Sir,- As ever, smoke and mirrors are alive and well in the SNP.
Reports in the local press highlight John Swinney suggesting he has given money to help out the good folk of Alyth after their devastating flooding earlier this year.
We even have Councillor Ian Miller praising Mr Swinney for heeding his calls for help.
What both of them don’t have the courage to admit is that they should both be thanking David Cameron.
The fact is, the Scottish Government refused to give money to help alleviate the flooding issues in Alyth and have only passed on money funded by the UK Government, because David Cameron promised to give areas of the North of England the fullest financial support possible during recent flood issues there.
The funding for Alyth is a result of the Barnett Formula in action and a small but direct evidence that pooling and sharing of resources benefits Scotland greatly.
It’s direct evidence that we are indeed Better Together.
Furthermore, the response from the UK Government in England has been to give each household affected by flooding £500 to assist in additional accommodation costs and a further £5,000 to assist with new flood prevention measures for their homes.
Businesses have also been helped by a grant of £2,500 per business paid through local authorities to get back on their feet and a further £6 million application fund for businesses to help keep their doors open.
In addition, houses and businesses evacuated because of flooding will pay no rates or council tax.
We wait with bated breath to see if this will be replicated in Scotland by the SNP.
Councillor Ian Campbell. 1 West Park, Stanley, Perth.
Rusty turbines a real possibility
Sir,- Many wind turbines will soon need to be replaced.
This was never going to be a problem when eye-watering subsidies were harvested from electricity consumers, but are now drying up.
Owners who decide not to replace the turbines will have to excavate 1,000 tonnes of concrete for every turbine, remove the turbine and the blades, which contain Bisphenol A, a highly toxic substance, and remove access roads.
Can they afford this expense or, like solar panel and opencast coal mining companies, go into liquidation?
The SNP Government failed to ensure that all local authorities obtained financial warranties from wind turbine developers.
Financial bonds are normally secured, either under Section 75 of the Planning Acts or Section 69 of Local Government Acts.
Scotland Against Spin, an anti-wind turbine pressure group, investigated and found that very few local authorities had obtained such warranties.
Abandoned rusting turbines coming to a hillside near you?
Clark Cross. 138 Springfield Road, Linlithgow.
Trade is key, not parliaments
Sir Your correspondent Andrew Collins is undoubtedly sincere in his complaints about our United Kingdom.
But he is mistaken in believing that either Westminster or Holyrood is the master of our destiny.
The fault lies not in those parliaments, but in ourselves that we are becoming weaker.
When our Parliaments were merged in 1707, we probably had one in five of our combined populations.
Nowadays, Scotland has shrunk to one in 12 with less people here than in the Yorkshire region.
In the last year, fewer children were born here than the numbers who died, and half the numbers born in the mid-1960s.
Parliaments can’t change those dynamics.
Our diminishing workforce will have to pay for our growing numbers of pensioners from their declining tax-base.
Meanwhile, the population of southern England is growing faster than anywhere else in Europe, with a birth rate matching the peak of the 1960s and continued high levels of immigration.
Westminster has been unable to even slow those rapid growths.
Looking on the bright side, the rest of the UK remains by far our most important and loyal customers.
More of our packaged food and drink is consumed in the London region than in the whole of Scotland, and our financial service industries are highly dependent on the London market.
Tourists from elsewhere in the UK are the biggest spending category for our hospitality industries.
This year, we’ve learned that a vital economic lever is held by the Government of Saudi Arabia that has decided not to restrict its own oil industry for the benefit of high-cost producers such as ours.
Consequently, development of North Sea oil fields has come to a halt, and tax payments have slowed to a trickle.
None of that is the policy of either Westminster or Holyrood.
This poque is not the same as 300 years ago.
Fortunately, we live now in an inter-dependent world that is increasingly beyond the control of any government.
As both Adam Smith and Karl Marx predicted: It’s trade that determines the wealth of nations.
Not Parliaments.
Andrew Dundas. 34 Ross Avenue, Perth.
Alba’s triumph on Hogmanay
Sir,- Well done BBC Alba excellent Hogmanay show from the Byre at Inchyra.
Great ceilidh bands from the west coast along with local entertainers, real Scottish entertainment and in my opinion BBC1 and STV came a poor second.
Once again, well done everybody.
John Robertson. 1 Earnmuir Villas, Strowan Road, Comrie.
BB’s fortunes should be hailed
Sir,- I am sure all former members of the Boys’ Brigade would appreciate reading Bill Stevenson, director of the Boys’ Brigade in Scotland’s, letter.
It is great to know the BB continues to serve the youth of Scotland as it has always done.
Many of us in our senior years still share friendships we made in the BB decades ago.
I hope they will continue to recruit volunteers to serve in the movement and boys will continue to join their local companies and share in the many activities the BB provides for them.
Thomas Michie. 93 Main Street, Kinglassie, Fife.
Temperature has gone up
Sir,- Charles Wardrop claims there’s been no observed increase in global surface temperature over the last two decade.
This is false. This is not a scientific claim. It is propaganda put out by the fossil fuel industry in order to create doubt to stop restrictions being put on the extraction of oil and gas.
The claim has no merit yet it is repeated ad nausea by gullible freemarket Thatcherites like Mr Wardrop.
A scientific paper on the so-called 18-year “pause” in global warming by Stephan Lewandowsky, James Risbey and Naomi Oreskes concluded it was a myth. The paper is titled “On the definition and identifiability of the alleged ‘hiatus’ in global warming”.
The authors assess the magnitude and significance of all possible warming trends during the past 30 years.
They found that looking back in time, the current definition of a “pause” in warming, as it is used in the literature, would have been used for more than one-third of the time, even though temperatures during the past 30 years increased by 1.1F (0.6C).
The authors included 40 peer-reviewed studies that reported on the so-called hiatus or pause, and found no consistent definition among those studies. Then, the authors used these same 40 papers and asked whether the so-called “hiatus” was unusual in the time records.
They found it wasn’t.
The study also found that when the sample size is small (such as a short time period with very few years), a so-called “hiatus” will always appear.
Alan Hinnrichs. 2 Gillespie Terrace, Dundee.
A rainy message from God?
Sir,- We’re all fed-up of the rain and no wonder, for it seems as if it will never end.
It brings one thing home to us though, that we can’t defeat nature ever.
Could the present deluge be one of God’s ways (whether we believe in him or not) of letting us know He is invincible, for all time?
Mrs S Watt. 15 Hayston Terrace, Dundee.