THE fall-out from Brexit continues to bring worrying news, and this time it is the farmers who are facing the impact of tariff-free lamb and beef from Australia competing with hill farmers and crofters in Wales and Scotland.
The UK Tory leadership are desperate to find some trade deals to replace the ones they ditched from our near neighbours in Europe. These mostly involve long journeys around the world, which conflicts somewhat with their responsibilities for reducing their carbon footprint, so they have many complicated manoeuvres to be getting on with.
READ MORE: Scottish Government fumes at Westminster over 'Great British Railways' plan
Prime Minister Johnson has obviously issued an instruction to all departments that they must provide some form of United Kingdom branding, as in the case of Grant Shapps and the railways. He, poor fellow, has been set the unenviable task of reworking a failed and expensive system under a United Kingdom timetabling and fares unit.This with no prior consultation with Wales or Scotland.
Mr Johnson has apparently nine inquiries looking at his past and present behaviour, something of a record for a UK PM. But this does provide us with reasons to re-ignite the Yes campaign. He will be busy juggling these balls in the air, with further bad news about Brexit fallout pending.
The First Minister has announced her new Cabinet and it looks as though there is no minister to prepare for independence.
So if the SNP leadership are not going to drive the demand for indy, I suppose we will have to do it for ourselves – the Yes movement in all its diversity, those in the SNP who are passionate about indy, the Alba Party, Now Scotland, AUOB and those who are feeling a bit undecided but might be persuaded to join us on the way.
Those of us at the grassroots who will be required to do the heavy lifting on indy never forget the old battle cry “United we stand – divided we fall”.
Maggie Chetty
Glasgow
PERHAPS we should be grateful to the drunken morons who shamed Scotland in George Square. Their behaviour is a clear warning of what we can expect – but worse – when the independence referendum is won. Police Scotland and the Scottish Government have no excuse for not urgently introducing stiff proposals to deal with offenders and those who tacitly support them (I must have missed Rangers Football Club’s apology, as distinct from expressing “regret”...).
Our new Scottish Government must start to act as if we were independent and defy Westminster whenever we choose “A Better Way”. The recent defiance of Priti Patel’s Home Office in Kenmure Street sets an example. It is our country; we have the right.
David Roche
Coupar Angus
LESLEY Riddoch can be reassured she is not the only one who longs for our government to ignite unstoppable movement toward unblocking our deep-seated barriers to a free and equitable society where opportunity is not dependent on personal wealth and property.
READ MORE: Lesley Riddoch: Cabinet is more of the same but Scots need radical action now
The final column in her weekly alarm call yesterday was a wish list few who have walked the hills and glens of Scotland could deny, having contemplated why child poverty and deprivation are so rife in our towns and cities when so much space and opportunity is seemingly vacant. Yes, in the very spaces the likes of which their predecessors might well have fled from the scourge of landownership monopolies.
Wow, imagine living here, as many have said before! Indeed, why not, and for those most in need rather than those who can most afford?
Tom Gray
Braco
PAT Kane’s article (Is Greens’ stance mirrored by rising support for a Scottish republic?, May 15) made miserable reading. Many of the most free and supportive regimes are in constitutional monarchies, while most of the most violent and repressive are republics.
The US president appoints judges to the Supreme Court and they are in office for life. A party could win a general election, pledge to pass certain laws but be prevented from doing so by the judges ruling them to be “unconstitutional”. Is this the sort of Scotland that Kane wants? The People of Halabja had the “dignity” of being citizens in the Republic of Iraq. Their government gassed them to death.
READ MORE: Pat Kane: Is Greens’ stance mirrored by rising disdain for the monarchy in Scotland?
There is no advantage for us as a population in changing a constitutional monarchy for a republic. The principal members of the royal family seem to function reasonably well, unless one thinks that anyone who is divorced is dysfunctional. Kane is dismissive of the Queen, because she is 95. Does this contempt extend to all nonagenarians?
I used to think the Greens were concerned about the environment and wished to build a society and economy where we humans could live in reasonable harmony with other living creatures and, indeed, the Earth in general. I see that I was mistaken. They really want to shout childish slogans, in an effort to sound “radical” and “different”. I have voted for them in the past, but am unlikely to do so in the future.
Norman M Miller
via email
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