Mr Irvine is “puzzled” that UK gender legislation from 2005 has “never caused controversy”. Perhaps that is because it restricts a change in gender recognition to those who have had a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, have lived in their acquired gender for at least two years and are at least 18 years old. By contrast, in Scotland, the failed GRRB introduced self-identification (without any diagnosis), and living in the acquired gender for three months, from the age of 16. This notoriously enabled men convicted of sexual offences to opt to serve their time in a women’s prison, until it was widely publicised.
Part of the muddle of SNP Government thinking was that the GRRB, entailing massive life changes, was valid from age 16, while the Named Person plan assigned a guardian – who did not have to inform parents of serious issues affecting their children – who was deemed to be required until a child reached the age of 18. Old enough at 16 to choose to change gender but young enough to require a state guardian? Something amiss there.
Jill Stephenson, Edinburgh.
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Be grateful for Thatcher
IN his catalogue of condemnation of successive UK governments, Eric Melvin (Letters, January 1) sadly does not display the rigour for the full picture he showed last year in his justified critique of Edinburgh City Council’s partial and misleading plaque wording under the Melville Monument.
Yes, the SNP’s support remains strong – but he does not acknowledge that Margaret Thatcher’s support was also strong, from 1979 through the 1980s, despite her numerous faults in his opinion.
She did not “hate” the trade unions as such, but quite rightly hated the ability and frequency with which the powerful union barons could call their members out on strike without a vote. Nor did she “deliberately” destroy our traditional industrial base (think Nissan); that had already begun in the 1960s/1970s due in large part to these barons like Hugh Scanlon and Jack Jones, ably assisted by Jack Dash and Red Robbo among others, as Scanlon himself finally admitted when he retired.
Their near-untrammelled power had to be reined in, which led (with our departure from the German-led Exchange Rate Mechanism) to our 1990s growth from which the Blair/Brown governments benefited. Would Mr Melvin have preferred such disrupters to have continued their “who governs Britain?” through to this century?
The banks’ deregulation was initially beneficial, but sadly too many bankers did not justify the freedoms entrusted to them; PFI was an accounting fiddle but not unlike that of our state and public pensions which the public sector is happy to continue.
It is too soon to describe Brexit as disastrous; the UK was still recovering, albeit too slowly, from the banking shambles when Covid then dominated everything else for over two years (and still does) followed by Putin’s war – from all of which much of the EU is still suffering no less than the UK (including their own PPE procurement issues).
John Birkett, St Andrews.
SNP has failed our NHS
SOME of your recent correspondents have defended the performance of the NHS in Scotland with the traditional SNP mantra that lack of investment is due to underfunding by Westminster which would all go away in an independent Scotland and cherry-picking statistics that show Scotland outperforms the rest of the UK. Personally, I agree that the NHS needs greater investment as well as greater efficiency but I have never had an answer to two questions.
First, given that Scotland receives approximately 25% more public funding than elsewhere in UK, the starting point in the statistics should be that they are consequently 25% better which is patently not the case, and secondly, the SNP has had 20 years to present the financial case for independence and hence the NHS in Scotland and has singularly failed to do so.
The latest series of glossy brochures (with a hefty consultants’ fee) tell us nothing of substance. You can guarantee that the financial case has been analysed to death somewhere and if it made good reading it would have been published and shouted from the rooftops. Perhaps the Scottish Government should just get on with the day job as effectively and efficiently as it can and stop blaming everything and everybody but itself.
Duncan Sooman, Milngavie.
Westminster battle ahead
I AGREE with Carlos Alba (“Talk of a Reform government is as risible as Farage’s cords”, The Herald, January 1) that polling today simply cannot predict the outcome of an election in 2029. In saying that, Mr Alba disregards the weakening of the Westminster two-party system, which has seen a collapse of popular support for the “Big Two”.
A run of dreadful Tory prime ministers and a Labour party fighting an election on a patently fake manifesto has seen politics in England descent into a three-way cockfight between Nigel Farage, Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch.
Scotland is in a different electoral cycle, the SNP rising while Labour’s credibility has taken a hit. Bad timing for unionism will be the announcement, just months before the Holyrood election, of multi-billion-pound financing of the refurbishment of the Palace of Westminster. I suspect many Scots (and others) will resent huge dollops of supposedly limited public money going into a building with diminishing relevance for many, when Westminster’s prime site could be sold and a brand new parliament constructed (in York?) for a fraction of the cost of refurbishment. As many of the peers have intimated they would not move out of London, the Upper Chamber could be limited to 100 members, elected of course.
GR Weir, Ochiltree.
Shun Labour and the Tories
IN 2003 the then Labour government took us into a war with Iraq. In 2011 the then Conservative government took us into a bombing campaign in Libya, and in December 2015 it took us into a military action in Syria helped in the vote by the LibDems and DUP. All three of these military interventions were of dubious legality, and have resulted in mass deaths, maiming, destruction and chaos in those unfortunate countries.
UK voters should ask themselves why they re-elected the Conservatives in May 2015 and December 2019 and Labour in 2024. This makes us, the voters, complicit. Let’s resolve never to vote again for these aforementioned parties. Let’s tell these politicians that we won’t comply with any more foreign wars.
Geoff Moore, Alness.
It has emerged that the 10 per cent increase in ferry fares decided by the Scottish Government was greater than the rise requested by ferry operators (Image: Newsquest)
Stupidity of ferry fares call
I REALLY had difficulty in believing the news that the Scottish Government had decided that ferry fares should go up 10% when the ferry operators were looking for around one-fifth of that increase (“Ferry fares increase was ‘greater than the sum operators requested’, note shows”, The Herald, January 2). This is the ferry service that is the lifeline of Scotland’s islands and has been allowed through disinterest and incompetence to deteriorate into a shameful mess.
When is the Government going to give itself a shake and stop making obviously stupid and harming policy decisions (harming to Scottish communities and harming to the Government)? I would really like to know which minister blurted out “I think we should bang up ferry fares 10%”. And what planet they were living on when they uttered that stupidity. And why the other members of the cabinet didn’t forcibly inform them of the existential threat facing the islands.
There’s a sports logo “Just do it!”. The Government could usefully adopt something similar: “Just don’t do anything obviously stupid and harmful”.
Sandy Slater, Stirling.