To whip up nationalist fervour against foreigners is a dangerous and deplorable move. Perhaps it is time to prohibit the display of flags of any kind for a while.

Martin Roberts
Perth

NHS can learn from industry

Neil Mackay’s article based on his interview with the BMA chief is brilliant. How can it, like James Macmillan’s speech on sectarianism at an Edinburgh festival lecture in 1999 be made into a turning point?

Bevan ‘stuffed doctors’ mouths with gold in 1946 and, unfortunately, allowed the co-existence of public and private medical sectors. Consultants make endless complaints about health management, of lack of a matron in charge of a ward, etc. The ’gold’ might have to be reduced to ‘silver,’ which would surely mean it cannot be the BMA’s task to lead the ‘new way.’ Consultants do seem difficult to manage. I’m a fan, to the horror of medics, of Henry Marsh (author of Do No Harm), one-time consultant, now journalist and presenter and I’m happy never to have managed anyone of his (now confessed) arrogance. Do consultants have a blueprint for how they would manage the health service themselves?

Dr Iain Kennedy and the BMA have done a spectacular job in protecting BMA members. In the 1970’s, medical consultants ‘worked to rule’ as the BMA fought the Labour government’s attempt at reforms – full-page adverts in the press by the BMA simply said, ‘BMA says No’…a union’s prime role is surely to protect.

I know a number of mostly retired medical consultants in Glasgow – they are (or were!) my pals. I chide them for being the ‘new aristocracy’ with their comfortable salaries, fabulous pensions and, above all, their cast iron job security.

They’ve followed the progress of an engineering company 3 of us started in Lanarkshire 30 years ago with serious interest. They, (no doubt comparing their lot with mine), have found it difficult to imagine living with no security. (The company did survive and now prospers with 70+ employees).

I do know medicine is a tough trade for all involved. Last Saturday night we were with a friend waiting for news. At 9pm there was a call from a surgeon who’d travelled 3 hours earlier, from QUEH to Royal Infirmary to carry out emergency surgery on his dangerously ill, wife; faultless commitment, and fingers crossed a great outcome.

I believe John Swinney to be a decent man, probably Keir Starmer too; they believe they’ll lose an election if they don’t ‘promise’ growth and no tax rises. There is no helpful spirit of post WW2 collaboration. Change is undeniably difficult to achieve. The public must somehow give the politicians sufficient manoeuvring room to make change happen without the crutch of catastrophe or war. Maybe the hundreds of thousands on waiting lists will eventually catch politicians’ attention?

It’s rich for someone (especially someone whose kids would say has negligible understanding of the ‘medical scene’) from the failed, shrivelled manufacturing sector to pontificate, but I do know that difficult change is possible – sure the need for us to make a profit does help.

The few remaining Scottish industries have mostly been banished to out of town estates. There is a skills shortage. The process of wealth creation is an invisible mystery to most. Those, like me, who go into manufacturing, where less than 8% of us work, are regarded with sympathy, if considered at all. Schools have said to our daughters, ‘You’re too bright to do science or engineering, you should consider law, medicine or even accounting at university.’ Yes…in Glasgow, a once great industrial city. Tragic and, like much else in our culture, needs to change.

For years it was thought that engineering companies should be run by accountants – now it is mostly engineers in charge. Top politicians in the USA are mostly lawyers – in China they are all engineers or scientists. Leadership skills need to adjust to different circumstances. We seem to be fumbling towards an understanding of which might produce better outcomes.

The NHS is not broken. Blood tests and vaccinations are efficient. The GP service is excellent in our admittedly gentrified bit of the city. My hernia surgery 2 years ago, after a tough 2 year wait, was executed perfectly. When patients eventually reach the ‘needle and knife’ stage, NHS care seems as brilliant as ever. I just have no sense of what efforts are being made to reduce waiting times. So many hands are tied into inactivity. When a private company has late delivery problems, enormous efforts are made to reduce the backlog – admittedly profit is that uncomfortable spur.

I hope Neil Mackay’s brilliant article can lead to a turning-point.

Dick Philbrick
East Kilbride

Don’t demonise our clubs and pubs

Much is made of Scotland’s issues with alcohol and the need to tackle alcohol abuse. It is unlikely that prohibition of alcohol will ever occur. The genie is out of the bottle, alcohol is drunk.

I believe the argument for taxing abuse out of the system is not nuanced enough. It is probably better that we learned to live with alcohol and think about how we could handle the issue better.

I would propose a vastly different duty for off- and on-trade sales to attempt to divert more people to drinking their alcohol in pubs. The Sheffield University Report on Minimum Pricing in September 2023 showed that 84% of alcohol purchased by ‘harmful’ drinkers (the worst sufferers) is from off-sales (supermarkets, corner shops etc). and only 16% of ‘harmful’ alcohol is purchased in on-sales (pubs, clubs, restaurants etc).

