LORD Macaulay once said “we know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality”. This aptly describes the stench of hypocrisy coming from the opposition parties at Holyrood with regards to Alex Salmond’s show on Russia Today. What the Unionist parties fear most is that a prominent supporter of Scottish independence has been given a platform to articulate the case for independence unfiltered.

There is now a McCarthyite witch-hunt being conducted against RT. The campaign is as ridiculous as Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The unproven allegations of Russian “interference” is used to perpetuate a very frightening accusation that critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism are foreign agents for Russia.

This obsession with Russia is a tactic used by the ruling elite, and in particular the neoliberals, to avoid facing a very unpleasant reality: that their unpopularity is the outcome of their policies of deindustrialisation and the assault against working people. It is the result of disastrous trade agreements that abolished good-paying union jobs and shipped them to places like China and Bangladesh.

The central concern of businesses post-Brexit is preserving access to the Single European Market on which the UK economy relies. May cannot even defend this goal. In this atmosphere of paralysis and crisis, Russia has become a scapegoat.
Alan Hinnrichs
Dundee

FOR those of us with longer memories, the current hysteria around Russian social media campaigns is a joke. The CIA did all of that much better in the past and presumably continues to do so.

They set up the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the post-war period. Unknown at the time, they financed a whole range of “respectable” cultural magazines. Encounter was their front in the UK, and there were equivalents in France, Italy, Austria, Japan, Australia and in various South American countries. They subsidised books they thought ideologically useful by buying large numbers of advance copies.

The British state had its own form of influencing opinion apart from its friends in most of the press. As Richard Norton-Taylor showed in Blacklist: The Inside Story of Political Vetting, up till the 1980s MI5 vetted around a third of the BBC’s employees for their political “reliability”. What happens now? Who knows?

The fact that some broadcasting and press journalists can with a straight face discuss how shocking it is that some Russians are sending around social media messages that might be divisive when the words Mail, Express and Sun don’t even cross their lips does make one wonder about how the “group think” develops.
Isobel Lindsay
Biggar

AS of Monday, the negative impact of Brexit will be further felt as it is decided where two major European agencies, currently based in London, will be relocated to. The EU member states will take the decision, decided by an arcane secret ballot, as to who will grasp the European Banking Authority (EBA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA), as the UK heads out of the European Union. Both are much sought-after prizes, considered to be among the EU’s crown jewels, with the former acting as the umbrella regulator for the EU’s banking system and the latter responsible for the protection of public and animal health through the scientific evaluation and supervision of medicines.

By a member state successfully acquiring these, not only is there the cachet of being a regulatory base, but there is the magnetic effect they could have in drawing workers from companies keen to be close to their watchdog.

Nineteen locations have submitted bids to host the EMA; eight want the EBA (Brussels, Dublin, Frankfurt, Luxembourg, Paris, Prague, Vienna and Warsaw), with the Austrian and Irish capitals offering particularly generous free office-space deals, according to insiders.

In 2002, I led a campaign to try to bring Eurojust (the European Justice Agency) to Edinburgh. Ultimately this proved unsuccessful and the agency remained in The Hague in the Netherlands. Never did I think I would see agencies exiting our shores as the UK plummets out of the EU.

Slowly but surely the negative effects of Brexit are being felt, and this is yet another chapter in a story which is destined to have a far from happy ending.
Alex Orr
Edinburgh

HAVE you heard about the massive discounts available for the under-25s? Big markdowns on rent, bills and council tax?!

Unfortunately they aren’t any. In reality the only thing reduced for us is our wages. Under-25s are excluded from the pitiful national living Wage. From 21-24 we can be paid as little as £7.05 per hour, and for 18-20s it’s a shocking £5.60! For doing exactly the same hours in exactly the same job.

Even working full-time, a 24-year-old might get as little as £14,500 per annum. And we’re far more likely to be on a zero-hours contract.

You can’t build a life on that. We want to move out, start families, make our own way in the world. We’ll never do that while being exploited as cheap labour for big retail and catering businesses. It’s time to fight for a real living wage for ALL.

Young Skint Scottish Socialist Party Member
West Calder