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With this year’s Scottish Poppy Appeal concluded, I would be grateful if I could use your newspaper to inform on the Auchterarder area’s contribution.
Last year, which was the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, record donations were made.
It is not surprising therefore that donations have fallen back to a normal level in the follow-up year of 2019.
Great efforts have been made by regular volunteers to maintain the poppy appeal effort and it is very satisfying that £5000 was recently banked for the Royal British Legion.
The generosity of the public continues to be amazing, but those who carried the poppy cans are owed special thanks; the shop and hotel outlets, the community school, St Margaret’s Health Centre and Hospital, the Army Cadet Force and, not least, the house-to-house collectors.
The Scottish Poppy Appeal is imbedded in the national calendar.
It is a most worthy cause that helps so many ex-servicemen and women who have given fine service to the benefit of us all, sometimes suffering mental stress and physical pain, and who have fallen on hard times.
Every penny donated will be used by the ‘Legion’ to good effect. Thank you so much for your support. Auchterarder is expanding fast with the various housing developments growing each year.
More volunteers are needed to carry out house-to-house collections in the Muir Homes Castle Mains area and the Robertson’s Townhead Farm development.
If any local reader would like to help with next year’s appeal in some way, please contact area coordinator David Homewood on 01764 663049. David Homewood RBL Poppy Appeal area organiser Abbey Park Auchterarder
The letter (PA, November 19) from George K McMillan, the Tory arch-unionist, shows how diametrically opposite we are on our views about being Scottish: to me it is a nationality, to him it is an encumbrance.
His subject this time is Scottish history. This may sound like an innocuous matter for his latest squeal but, given the timing and the contents, this is a carefully crafted political attack on the SNP in the usual slippery Tory shot-from-the-dark style, trying to make out that the SNP government is introducing partisan history to schools, thereby planting the idea in people’s minds that the SNP are dishonest and untrustworthy as we move towards polling day.
The Tories are good at this – even as I write they are being slammed for turning their digital site into a fake site called ‘factcheckUK’ during the Corbyn -Johnson debate.
A spokesman claimed people would know it was ‘satire’ because it retained the letters ‘CCHQ’. I doubt if people in general would know that the letters stand for ‘Conservative Campaign HQ’, but that, itself, looks close to GCHQ. Coincidence or otherwise?
Mr McMillan bemoans the fact that the government has issued - he accurately describes it – a guide to schools, then pronounces that “history is supposed to be factual and objective, but this is a travesty”. If it is a guide then presumably teachers will ignore that which they consider incorrect and substitute their own views.
He is seeing things from a Tory authoritarian view – we have watched them throw out long-serving party members for not backing Johnson’s version of Brexit and making all general election candidates sign a pledge to support Brexit as a condition for selection.
He claims that ‘Scotsnats’ boast about victory at Bannockburn, but make no mention of Flodden and other battles. Well, I talk about Bannockburn, Flodden, Stirling Bridge, Dun Nechtain, and Rosslyn among others, the latter two probably being more important than Bannockburn in their time.
Does he really think that the Scots are different from the rest of the world? All countries talk up their victories and play down their defeats.
He goes on about nationalists deploring English invasions, but failing to mention Scottish attacks in North England. Well, for one thing we do talk about the likes of Otterburn. For another, Scots tended to be taking retaliatory measures in a national context (ignoring Border Reivers’ actions). He states that Robert the Bruce’s family came from France with William the Conqueror and he owned more land in England than Scotland. Is this supposed to be a revelation? Never for one moment did I think his faither wiz a scaffie frae Kinnoull Street and his mither a wee fishwife frae Eberdeen.
This shows up how Scottish history is contaminated by English events: “William the Conqueror” – in England, yes, not in Scotland. We should stick to his noble title in France which I cannot repeat here. We should also remember that the southern English had quite a record of attacking the north through the ages.
He then goes on about the 1707 union as being portrayed as being imposed from the top down. It was. Just 110 Scots MPs voted through the act leading to the union.
Many had property in England they could have lost under the Alien Act (we’ll ignore the effects of the Darian
Disaster, since that is well known). The peasantry were not consulted, but petitions flooded the Scottish Parliament opposing the union.
When I was at school many years ago, a large chunk of history was about the Wars of the Roses, the Hundred Years’ War, Henry VIII and other facts that were not relevant to Scotland. We were also taught about the glories of the British Empire and how it brought civilisation to native peoples across the world.
Mr McMillan gives us a bit of a rerun on this when he mentions the Scottish Enlightenment after the union – and how Scotland gained from “the benefits of an expanding British Empire”.
That was because we had exported many of the wars to the colonies, Scotland now being effectively a colony itself. This “expanding empire” was a looting orgy for the benefit of the upper classes, it is estimated that the Empire sucked out 95 per cent of India’s wealth. The Indian Mutiny of 1857 was against the East India Company, a private enterprise which today’s Tories would happily invest in.
Mr Macmillan seems to have forgotten to use the word “exploitation” – and he dares to accuse others of travesty. Thomas R Burgess St Catherine’s Square Perth