Should Shetland and Glasgow have the same lockdown end date?

I have been closely following the infection figures for Glasgow (my home) and also Shetland.

Shetland? Well, I particularly enjoyed my holiday in Shetland. Love the TV series, and was gutted for them when initially they seemed to have a worrisome rate of infections. So no scientific reasons for my choices at all.

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Based on the published figures, the weekly average increase in Glasgow’s known infections appears to have remained stubbornly constant. Shetland by comparison has recorded no new infections for 14+ days.

As a lay person, one could argue that perhaps a different lockdown strategy should now be considered for Shetland and Glasgow. Shetland may have reach a point where some restrictions could be lifted. Glasgow, perhaps not.

Now, I have every confidence that issues like this will be under consideration by the Scottish Government with their proper detailed analysis, but it points to the nonsensical argument promoted by Alister Jack, the Unionist press and their acolytes that the four nations of the UK must only move as one.

It appears that it increasingly makes less sense for the Scottish islands to move in lock-step with the Scottish mainland. How could it possibly be that a London-centric Westminster Government could make an accurate assessment for the length and breadth of the UK with a one-size-fits-all approach?

I Easton
Glasgow

I AM one of those people who has fallen between the cracks in the current situation. I am furloughed for about another two weeks and then my income from my (professional but zero-hours) job will vanish altogether. Overnight.

I will be living on the very small amount of self-employed work I can generate, and the income from a one-bedroomed flat in a deprived area of Edinburgh.

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Because I’m a decent landlord my tenant pays below the average rent. The combination of rent and self-employed income takes me to well below the poverty line, but because I have “savings” (that is, the flat) I am not eligible for any benefits whatsoever. I have no idea how I will manage if my employed work does not restart after the summer. But hey, I’m just a little person and the government don’t care whether I starve or not.

I have no doubt that there are many people like me who have always been careful with money, have always worked, have never been in debt, and yet who are staring poverty in the face. A Universal Basic Income is essential, and the only pity is that it has taken a pandemic to make even the best mainstream politicians realise that.

Name and address supplied

I COULD hardly believe my ears on Friday when I heard a BBC announcer say that we were commemorating those who died bringing “peace and freedom to the whole world”!

That would be the peace and freedom enjoyed by Israelis and Palestinians alike since we decided the partitioning of territory, and likewise the peace and freedom Iraq has enjoyed since Blair and Bush’s war. Let us not forget, either, the peace and freedom being currently enjoyed in Yemen as a result of the bombs and other arms we sell in that area and the technical expertise we send to Saudi Arabia on how to target them.

This, along with Syria and so many other areas of conflict, is the “peace and freedom for the whole world” our relatives fought and died for and which we are commemorating 75 years on, when we have just left the one major organisation which has genuinely brought these blessings to our European part of the world. Hypocrisy and jingoism know no bounds.

Many of those who died for a better world than this must be birling in their graves.

L McGregor
Falkirk

MARTIN Docherty-Hughes rightly condemns the way extremists hijacked the VE Day 75th anniversary (The bombs that shaped a Scottish town’s history, May 8). However he goes on to say that hundreds of Nazi bombers carried out the attack of Dumbartonshire in March 1941.

The airmen of the Luftwaffe were in the main conscripts, and many were serving from before the rise of the National Socialist (NS) Party. Most were certainly not members of the NS Party. Only about 7% of the German population were members of that blighted party. Mr Docherty-Hughes talks about casual racism towards our European friends, but goes on to insult the German nation by tarring them all with the NS brush.

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Germany today still feels the repercussions of the Nazi regime today. To call ordinary German conscripts Nazis is backing up what the likes of Farage are doing. This constant poisoning of all Germans is doing no-one any favours, considering there is quite a large German support for Scottish independence, including active groups such as Germans for Independence. Matin, were, in your mind, the British and American crews that blanket bombed Dresden also right-wing extremists? Of course not, you will probably say. They were just doing what they were ordered to do.

Andy Hurley
Germany

I AM 81, I can’t remember too much about VE day but two things do stick out in my memory. I do remember the party in the street outside in the Glasgow slum where we lived, mainly because there was lots of food around for a change and this impressed me very much, because we were usually hungry most of the time.

However, I remember vaguely another more serious side of that day, how the adults reacted to peace in Europe. My father’s sister wept as she talked about her son, who at 16 had died at sea in a merchant ship sunk by a U-boat two years earlier.

So in our slum buildings and in our poverty there was indeed happiness and relief for the adults, tinged very much by sadness and loss, and a clear determination to do things better in the future. That is no doubt why there was a Labour landslide victory at the General Election that year.

Andy Anderson
Saltcoats