Readers’ letters: We need swift action to tackle rise in speeding offences

Offences have spiked on the A9 where average speed cameras are not deterring impatient drivers from speeding on a road notorious for high fatalities while 52 per cent of drivers on the M77 were recorded exceeding 70 mph. Motorways, however, remain relatively safe yet it’s nearly ten years since the last section of motorway was built.

It’s on urban roads where most of the 32 per cent increase in UK speeding offences have occurred. Council monitoring on Turnhouse Road in Edinburgh last year showed that 10 per cent of traffic exceeded 30mph in a 20mph zone near a busy crossing and nursery. The road is currently receiving traffic calming and an upgraded crossing after local lobbying.

Such measures come at a cost to taxpayers and a change in behaviour is required. This can only come from better enforcement. Withdrawal of 33 speed cameras in Edinburgh showed a contempt for road safety. Those that remain in Scotland are detecting more offences each year, with over 50,000 in 2025, and remain the most effective method of enforcement. The government may be reducing child poverty but it’s failing to keep children safe. Resources must be allocated more effectively to deliver better results including through upgrading of inadequate road infrastructure. Otherwise, there will be more unnecessary deaths.

Neil Anderson, Edinburgh

Do the right thing

The recent news that pensions calculation errors mean more than 1,000 veterans have to repay significant sums, along with cuts to their pensions for years to come, is shocking. The total overpayment is "only” £5.1 million and the first reaction of Whitehall is to recover the overpayments in full.

Some veterans now have life-changing sums to repay, through no fault of their own. Veterans and their families will likely be rather distressed.

In order to relieve all these veterans’ valid concerns, the leading service charities should volunteer to pay. The RNRMC, ABF and RAFBF have assets of well over £250m all told. These charities can afford to pay out £5.1m and the beneficiaries will surely think kindly of such an act, many likely to leave an appropriate legacy. Indeed, such a statement of intent may embarrass the Treasury into writing off the overpayments without these three charities spending one king’s shilling.

Former Defence Secretary, now Chancellor, John Healey will surely wish to do the right thing.

Lester May (Lt Commander, RN, retired), Camden Town, London

Obvious cuts

Ian Waugh (Letters, 3 August) suggests cancelling the state departments of Scotland and Wales so that the Labour government can have funds to squander on its pet projects. I would recommend returning the Secretaries to their previous task and save an even greater amount by reversing devolution.

Just how much are the so-called governments costing in relation to the costs under a state department. The duplication of tasks is horrendous, jobs for the boys in having their own MSPs. MSs and mini-embassies abroad. In Scotland they have a higher tax regime to pay for it, but Holyrood has still managed to raise a ‘national’ debt in addition to the UK national debt.

The emotions of having their own administration is admirable, but is the cost and chaos really worth it?

Charles Lowson, Fareham, Hants

Voting wisely

The Supplementary Vote (SV) system used for the recent Manchester mayoral election seems an improvement over first past the post. Over 100,000 voters had a say in the choice between Labour and Reform without having selected either as their first preference. Under FPTP they would have been regarded as abstaining.

However, a further 66,000-plus who also put neither of these parties first did not have such a say. It may be that they declined to make a second choice, which is perfectly OK. But they may have nominated a second candidate who (along with their first choice) was eliminated in the first round of counting. This would include voters who put the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, or the Conservatives and Restore, as their two choices.

There are other systems which would avoid disenfranchising these voters. These include voting systems in which the voter can assign an order of preference for all the candidates rather than just the first two. With the Alternative Vote (AV) this would be used to eliminate candidates one at a time, with votes being transferred after each count. Or (as with SV) all but two could be eliminated after the first count of first choices. Votes placing an eliminated candidate first would then be sorted according to which of the two surviving candidates has been given the higher preference.

The distribution of support in Manchester was sufficiently weighted that the choice of voting system was not going to be critical. It may be, however, that we can expect elections where support is more finely balanced among a number of parties. Even if we are sceptical enough not to care who wins, we should care if the system is inadequate to give the winner legitimacy.

John Riseley, Harrogate, North Yorkshire

Cricket memories

Tony Ostrowski’s interesting letter about playing cricket on Elie beach (July 31) reminded me of times when we went on holiday in the UK and my dad (who’d flown on Operation Varsity) would cajole all the men staying in the same boarding house on to the beach to play cricket. For obvious reasons we used a tennis ball. Aged 13 or 14, I always took my bat and stumps.

As an adult I played beach cricket on the isle of Sark with friends. Always great fun. Huge flat beach, hardly any people.

We had come down from Glasgow to Kent in 1952. I learned to play this wonderful game at grammar school, then some village cricket before moving on to play at Sevenoaks Vine CC, formed in 1734.

The middle stump was introduced on the Vine in 1777; players like the third Duke of Dorset and other nobles deciding they’d had enough of bowling at two sticks so far apart the ball would pass between them.

Glasgow Hillhead visited regularly, which resulted in some fairly boozy evenings which included my somewhat noisy but tuneful (I think) Corries songs. I skippered one of the lower Vine sides, which included two other Glaswegians. I ceased playing when I was 64. I miss the cameraderie.

Doug Morrison, Tenterden, Kent

Not a deterrent

Several correspondents recently have maintained that the British (and therefore also Scottish) nuclear deterrent is the only thing to have kept us safe from inevitable invasion by hostile forces to the East.

Can they therefore explain why the jackboots of the enemy have not yet pounded over, say, Belgium, Italy, Norway and Slovenia, to name a few defenceless countries lacking the cosy umbrella of an independent nuclear deterrent? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wholly indefensible, but its faulty rationale that half of Ukraine is Russian-speaking and largely Orthodox in religion and that the whole country was formerly an integrated part of the Soviet Union is, at least, sort of understandable.

No such situation applies to Scotland, so the logic of our safety from invasion resting on the possession of “weapons of mass destruction” is dubious in the extreme.

Brian Bannatyne-Scott, Edinburgh

Defending Ukraine

It is disappointing, although perhaps not surprising, that both Martin O’Gorman and Brian Barbour (Letters, 4 August) in their misguided attempts to justify the UK continuing to maintain and implicitly expand its nuclear capability omitted to mention that the UK, along with the US, was among the signatories of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. Also, contrary to their assertions, although this Memorandum was the basis for Ukraine to return Russian nuclear weapons to Russia, if retained Ukraine could not have launched them in defence of the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 two decades later because Ukraine never had operational control of those weapons or independent launch codes for them. Clearly the continuing possession of nuclear weapons possessed by signatories the UK and US did not serve as a deterrent to the Russian invasion.

What could have prevented Russia’s subsequent invasion of eastern Ukraine would have been a far stronger response from the UK and the US when Russia invaded Crimea, which in turn could have saved “hundreds of thousands of lives and tens of billions of pounds worth of damage”.

Stan Grodynski, Longniddry. East Lothian

No to renewables

Tim Fllnn (Letters, 4 August) urges us to have renewable energy. That would be a miracle. Energy can’t be created. It can only be converted, which is what we do with windmills. This is why when there is no wind there is no electricity. That is to say, the conversion is beyond our control.

Malcolm Parkin, Kinnesswood, Kinross-shire

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