I CALL on Alister Jack MP and David Mundell MP to ensure immediately that the Westminster government passes on to Holyrood £160 million of EU funding of direct farm payments that was sent from Brussels to the UK specifically to help Scottish hill farmers.

This dispute over the subsidies has been continuing for more than five years ago. It is a clear-cut matter. It is time Dumfries and Galloway farmers received the money due to them. The European Commission has allocated the UK an extra £190m of funding over six years. The money – known as convergence uplift – is aimed at addressing the low payments received by Scottish farmers, and Scottish farmers only, under the Common Agricultural Policy, because of the more disadvantaged conditions, ie weather and soils, in which they farm. It was not intended, in any way, shape or form, for Welsh, English or Northern Irish farmers who have been receiving much higher payments.

However, the UK Government, in its wisdom, has decided all four home nations will share this extra funding between them, meaning Scotland has only been allocated £30m of the extra £190m cash.

The UK only qualified for £190m of additional funding because of Scotland’s low payment rate per hectare, which brought the UK below the qualifying threshold. This money belongs to Scotland, to help Dumfries and Galloway farmers who had previously been under-funded, and it should be paid, along with compound interest, to our farmers as they are the intended and rightful recipients. Other farmers in the home nations have not been underfunded in the past as have our local farmers in Dumfries and Galloway. Westminster is denying a payment of around £14,000 per farmer over a six-year period, or £2,300 per year. Could farmers not use this money?

To withhold this money and to additionally insult elected Scottish MPs in the House of Commons who raise this matter as “grievance-mongering separatists” is an absolute disgrace. The promise that Scotland would be respected in the Union has been shown time and time again to be nonsense, even with straightforward matters such as this. This matter has cross-party support in Holyrood, so Westminster is not respecting Scotland as a whole. Dumfries and Galloway farmers cannot and must not be a cash cow for Westminster. The farming community must not let our local Conservative MPs off the hook on this vitally important matter, which could mean the survival or otherwise of small farms in our region.

John Schofield
English Scots for Yes, Dumfries and Galloway

CAN I commend the organisers of All Under One Banner for their sense of political history in organising the Stirling march this Saturday on June 23, which is not only Bannockburn Day but will be the 90th anniversary, to the day, of the founding of the first nationalist political party in Scotland, the National Party of Scotland (NPS). The National Party was inaugurated at a rally in King’s Park, Stirling, on June 23 1928 under the convenership of the great Scottish Radical, Robert Cunningham Graham.

In 1927 it was the failure in the Commons of the Independent Labour Party Home Rule Bill, sponsored by the Rev James Barr MP, which persuaded a significant element of the nationalist movement in Scotland that the promotion of national self-determination through Westminster was a political cul-de-sac, so the new approach called for an autonomous Scottish party committed to independence which would contest elections on that policy.

At the King’s Park Rally in 1928 the Glasgow Herald reported that the author and NPS founder Compton Mackenzie had sent a telegram from Harris commenting that: “The reawakening of Scottish national conscience is vital to the endurance of Western civilisation”.

Nearly a century later, in a world of increasing authoritarianism, declining compassion, and a debilitating individualism, how true are the words of Compton Mackenzie for today?

Cllr Andy Doig (Independent)
Renfrewshire Council

WITH Westminster we have a parliament designed and still in the 19th century, whereas Holyrood has electronic voting and we lead the way with laws on minimum alcohol pricing and bans on fracking and upskirting. But down south they are governed by a outdated system and stick to rules from the dark ages. Scotland will never be an equal nation until we leave this outdated Union and get out in the real world while the rUK is stuck in the past.

Stevie, Motherwell
via text

THE Peter Principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their “level of incompetence”. An employee is promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job don’t necessarily transfer to another.

When I think about this, I think of David Mundell.

Gordon Walker
Address supplied