However, given, that, in Scotland, only 15% of alcohol is actually sold in on-sales (pubs, clubs, both dancing and sporting, etc) in the first place these figures suggest that only a relatively small percentage of harmful drinkers are accessing their alcohol through pubs.

This is why Minimum Unit Pricing is aimed at buyers of the cheaper drink sold in off-sales. However, the money raised from this goes straight to supermarket/convenience stores profits not to helping those with alcohol problems. By all means raise the costs of off-sales alcohol but keep the money for the health service.

Why is so much time spent on demonising pubs etc and even the adverts within pubs such as umbrellas and table mats? I feel that it is unlikely that a drink sign on an umbrella outside a pub advertising Merlot chases folk down the drink isle in a supermarket looking for bottle to drink at home. As the supermarkets etc make free money with MUP they are far better at tempting drinkers than beer mats are. It is in their best interests to tempt any kind of drinker.

Pubs etc allow drinking to be in more sociable and controlled surroundings compared to drinking in the home alone or in pairs while ignoring alcohol measures and opening times. Pubs also have a positive effect on wellbeing and in bringing communities together compared to off sales drinking. Raising on-sales prices further will lead to closures of pubs, clubs and restaurants with loss of jobs, facilities and safer drinking places which will in turn drive more people to drink alone.

Pubs should be looked on as part of the solution.

Alastair McMillan

Scotland should have its own currency

The disadvantages of PFI are well documented by Robert Menzies (Letters 28th August) and serve to illustrate one of the advantages that an independent Scotland – with its own currency – could have, which is that public works such as hospitals would be financed by Scotland’s own interest-free money.

Independence would allow Scotland to issue its own money supply and be rid of the private rapacious banking system that is presently ruining the UK.

Space here does not allow for a fuller explanation, save to say that Scotland could also create and issue its own fiat currency, instead of using that of the UK, but this Scottish currency would be for the benefit of Scotland itself, and not for that of greedy bankers.

Malcolm Parkin
Kinross-shire

Deer are integral to our ecosystems

The article ‘Sharp end of criticism’ (Sept 28) is all about reducing the number of red deer across the Highlands in order to encourage trees. It states “the zero-tolerance approach to deer … may be working” quoting a research paper which concluded that pine was regenerating in the Cairngorms because of lower deer numbers. How surprising!

But this whole approach misses a fundamental point: deer, indeed large herbivores generally, are integral to natural ecosystems and shape the vegetation pattern. Are the Highlands of Scotland, then, not a success story in being the only area of Europe to maintain a significant population of indigenous large herbivores throughout the postglacial period? And now we want to get rid of them because we prefer trees!

Research over the years has shown that there is postglacial change in vegetation: from ice, to tundra, to woodland, to moorland. In this, the oligocratic phase, one would expect woodland to decline and open moorland to expand. This is a natural process, which all those wanting less deer and more trees are seeking to reverse. And I thought nature conservation was about conserving natural processes…

James Fenton
Oban

Atrocities put Jews worldwide at risk

I agree with Don Ferguson on Gaza (“‘Never again’ must mean exactly that’; Letters, 28 Sept.). But quite apart from the Israeli State endangering itself, Netanyahu’s atrocities are putting Jews worldwide in danger, though many are not Zionists.

One of the sickest developments, according to MintPress News*, is that the IDF’s Unit 8200 now has the cynically named ‘Project Lavender’, an AI-generated kill-list which assigns every Gazan (including children !) a ‘score’ between 0 and 100 according to the likelihood of their being a Hamas member. Above a certain ‘score’ they’re automatically targeted with drones, and woe betide anyone who happens to be near them. It’s called ‘collateral damage’.

This is barbarism, reminiscent of Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents. Civilised Europe should be condemning it to the utmost.

George Morton,
Rosyth

What is going on with our police?

Once again we are made aware of serious issues with Metropolitan Police officers in a BBC documentary programme. Mark Rowley had promised to root out the bad apples when he took control. He now comes out and tell us that some of theses issues still remain. So, just what has he done?

We had a similar situation in Scotland when the last chief constable resigned. He had been in charge for 5 years, and on announcing his retirement, he admitted the force was homophobic, racist, sexist and misogynistic. What had he done in the period he was in charge, nothing! If memory serves me correctly, he had suffered a period of controversy in his own early career and survived it. What does that tell us?

Both these men retire with massive pension pots, receive huge lump sum retirement pay-outs, and have their knighthoods. On retirement they get offered opportunities to sit on various committees, without always having appropriate experience in some of the fields. Just because they were top officers in the police?

What a mess!

John Russell,
Airdrie