Readers' letters: League reconstruction could usher in a whole new ball game

Perhaps inspired by the creation of the English Premier League, there was a proposal to create an SSL, a Scottish Super League, in 1992. Eventually the Scottish Premier League began in 1998 and adopted many of the SSL suggestions.

Reconstruction is being discussed again mainly because fixture congestion must be reduced with the growing commitments for those clubs competing in Europe. A top tier of 16 would mean a reduced 30-match season and an end to the tedium of meeting the same club four times and, maybe, even more, if unlucky enough to be drawn against them in the cup competitions.

There are many hurdles to be overcome, however, as the SPFL Competitions Working Group, the CWG, meets again on 29 April. The provincial Premiership clubs will never vote for a top tier of ten that may topple them from the top tier. In 2013 Ross County and St Mirren, out of selfish self-interest, exploited the archaic 11-1 voting structure to wreck a previous attempt at reconstruction.

Sky Sports demands four Old Firm derbies and account for £150 million of income.The Premiership takes an indefensible 82 per cent of the financial cake and hence big full-time ambitious Championship clubs such as Falkirk, Dunfermline Athletic, Partick Thistle and Raith Rovers – who would not dilute the quality of the top tier – struggle to move up.

A larger top tier would almost certainly attract greater investment from sponsors as Scotland has, per capita, the biggest attendance figures at football matches in Europe. Can the CWG square the circle and bring in a new format in 2025/2026?

John V Lloyd, Inverkeithing, Fife

Industrial reality

When I hear people complain about steel production and shipbuilding no longer being attractive industries in the UK, I ask them: “Where do you buy your underpants?”

Readers will not be surprised that answers invariably include M&S and Primark. Both sell underwear and other clothing, all of which is produced in Bangladesh, Vietnam and China, where costs are so low that we Brits can benefit from spending as little as possible on our pants.

Shamefully, nobody seems to have cared that our textile industry has disappeared and few people are employed to make clothing products in the UK, as we simply can’t compete with the Asian market. But we still want inexpensive pants.

We also want British-built ships using British steel, though we clearly can’t afford to pay for it. We can’t provide like-for-like salaries when faced with Asian competition.

It’s reality, the way of commerce, like it or not, so get used to it, it’s here to stay across industries. And it’s certainly not going to change before you consider the purchase of new underwear, especially if you’ve found my prognosis frightening.

Gordon Y Watson, Edinburgh

Propaganda tool

The SNP has made hay with the Scunthorpe versus Grangemouth issue, turning it into (yet another) of their “England bad, Scotland the victim” fake grievances, as Elizabeth Scott and Michael Fraser (Letters, 21 April) demonstrate. This isn’t because the SNP cares about Grangemouth but because it seems a useful weapon in its dreary and dishonest separatist cause.

Let’s compare the two cases. Scunthorpe is the site of the UK’s only steelworks. Politicians have belatedly twigged that the UK needs to produce its own steel, for industrial purposes and also for our burgeoning defence requirements. If the furnaces are switched off, they are switched off forever, and the UK is left without a steel industry.

The UK has five other major refineries besides Grangemouth. Iain Hardie, Petroineos’s regional head of legal and external affairs, tells us that Grangemouth is a “bottom quartile performing refinery” in western Europe. As the second oldest refinery in Europe, it has high operating costs, a declining market and is energy inefficient. Expressions of interest in buying it have not survived “the most basic financial or operational due diligence”. The refinery is losing £400,000 every day.

It might have been different had the SNP administration accepted fracking in Scotland and/or not stated its opposition to further North Sea exploration. However, none of that matters when Grangemouth provides the SNP with a juicy anti-England/Westminster/UK propaganda tool.

Jill Stephenson, Edinburgh

Buy British

We have a Prime Minister who, it seems, is prepared to do anything to be welcomed to the feet of Donald Trump.

If we have learned anything since Mr Trump came to power it is surely that we must make ourselves as independent of the United States as we can. Buy British must be our mantra from now on. For example, we must buy Tempest stealth fighters for our air force – not American fifth-generation F-35A Lightning II stealth aircraft. And we must buy Rolls- Royce nuclear small modular reactors for our future electricity supply, rather than the Gates-founded TerraPower small reactors.

As we’ve seen with steel production, once we cease R&D and manufacturing in a particular area we are in the hands of foreign suppliers – and their restrictions. Do we really want Mr Trump dictating to us if and against whom we can turn our weapons of defence on?

Doug Clark, Currie, Edinburgh

Who foots bill?

Sandy Winterbottom made no mention of the Scottish debt of £1 trillion that would arise from the implementation of current Holyrood Net Zero policies in her article (Scotsman, 19 April).

Such a debt carries an annual debt interest bill of around £40 billion yet it is unlikely that any political party will include plans on the repayment of such a cost. Surely voters are entitled to know which budgets will be cut to reimburse the money lenders in the City of London!

Ian Moir, Castle Douglas, Dumfries & Galloway

School discipline

There is a crisis looming over the dramatic shortfall in new students studying to become secondary school teachers in Scotland (Scotsman, 19 April). The numbers are 1,003 short of the target of 2,336.

Why are politicians so surprised? The indiscipline and violence in secondary schools has been known for a long time but headteachers were not allowed to exclude pupils by the Scottish Government. The result was that teachers took early retirement or just left.

Seeing this, students decided to pursue another career path – and who can blame them?

Michael Baird, Bonar Bridge, Highland

Labour warning

It is interesting to behold certain Labour ministers scurrying about and plotting to undermine the recent ruling by the Supreme Court that “woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex”.

It is telling that Downing Street is standing back and not clamping down on them. Their aim is to muddy the waters which have been cleaned up by the very definite Court decision. They are doing this because of the reaction by the vocal trans minority and their aggressive supporters to that decision.

If the trans faction succeed in making trans women actual women in the eyes of the law, the outcome will be much the same as that experienced by the SNP after Nicola Sturgeon’s foray into gender identity. The SNP has learned to its cost and Labour will find the same thing that the population at large is thoroughly fed up with men trying to take over spaces which are exclusively those of biological women. Anatomical tinkering and pieces of paper called Gender Recognition Certificates maketh not a woman.

Labour will lose the next election if they go down this particular rabbit hole.

Andrew HN Gray, Edinburgh

Judgement call

After the earth-shattering decision it has handed down recently, I hope the Supreme Court will have the opportunity to declare without any equivocation that fire burns or that water is wet so that we all know where we are.

S Beck, Edinburgh

No regrets

John Swinney just can’t seem to choose to be on the right side of common sense and decency. Following the Supreme Court ruling which states that only biological women should use the single sex spaces designed for them, he stated that this will leave members of the trans community feeling “uncertain and anxious”.

He is refusing to apologise to women, saying he has “no regrets” over his support for self-ID (Scotsman, 21 April). An apology is the least he should offer us. Where was his understanding and compassion when women were saying that attending rape crisis centres with men who claimed to be women made them anxious? Where was his concern for our anxiety when we had to endure men in the ladies’ toilets?

The First Minister of a country should govern for everyone but it is clear where his allegiances lie. He should be acknowledging that the term woman refers only to biological women and we are entitled to feel safe in single sex spaces. I fear I wait in vain.

Jane Lax, Aberlour, Moray

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