Sir, As one of Scotland’s few remaining Conservatives, it saddens me to see the Tory party repeat the errors of previous administrations.
Maggie Thatcher unwisely adopted a colleague’s plan for the so-called poll tax. Worse still, she decided to try it out first in Scotland, with disastrous results!
Now David Cameron seems hell-bent on following suit with his benefits reforms and now that awful “bedroom tax”. Talk about handing the next election to the lefties on a plate!
Even if the legislation survives, its implication is fraught with untold problems, as our courts are now demonstrating.
This so-called tax should be scrapped and, as far as benefits fraud is concerned, the Westminster Government should simply instruct the departments concerned to get their act together and go after the offenders. The same applies to illegal immigrants. Less posturing with offensive advertising campaigns and more attention to closing the yawning gaps in immigration controls should be the priorities.
There are too many wealthy, ex-public schoolboys advising Mr Cameron. They have no idea how most voters think.
What Mr Cameron needs to keep him out of trouble with the Left and most of the electorate is somebody who has come up through the ranks, as it were, who was brought up in a council house, who went to a state school and had to work hard to make his way in the world.
With an adviser like that at his side, he might manage to avoid the worst of his ivory tower gaffes.
George K McMillan. 5 Mount Tabor Avenue, Perth.
Why Ronald Coase won Nobel prize
Sir, Your readers may like to know what it was that earned Ronald Coase, a member of the School of Economics at Dundee in the 1930s, his Nobel prize in 1991 (as reported in The Courier, September 6).
In 1932, at the age of 21, he gave a lecture at Dundee on why, in a free market, companies exist (rather than individual entrepreneurs). No-one had asked this before, preferring to study the macro-economy.
His answer was that integration of different activities (such as producing and advertising) plus a command structure are more efficient because they avoid the transaction costs (negotiations etc) of the marketplace.
For some 50 years, “for reasons that only those familiar with the perversities of academic disciplines can fully understand” (as John Naughton put it in The Observer), this was ignored.
Amusingly, the advent of the internet has now drastically altered the balance of power between companies and individual entrepreneurs in favour of the latter.
Perhaps some kind graduate would like to fund further research at Dundee into this matter?
Antony Black. School of Humanities, University of Dundee.
Just passing warblings
Sir, After having called humanity a “plague on the Earth” one’s expectations of the next misanthropic utterance from Sir David Attenborough were pretty low.
But his claim that we have creased to evolve because we have stopped natural selection through family planning is rather odd. I thought he was in favour of birth control?
Anyway, as a scientist I would be surprised if significant selection is not still taking place in modern populations through if nothing else selection based on sexual attraction.
As regards Kenneth Miln’s fear of slipping into a new Dark Age (Letters September 12), I wouldn’t give so much weight to passing warblings from the ageing “patron saint of all greenies.”
Dr John Cameron. 10 Howard Place, St Andrews.
Is God pointing the way to us?
Sir, The Church is seeking its way forward with God in the current debate on same-sex marriage.
As God cannot be defined in the same way as we define a circle or a square, both of which are unchanging, we catch a glimpse of God when we openly debate issues such as same-sex marriage.
That glimpse may demand we change our understanding of God just as our understanding of God has changed through the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Could it be that God is asking us, the Church, to change our understanding of marriage?
Grahame Lockhart. Myrtle Cottage, 15 Scott Street, Brechin.
Can’t grasp this simple fact
Sir, Alex Johnstone MSP in his comments on the SNP Government’s refusal to make the hardship funds into loans proves how out of touch and lacking in compassion he is on the plight of the needy and vulnerable in our society.
Turning grants into loans only replaces one crisis with another. Vulnerable people can’t afford to pay loans, a fact he, like most of his Tory pals, can’t seem to understand.
Peter Bell. Muirton Road, Arbroath.