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK and of young people aged 20 to34. The Scottish Government is due to publish a renewed Suicide Prevention Strategy in 2017 and we face many of the same challenges. As such, we urge the Scottish Government to take account of the review findings.

Most people who take their own life in Scotland have no contact with specialist mental health services in the 12 months before their death – and that is not because they are all "unreachable". Measures to improve identification of those at increased risk of suicide, and the provision of accessible local support, is crucial. However, commitments to this mean little if not properly funded and implemented. Application of the English strategy was considered “highly variable and subject to insufficient oversight”. To avoid the issues England has faced, Scotland’s strategy must include a clear implementation programme, with strong national leadership, clear accountability, and regular scrutiny.

Every six seconds someone contacts Samaritans for help. Suicide is never inevitable. This report should serve as both a wake-up call to Westminster and a very clear message to the Scottish Government about why we must renew and reinvigorate efforts to save more lives and more families from the terrible impact that every suicide brings.

James Jopling, Executive Director for Scotland, Samaritans

THANK you so much for your Tuesday edition. Up until then, I hadn’t been too hopeful. I found it down right worrying that flap-over hair had become Presidential, even before knowing of the neo-con construction that has become his Cabinet along with his “boys with toys attitude” and the arms race. Like it or not, we have a relationship with the USA, and now with the flap-over in charge, that worrying bomb-thing just outside Glasgow could become even more worrying.

The potential of truth re-writes leading to further illegal wars, regime change, the propagation of trade before worker’s rights, climate change denial, “exploration” (better termed “exploitation”) in sensitive world areas; slaughter and carnage in the Middle East, deaths in the Med, the rise of right wing parties and their ideologies all frightened and depressed me, even without Brexit!

Knowing that at least here, our government has come up with plans, statements, reassurances to EU nationals, reaching out to mainland Europe, visits, meetings et al, I still wasn’t too hopeful.

So, it was the harnessing of your “Hope” front cover and the inside positives that reminded me of 2014 and the bonding between peoples and communities with a common goal.

Can we channel that again firstly here and then beyond, politically and socially? We need to, or at least try to. It’s obvious that humanity is splintering off into deepening, defensive and defended factions.

We can’t allow ourselves to be swept along, tacked on to the fraying edges of the UK. Now, more than ever, we have to make a stand for Scotland and internationalism, not the inward-looking “protectionism” that so galvanised many of the “Leavers”.

Despite the ills of 2016 then, I still believe in the need for the small state, the independent state and if we are to have a future that is less frightening for me at least, it’s one where we consider and address the weaknesses of our arguments in 2014, build a stronger case for indyref2, and take the argument to the public over the coming months.

The failure of austerity, the exponential growth of poverty, homelessness, hunger and the need for social intervention shows it isn’t working, as is, here and abroad.

Selma Rahman, Edinburgh