Readers letters: BBC says commitment to celebrating Scottish music remains strong

These new shows continue BBC Radio Scotland’s commitment to showcase the best from Scotland’s music industry and beyond, including unsigned bands; and looking at the new weekday evening output, at no point have we said that new Scottish music won’t be part of the mix here too. It will be.

Roddy Hart’s Mix Tape will join an impressive range of specialist music titles which include Another Country, BBC Introducing in Scotland, Travelling Folk, Take the Floor, Vic Galloway, The Quay Sessions (also presented by Roddy), Piping Sounds, Your Requests, and Classical Now.

These programmes sit alongside BBC Scotland’s commitment to emerging artists including Young Traditional Musician of the Year, Young Scottish Jazz Musician of the Year, Young Scottish Classical Musician of the Year and BBC Introducing Scottish Act of the Year. We remain deeply committed to celebrating it all in our schedule.

Luke McCullough, Corporate Affairs Director, BBC Scotland, Edinburgh

Parcel force

For those of you interested in learning a foreign language, here’s your first lesson in Amazonian.

The phrase “parcel was handed to resident” translates to “dumped on soggy doorstep without attempting to ring doorbell or chap door and hope customer gets it before the local porch pirates do”. As Bracknell’s Law would have it, once is unfortunate, to do it thricefold in one visit smacks of couldn’t give a monkey’s.

Mark Boyle, Johnstone, Renfrewshire

Spoke too soon

You could almost feel the gloating in the air when John Swinney was able to boast that there was no doctors strike “in Scotland”. That attitude has come screeching to a halt. The threat of a doctors’ strike north of the border is now very real indeed.

But it brings to the fore perhaps the SNP’s weakest point. They appear unconcerned about what is best for the NHS and its patients in Scotland; their only interest appears to be in what England and Wales are doing in comparison.

When they can concentrate on what is best for the health and wellbeing of Scots and put aside nationalistic childishness and work together with our fellow islanders, perhaps we can take a step forward.

Alexander McKay, Edinburgh

AI regulation

Three years on from the launch of ChatGPT, 2025 will go down as the moment AI came to the fore of public attention. Unsurprisingly, the CEOs of the US hyper-scalers have been prominent, supported by global investors, and further amplified by the voices of senior politicians, including ex-prime ministers. All claim AI is “the” answer to elusive UK productivity growth.

Other voices have been more circumspect. Daron Acemoglu, the 2024 Nobel Prize-winning economist, suggests the job impact of AI will only lead to a modest gain of 0.71 per cent in total factor productivity over a ten-year period. Other significant concerns include the scale and speed of investment in AI digital infrastructure, related high development costs to both the environment and local communities, and the looming threat of an AI investment bubble bursting.

Tangible benefits are evident. In the life sciences the power of AI-based “lab in a loop” is turbo-charging the discovery and development of important drugs, thereby dramatically shortening long development timelines and reducing the very high costs of R&D in pharmaceuticals.

Bur darker human costs have also emerged via social media – cruelly highlighted by the case of Sewell Setzer, a 14-year-old American boy who died by suicide after becoming obsessed with a chat bot modelled on a Game of Thrones character. This is not an isolated incident. By the end of this year several lawsuits had been filed against OpenAI where “sycophancy” algorithms, designed to be user-sensitive and helpful, led to harmful and sometimes tragic of outcomes.

Accordingly, greater and more effective regulatory control and social accountability is urgently needed in 2026 – as AI technology races ahead of government, politicians and the people they represent at apparent break-neck speed.

Ewen Peters, Newton Mearns, East Renfrewshire

Dead horse

It was to be hoped that the obsession with “slavery and colonialism” in Edinburgh had run its course. However, the gullible Lottery Fund has breathed new life into this dead horse (your report, 23 December). It is incredible that with a self-declared housing emergency, with poor maintenance of streets and pavements, with massive problems in social care and with rundown community and recreational infrastructure, the city council is devoting the time and energy of its officers to this nonsense.

Slavery and colonialism are not synonymous. Slavery has existed since the beginning of time. Britain did not have colonies in Africa at the time of the Atlantic slave trade. Slaves were bought from local rulers at trading posts on the coast. It was only after Britain and France colonised parts of Africa that they put an end to slavery in these countries.

Colonial rule in Africa had many faults but it was relatively free from the corruption and communal strife which have characterised many of these countries since independence. In any case, colonial rule ended 60 or 70 years ago so is completely irrelevant to present-day Edinburgh, on whose many problems the council should be focusing.

Robert Cairns, Ceres, Fife

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