Doggy paddle: Chilling out in the cool waters of Loch Lomond
Asscotlandcametogripswith the fact that lockdown wasn’t going to ease, some decided that getting away from it all was the best response.
And for one golden retriever, that meant chilling out in the cooling water of Loch Lomond, while for others it meantmessingaboutinboats.
With little rain expected over the next few days, more people will be likely to be out and about across Scotland, while the country is already seeing a growing number of staycationers, with motorhomes an increasingly common sight.
I hope the students at St Andrews University treat the views of their new lecturer Stephen Gethins with some scepticism (“Independent Scotland would act as a ‘bridge’ between EU and UK, says former SNP MP”, 15 June.)
Brexit is not driving a desire for independence, it is driven by SNP politicians who use the offices available to them to campaign on this to the exclusion of everything else. They were doing that long before Brexit.
Despite five years of relentless campaigning, Brexit has barely increased the indy vote and it is a very small minority of people who say that this is the priority at the moment. Brexit did not re-ignite the debate either. On 19 September 2014, ten hours after the result, Alex Salmond said: “The campaign will go on and the dream will never die...”. If Brexit had not happened, some other grievance would have been cultivated.
Mr Gethins says the UK is no longer a union of independent states, but it never has been. The UK is properly defined as a nation of unions. There is enough ambiguity to allow us to talk about the UK or Scotland as a country or nation and that allows us to rub along together and work well together. If we are going to talk about history, we have at least to describe what actually happened.
Scotland does not have a foreign policy. That is undertaken at a UK level. Scotland has produced good foreign secretaries such as Robin Cook and Sir Malcolm Rifkind in the last 30 years or so, so we do have our say. Talking about policies that are outwith your agreed area of operations is a waste of time and money. Our time and our money.
The south of Ireland does not have more soft power than the UK. There has been a meeting of G7 leaders in Cornwall this week, led by the UK Prime Minister. These were the most influential political leaders in the world, bar Russia and China. Ireland was not there. They can only dream of being there. When the crisis in the Euro zone emerged ten years ago, it was the UK that bailed out Ireland, not the other way around.
Finally, despite him being the SNP EU spokesperson in 2019, Stephen Gethins was the only SNP MP to lose his seat, suggesting that the electorate of NE Fife was not persuaded by his arguments, and did not want him to represent their views. A failed politician is not the best choice for giving our young people some proper perspective on the big issues that are happening in the world.
VICTOR CLEMENTS
Aberfeldy, Perthshire