Readers' Letters: Swinney grandstands on Gaza while Scottish patients wait

Is this the same John Swinney who at First Minister’s Questions each week accepts the health service is failing to deliver for Scotland’s population, with huge waiting lists, people paying to get treatment privately and even one of his health ministers acknowledging that people are dying prematurely as a consequence?

While it is difficult not to feel for the plight of Gaza’s population, Mr Swinney conveniently forgets that Hamas could stop this instantly by returning the hostages, stop rocketing Israel and ceasing to declare their intention to wipe Israel off the face of the map. He instead appears to blame Israel for the ongoing war. Much too short and selective a memory, Mr Swinney.

He also, it seems, forgets that Gaza is surrounded by Arab nations – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Jordan to name but a few, all of which have excellent health services where, unlike Scotland, patients don't have 78-week waits to see a specialist and two weeks to see a GP.

So please Mr Swinney, stop the grandstanding, spend taxpayers’ money on services in Scotland, and fix the NHS.

Frank Brown, Aboyne, Aberdeenshire

Dodgy devices

David Hannay (Letters, 10 July) makes good points about ID cards, but these will be processed by a computer, and the horror of the Post Office debacle comes to mind. Surely government knows enough about us already from credit card and mobile phone use. The thought of a giant computer in search of anything, or anyone, for any reason, fills me with dread.

The early days of computerisation, when businesses were bankrupted after the changeover from manual systems, still stick in my mind. In the 1970s I became MD of a company in the middle of a computerisation process that had been dragging on.

An employee told me he had been keeping paper-driven records, and thought the computer was never going to work.

So I sacked the computer, gave it to the local school to play with, made the helpful employee a manager and went back to the proven paper system. My company prospered, while my competitors struggled with their own computers. Nobody remembers how dodgy computers can be.

Malcolm Parkin, Kinnesswood, Kinross

The IDs have it

The issue of identity cards comes round fairly regularly (Letters, 10 July). It is seen by some as a sort of cure-all to the problem of illegal immigrants in the UK. Comparisons are made to countries which do have ID cards as if they show their efficacy.

They don't. One only has to see where the illegals are coming from, which is France. France has ID cards. It also has hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants.

In the UK, when I am asked to prove my identity I can use my passport, or I can produce my driving licence, which is official and gives my photograph, name, date of birth, address and bears my signature.

I should add that there are 42.1 million people in the UK who hold a driving licence. The working age population of 18-64 is 40.5 million and most driving licences belong to this group. There are approximately 12.5 million British citizens aged 65 and over. However, the main group in the population who cause most of the trouble in society is the former group, who are of working age. It is their identity that you want to know and 81 per cent of young, British men carry a driving licence.

Most crime in the UK is carried out by younger people. Most illegal immigrants are young men, usually in the same age group as the one that causes most trouble in the UK. If anyone needs ID, I would suggest they are the ones who should be made to carry it. British citizens already have it. Perhaps illegal – and even legal – immigrants should be given an electronic chip?

Andrew HN Gray, Edinburgh

Wind religion

I fully support the idea of floating wind farm platforms (Dan Jackson, Perspective,10 July) if it means sparing this beautiful country and not despoiling the seas and seabed, but time is not on our side.

The problem is that the wind industry with the New Planning Framework 4 (NPF4) based on the Scottish Greens Manifesto has speeded up like a train out of control. In the Borders Council alone there are 11 wind farms at the planning stage, with 150 turbines and 7 scoping opinions with 174 turbines. All over the country councils are being faced with these applications.

When the SNP chose wind as their flagship industry to replace oil and gas they overlooked one fatal flaw. There are very few jobs after the wind farm is built so in order to keep making money and provide jobs you have to keep building wind farms.

The other push is house building, which has the same flaw.

By the time the public wakes up to the planned destruction of this country it will be too late. Action has to be taken now and every MSP should be contacted. Wind farms stopped being built in England when power was handed back to the councils. Imagine the outcry if the Scottish Government’s NPF4 was being imposed on Scotland from Westminster?

A consultation to the Torfichen wind farm near Edinburgh included the words: “...with some users viewing wind turbines as incongruous and intrusive structures in rural locations, whilst others consider them to be elegant symbols of sustainable energy provision”.

Is this what we must tell our grandchildren when they ask why they have to look at them and dispose of them?

Totem poles for a new pseudo-religion which claims the “Saudia Arabia of Renewables” is saving the planet?

Celia Hobbs, Penicuik, Midlothian

Sinking ships

Inverclyde Labour MP Martin McCluskey is urging SNP Transport Secretary Fiona Hyslop to award new ferry contracts to Ferguson Marine without going out to tender. Where has he been for the last seven years? The management and workforce must unfortunately be classified in the same category as the former principal of Dundee university – incompetent.

BAE Systems are brave to award steel fabrication work of hull sections to Fergusson Marine. I hope they fit and are completed on time. They should be rewarded by being sold Fergusson Marine for £1 and should be given the £14 million the SNP Government are proposing to gift to the Ferguson yard.

The sooner the Scottish Government stops interfering with the commercial marketplace, the better. They have shown they can neither run a business nor properly use the powers delegated to the Scottish Parliament.

Robin Jack, Edinburgh

Words of war

The Scotsman Editorial says President Donald Trump falsely claimed Ukraine started the war (10 July). That's true if you believe the start of the war was 2022.

It isn't if you believe the start of the war was in 2014, when the nationalist government – which took power in a coup – started military operations against the breakaway Russian-speaking eastern provinces. After Ukraine's eastern provinces opted for self-rule in 2014 the Kiev government bombed and shelled them for seven years. According to the UN's Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights reporting in February 2019 the total number of conflict-related casualties between Ukraine and the eastern provinces was 40,000-43,000 from 14 April 2014 to 31 January 2019, including 12,800-13,000 killed.

I also question whether Ukraine is the “democracy” it claims to be defending. And as far as Ukraine defeating Russia is concerned, there is as much chance of that as Fort William FC winning the Scottish Cup.

William Loneskie, Oxton, Lauder, Berwickshire

Bad taste

Benjamin Netanyahu's nomination of Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace prize is appallingly distasteful. Israel has always enacted a system of oppression, colonialism and hegemony in historic Palestine. Its policies were intended to spur territorial fragmentation, segregation, displacement of indigenous people, dispossession of lands and properties and the utter revocation of political, social, cultural, religious and economic rights.

The international community's response has been blatantly defeating. It can no longer be limited to iterative condemnation. Until Israel dismantles its repugnant apartheid system and addresses the underlying causes of this intractable conflict, peace will remain a mirage.

Munjed Farid Al Qutob, London

Route and branch

Re: “Scottish railway stations with highest proportion of cancelled services revealed” in Wednesday’s Scotsman.

If Helensburgh Central and Cardross top the list it is patently obvious that other stations on that route are also going to be on that list.

Every station mentioned is on the Waverley to Helensburgh line. This a scenic route I've done many times, and if it is unreliable people will turn to their cars

Scott Miller, Joppa, Edinburgh

Catty comment

I loved the photo in yesterday’s Scotsman of a French reporter interviewing Larry the Downing Street cat.

A last desperate attempt to get common sense out of No.10?

David Flint, South Queensferry, Edinburgh

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