A resolution to child poverty
DURING the first of the debates between the Yes and the Better Together campaigns, Nicola Sturgeon raised the issue of children in poverty: 50,000 children are in poverty in Scotland.
She blamed the Tories’ austerity measures. I blame the Tories, Labour, the LibDems, the Greens and the SNP. There are currently around 900,000 homes in fuel poverty in Scotland. Among this figure will be those 50,000 children. This poverty is in part caused by the rapid rise in energy prices. Energy prices are rising because the Labour Government implemented an illconsidered energy policy with unrealistic renewable energy targets.
The Coalition Government continues to support this drive to heavily subsidise renewable energy. The SNP is wholly supportive and obsessively exploiting that energy policy by imposing its own unrealistic targets upon the people of Scotland. Those footing the bill are the consumers, and they do so by an additional 15% added to their bill. This amount increases substantially every time the energy companies raise their tariffs. Not only are the most vulnerable suffering from this relentless rise in energy costs – predicted to surpass average mortgage payments within five years – but ordinary, hard-working people are struggling to make ends meet because of the cost of running their homes.
And all this cost is not even guaranteeing the lights will stay on. If the SNP was seriously concerned about child poverty it would stop its ludicrous pursuit to cover our country with ineffective and highly expensive wind turbines. More realistically, it would insist the industry stands on its own two feet and lobby Westminster to pull the plug on the subsidies. At the very least it should subsidise renewables accountably via government budgets. These subsidies drive up our fuel bills, drive up consumer costs and unemployment as companies cannot afford to produce, manufacture and transport goods. They also encourage the ruin and exploitation of our natural heritage. And the profits made by the energy companies are deposited into offshore investments. Scotland reaps very little, or no benefit from this exploitation. THIS picture was taken on Orkney. It was a wonderful cliff walk. Above sits the Kitchener Monument, erected by
HELEN LENNOX HENEVER I watch the television programme Who Do You Think You Are?, in which celebrities look at their ancestors and trace their history, I am always struck by how often they find that history and the most interesting facts from the pages of the newspaper of the day stored in a library or other official building.
It could be for a marriage, incident, accident or conviction for some misdemeanour long forgotten in the dim and distant past, but forever recorded in the pages of a newspaper.
Perhaps you might want to conduct research into the period of the miners’ strike in Scotland in the 1980s. You might go to the National Library of Scotland on Edinburgh’s George IV Bridge, or to your local public library to look at what the people of Orkney in 1926 to remember the Secretary of War. His ship hit a mine and sank off Marwick Head in 1916 with the loss of many lives, including Kitchener’s. Taken with a Canon 6D camera, 125th at f8.
We welcome submissions for Picture of the Day. Email photographs to pictureoftheday@theherald.co.uk.