Common decency
With May Day almost upon us and the traditional call for action against international injustice being gradually forgotten in the public mind, I am grateful to The Scotsman for publishing letters from readers like that from Joan Rowley (19 April), reminding us that the bombing and murder of children in the Yemen goes on and on, with much of the Saudi military ware having been made and sold by our own country.
Our media in general have been so preoccupied by the wickedness of other nations that our own shameful behaviour rarely hits the headlines. Even in an age when global news is beamed daily into every home, it is still the splinter in the eye of our “enemy”/neighbour that is made obvious and the plank in our own eye ignored.
But such silence is not golden. Sin is even worse when apathy reigns.
So for how much longer do veteran lions have to wait for younger ones to rise and roar in protest as previous generations did?
Our present government has intentionally organised what the Home Secretary confirmed as a “hostile environment” for families that previous leaders named as British and asked to come and help the “Mother Country”.
The same government has been deluded by what is now evidenced as a mirage and yet persists in leading us out of a not fault-free but definitively co-operative union that enabled modern roads to be built in the Highlands. That union also spared our sons from the traditional wars in Europe that killed and maimed their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers.
Brexit has turned out to be quite the opposite of the ancient Israelites’ Exodus. They were led into a Promised Land proved to have milk, honey and the grape: we are being pressed out of a Land of Promise into an unknown wilderness where it will be every country for itself.
With all this lack of common decency from above, and the pigheaded pride that cannot learn from mistakes, the regime change we all need now is not elsewhere but in Britain.
(REV) JACK KELLET Dyers Close, inner l lei then thought the electorate wanted to hear by way of reassurance about the royal family.
Mr Macaskill says he is not an ardent republican, but then delivers a pretty good impression of one with his snide dismissal of anything positive the royal family members do as merely something they have been “directed so to do as part of the (family) business empire”, and displays a coldhearted nationalist attitude to popular reaction to the birth of a prince by describing it all as “wearisome”.
If Nicola Sturgeon ever manmail ages to engineer an independence referendum rerun, it is to be hoped that the White Paper II more honestly explains the likely replacement of the monarch with a president, perhaps providing a shortlist for us all to ponder. Salmond, Macaskill, or Sturgeon perhaps?
KEITH HOWELL West Linton, Peeblesshire