Sir,- Covid willing, COP26 in Glasgow in November will attract over 30,000 delegates, creating extra greenhouse gas emissions, disruption for people living in Glasgow and the need for a huge police presence.
In her budget Finance Secretary Kate Forbes increased the police budget by £60 million up to a record £1.3 billion.
Why should UK taxpayers subsidise COP delegates?
Levy a carbon tax since delegates will arrive by air, a congestion charge for their chauffeured limousines and a pollution tax because of the hot air and rubbish they talk.
The police should advise Extinction Rebellion that the number of demonstrators will be limited and they will have to pay for police supervision as do football clubs.
A fee of £100 will get a “right to demonstrate” pass.
Those without a pass should be fined at least £1,000 and violent acts punished with jail time.
Clark Cross.
138 Springfield Road,
Linlithgow.
Two Scotlands that ‘cannot co-exist’
Sir, – Alex Bell’s piece last Wednesday should be required reading for anyone minded to support separation. He’s a former adviser to the SNP leadership.
The sales pitch is that separation will give “the Scotland you want”.
It’ll give your neighbour the Scotland he/she wants.Those two Scotlands may be so different that they can’t coexist.
In reality, you’d get the Scotland you want provided you want the same as those in charge.
Most of you will be disappointed; all of you will be financially worse off, at least for a long time and possibly forever.
Councillor David Dempsey.
7 Carlingnose Park,
North Queensferry.
Calamitous Westminster failure
Sir, – A few weeks ago the entire Dutch government resigned after thousands of families were wrongly accused of child welfare fraud and told to pay money back.
Now I would not wish to downplay the seriousness of that situation, but it would seem to me to be, in the grand scheme of things, fairly minor compared to the calamitous failure of our Westminster Government, which has presided over one of the highest death toll per head of population in the world, in one of the richest countries on Earth.
Johnson’s government has demonstrated incompetence from day one, too late to lockdown, too early to leave, they ploughed on with Brexit, to ‘secure our borders’, as the pandemic surged, yet it has taken them a year to decide that it might be wise to enforce the aforementioned border, and, as yet, would appear to have no plan on how to do this.
Yet not a single Minister, so far as I can recall, has resigned over this dreadful failure of government, nor indeed have there been many calls for heads to roll.
After austerity, Windrush, Brexit, and all the rest of the Tory lies and obfuscation, are the British people now inured to government failure?
Les Mackay.
5 Carmichael Gardens,
Dundee.
Covid vaccine critics are ‘havering’
Sir, – I note in recent days several contributors describing vaccine roll-out in Scotland as incompetent.
Perhaps we should ask them to define their understanding and use of the hyperbole.
The dictionary defines incompetence as ‘the inability to do something successfully’. Are these writers seriously asking us to believe that due to Scotland lagging behind England by a small percentage, that this is incompetence?
They are havering.
Alistair Ballantyne.
Birkhill,
Angus.
Treating nature as a vital global asset
Sir, – The Das Gupta Review, an independent review on the Economics of Biodiversity, views nature as an asset, just as we view human capital.
Perhaps schools should include the Das Gupta Review into the secondary curriculum.
Kenneth Miln.
Union St,
Monifieth.
