Ageing Calmac fleet is an affront to islanders – The National

FOR the last 60 years at least I have been aware of the carve-up that was and continues to be the Union, and I passionately wish to see it dissolved in my lifetime. So I support any and every agency that promotes our independence, with the SNP patently being the prime mover. However I do not agree with some things that the SNP does, and more particularly with things that the SNP government doesnt do.

One example is its seeming lack of effort or ability in securing the ferry infrastructure of this country. Scotlands island residents of some 90,000 or so depend on reliable ferries, and regrettably they havent had them for lots of years. With its geography and its history of shipbuilding, Scotland should have a modern ferry fleet, built in Scottish yards, but what it has is an ageing fleet and an apparent lack of competence to replace it, if Ferguson Marine is taken as example.

And thus viewers of the STV evening news a couple of nights back had to suffer the skin-crawling experience of slithy-tove Gove in Stornoway, offering levelling-up funds as a UK solution to an observed Scottish Government problem. We need urgently to get a grip and thus avoid setting up obvious targets for a corrupt, devious and dishonest UK (ie English) Government, one that we have had to thole for far too long. Please, for all our sanities, not much longer!Ken GowBanchory

THE new Pietistic argument against independence seems to be that because the UK departure from the EU was so chaotic, shambolic and disorganised this means independence will be as well.

What this preposterous argument implies is that the fraudulent extreme right-wing clowns in charge of that process (Boris Johnson and his Ghouls) should continue to rule Scotland.

Brexit was presided over by Boris Johnson a man so bone idle he could not be bothered to go to five Cobra meetings during the worst pandemic for 100 years.

This was the imbecile whose government wasted 150 million on unusable masks, 10 billion on a test and trace system that did neither, 16m on Covid tests that did not work, yet got his plane rebranded at a cost of 900k. And the Unionists laughably claim independence is the problem.

It was these same British nationalist wingnuts who applauded while 1.5m EU citizens were denied a vote in the 2016 EU referendum. They have done a volte-face and are now saying that Scots living outside Scotland should get to vote in any future referendum in order to rig it.

This wretched Unionist hypocrisy has the nauseating reek of a putrid corpse.

Another absurd ludicrous insulting fairytale is that in 2014 the Yes side agreed this would be a once in a generation event. There is no evidence for this as it never happened. Yet Unionists think if they lie about it long enough then it will become reality.

British Unionists are similar in outlook to followers of the fascist Trump-loving Qanon conspiracy theory. Both are ludicrous and have an aversion to reality. Yet they are both followed slavishly by mindless fanatics.Alan HinnrichsDundee

THE Spanish government has granted a pardon to the nine Catalan political prisoners and it pains me that internationally they attribute good intentions to this farce. The pardons have been given in a forced manner, because of the recent Council of Europe report, which equates Spain with Turkey, and because of the imminent, presumably condemnatory judgement of the EU Court of Human Rights. But these are Spanish-style pardons: reversible pardons.

They are not pardons but conditional release and, if at some point they consider that they are not behaving correctly, they will put them back in prison. Furthermore, in Catalonia, there are 3300 pro-independence supporters with open criminal proceedings for holding peaceful demonstrations. For them there will be no pardons, but fines and imprisonment. Like the recent five-year prison sentence for the young Marcel Vivet. Convicted without evidence, only on the accusation of a policeman (who, moreover, we have now discovered that he had blamed another demonstrator for the same action!)

And there will be no pardon for the exiles (in Belgium and Switzerland), who will still not be able to return home because the Spanish police will arrest them against the criteria of the Council of Europe and against the immunity they enjoy as members of the European Parliament. But not only that, the Court of Auditors is also involved in the operation against independence.

It is a court that audits the accounts of public administrations (although it has not prosecuted the corruption of Spanish governments). It is linked to Francos dictatorship, made up of non-judges appointed mostly by the Spanish right wing, not very transparent and outside any democratic control. The Court of Auditors accuses the Catalan government of having incurred undue expenses and holds 41 people allegedly responsible who, although not yet sentenced as guilty, will have to pay bail per person of 3.8m, 3.3m, 2.95m, 2.2m ... or have their salaries, bank accounts and family assets seized. These amounts now demanded by the Court of Auditors are in addition to the 5.2m and 4.1m previously demanded and paid.

The state is prevaricating in order to ruin them and try to scare the independence movement. Is this the forgiveness and concord offered by the Spanish State? We will not be satisfied with nine reversible pardons while the repression continues.

However, we do know that, neither this farce nor your repression you will manage to make us more Spanish. On the contrary, you have made us pro-independence: too many grievances, too much violence.

We are and will be Catalans, inhabitants of a nation with over a thousand years of history. We have survived centuries of Spanish oppression and deserve to be free.

If a region of Spain, not the richest, but the most enterprising and hard-working, is economically sustaining the state, what you should do is respect and care for this region. The will for independence is growing and will continue to grow in Catalonia, and it will not be because of the serious economic plundering it suffers, but because of mistreatment, lies and ferocious repression that never ends. Freedom for Catalonia!Montse Molas VerdaguerBarcelona, Catalonia

I WAS interested in your article (More Research Needed on Virtual Abortion Care. National, June 28). But is more research needed on the telemedical process of carrying out abortions?

The German makers of the two drugs used to effect abortions have specifically and publicly stated that they should never be administered without real-life medical supervision. Germany and France have debated the issue of telemedical abortions for ten years and have decided against them. You go on to say that a pro-life campaign may have skewed the Scottish consultation result because a Right to Life group used standardised responses, more than 3000 of them.

If all printed voting papers were labelled standardised responses, and therefore discounted, would that mean all our past elections should have been invalidated, and all our future elections too? What value can be placed on surveys on Scottish independence if printed cards are used and then dismissed?

If I tell you that a leading British Tory MP has invested an immense amount of money in the pharmaceutical company which makes these abortion-inducing drugs, which in fact he has done, does this not tell you which way the wind is blowing?

Moreover, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, Marie Stopes, indeed all the abortion providers are funded and heavily subsidised by the British Government. But the British Medical Association (Scotland) must now be seeking possible ways of saving money by not having to pay doctors and nurses to care for young women seeking abortions. Are these things not likely to skew the consultation in the other direction?

I am not personally acquainted with the Right to Life group, but it seems that votes freely and rationally given, on whatever the paper, are not standardised responses and should be respected and counted.Lesley FindlayFort Augustus

IN Kirsteen Patersons article titled, OBON isnt fascist but it gives me the shivers, she explains why One Britain One Nation must not be conflated with fascism.

But consideration of verse two is blatantly false and promotes a racist ideology when it states: So many different races, standing in the same place.

Although purportedly conveying an image of unity, the sentence in fact reflects historical racism by referring to many different races. As modern science reveals based on empirical evidence there is only one human race.

This point is also encapsulated in law as in the Equality Act 2010, Section 9, race is not used to denote either a racial ground or group. Indeed, race can be viewed as an outmoded and discredited concept to distinguish biological differences.

By teaching children whose minds are malleable distorted ideological perspectives, this serves as a good example of institutionalised discrimination, in this case racism.

Further, the song does not acknowledge the reality that people from specific national or ethnic groups, including black people, are not in the same place when considering levels of economic disadvantage and social oppression that they experience.

An innocent little ditty ... methinks not!Dr Stewart MontgomeryGlasgow

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Ageing Calmac fleet is an affront to islanders - The National