Readers' Letters: Sack NHS Fife Board in wake of Sandy Peggie case

A Board that has currently spent in excess of £250,000 on an employment tribunal involving a nurse and a transgender doctor and a board that, even during an investigation, has the gall and, indeed, stupidity to issue a public statement attacking a lawyer for the nurse Sandie Peggie and the charity Sex Matters.

This action was a disgraceful misjudgment and it is now without question that the Board should be removed. If Mr Swinney had a backbone he would at least remove the Chief Executive Carol Potter currently enjoying an overinflated salary of around £150,000. The public and the defence of the public purse deserve nothing less.

Richard Allison, Edinburgh

Peculiar protest

The weekend march in Edinburgh for Gaza was yet another display of anti-Israeli, anti-British "dislike". There were the usual Palestinian flags on display but also of Iran and Scotland. This is an interesting mix. Iran wants to destroy Britain.The Palestinians, under Hamas, want a genocide of Israelis and Jews to say nothing of gays and the Saltire is from those seeking the break-up of the UK. The common denominator here is for far-reaching changes.

This begs relevant questions. Would the elimination of Israel, creating a Hamas run Palestinian state (no placards asked for regime change), an Iranian takeover of the Middle East or even Scottish independence actually make things better? Be careful what you wish for.

Gerald Edwards, Glasgow

Challenge Trump

Every day our ears are assaulted by listening to the insincere words of the Israeli Government; “Israel is investigating… (yet another slaughter of innocents”), or “Israel expresses deep sorrow…” (in respect of the killings in Gaza’s only Catholic Church, an action criticised by Italy’s right wing Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni). Evidence is overwhelming over 18 months of Benjamin Netanyahu’s hateful aggression in Gaza, the West Bank and beyond. Experts, even a former Israeli Prime Minister, describe Israeli (and US) plans to create a “humanitarian city” in South Gaza as nothing other than a concentration camp. Driving Palestinians from their homeland, massacring endless thousands of innocents, clearly pursuing ethnic cleansing and working with Trump to take over Gaza as a development project; these obscene actions are akin to the pogroms of earlier times that were so terrible for the Jews.

Starmer and other world leaders leave Netanyahu to carry on with his obscene plans. Their moral compass has lost direction. The people know better than the politicians what is right and wrong. It’s time to challenge Donald Trump and Netanyahu. Time, when Trump visits the UK, to challenge him on his support for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the land-grabbing in the West Bank.

Andrew Turnbull, Perth

Bad old days

A Lewis (Letters, 19 July) is, of course, right. Joyce McMillan consistently reaches for the in-words in the world of Champagne socialists, like “reactionary and neoliberalism”, without having a clue what they mean. Like him I am not sure I do. In her column (Perspective, 18 July) she writes “Margaret Thatcher is now understood not to have fundamentally revived the UK economy, but she had contempt towards the universal values on which the post-war generation tried to found a rule-based order”.

I am old enough to remember the zenith of Joyce’s dream world in the late Seventies when the trains were on strike, as were the car workers, steel workers, miners and even gravediggers, so bodies were piling up in mortuaries. We couldn’t make cars which got beyond the door of the car showroom without falling apart. Ford stood for “Fix Or Repair Daily”. It was a true Nirvana, about which only Joyce McMillan could dream, and certainly not the vision of Clement Attlee or Aneurin Bevan, who would have turned in their graves.

But pace Joyce! The bit you would really have liked is yet to come. We soaked the rich. The top rate on unearned income was 98 per cent and on earned income it was 85 per cent. Along came Margaret Thatcher and over the next ten years the UK became a successful economy once again. We made cars that worked. We had some of the fastest-growing companies in the OECD and the top tax rates dropped to 40 per cent, resulting in the top 20 per cent of taxpayers paying 10 per cent more than they did under the earlier high rates. Perhaps the only sadness was the decline of the economies in the Channel Islands.

Those are the facts, except for those like Joyce McMillan, who would rewrite history.

Mark Tennant, London

Cutting through

One can always rely on Alexander McKay to not let pesky facts get in the way of blaming everything on the evil SNP – his latest being that its love of red tape meant it could never succeed in “completing” a “network of tunnels” like the Faroes connecting the islands in the archipelago (Letters, 18 July). What Alex forgot to notice when he googled his latest factoid was, it's a mere four tunnels. There are 17 major islands in the Faroes, meaning fewer than half are interconnected (let's not even start on the 779 minor islands).

The oldest tunnel, Vágatunnilin, predates the SNP taking power, there's only one new inter-island tunnel planned – to link Sandoy to Suðuroy – that won't be ready until 2035 at the earliest, and none of them would have happened without massive Danish funding – explaining the eyewatering £40.50 it costs to use the seven-mile long Sandoy tunnel, to pay the costs off, shades of the Skye Toll Bridge fiasco.

Mark Boyle, Johnstone, Renfrewshire

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