Notice board Real, urgent change is needed to protect our children
● Lesley Riddoch is touring with her new film Denmark: The State Of Happiness. There are screenings at 7.30pm tonight at Stromness Town Hall, Orkney; 7pm tomorrow at Shetland Museum & Archives. For full tour dates and to book, see lesleyriddoch.com/events
● Free Highlight Talks continue in the Robertson Room at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway at 2.30pm on Wednesday. Gerry Carruthers, professor of Scottish literature at Glasgow University, will speak on Robert Burns: The Ellisland Effect, examining the poet’s time at Ellisland Farm and its impact on his work. Booking a free place via Eventbrite is advised.
● Author SG MacLean will be visiting Stirling Central Library at 6pm on Wednesday to discuss her award-winning novel The Bookseller Of Inverness, a historical thriller set in Inverness in the wake of the 1746 Battle of Culloden. For tickets call 01786 237760 or email centrallibrary@stirling.gov.uk
● Edinburgh Women For Independence will be Ootnaboot across Edinburgh in the run-up to the election, starting on Saturday. They will be stall sharing with Yes Marchmont Morningside from 11am-1pm at the Edinburgh Meadows Festival. They are always looking for more volunteers.
● Dumfries & Galloway Arts Festival is running until Sunday, June 2, with a programme of world-class theatre, music, dance, comedy and spoken word. See www.dgartsfestival. org.uk for programme details.
● Colin MacIntyre will be in conversation with Billy Sloan about the first book in his Mull Mysteries series, When The Needle Drops, at 7pm on Tuesday, June 4 at Waterstones Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow. Tickets £5 or £12 including a copy of the book. See www. waterstones.com to book.
AS parents, we strongly support the new Edinburgh low emission zone (LEZ), due to come into force on June 1, as an important step towards the bold, transformative, just policymaking that our children and communities urgently need.
Air pollution is a human rights violation and the largest environmental health risk we face today, causing approximately seven million premature deaths across the world, and 36,000 in the UK, every year. Children are more vulnerable to toxic fumes as their bodies are smaller, their lungs are developing, and at street level they are closer to car exhausts. The European Environment Agency estimates that air pollution kills 1200 under-18s annually in Europe alone.
2024 marks 11 years since the tragic death of nine-year-old Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah in London, and five years since a landmark coroner’s case concluded that air pollution contributed to her death. In 2018, Unicef found that children in around 2000 UK schools are exposed to illegal, unsafe nitrogen dioxide pollution. They are especially vulnerable in deprived communities, and one in five children in Edinburgh lives in relative poverty. Last year, more than six in 10 Scots surveyed by Asthma + Lung UK Scotland said they were worried about air pollution at the school gates. LEZs have documented success in reducing air pollution, and have been shown to have numerous health benefits.
This is also part of a much bigger question: put bluntly, whether the world in which we are bringing up our children is “fit for purpose”, never mind the world we are “gifting” future generations. It is less than three years since Scotland hosted international climate summit COP 26. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is clear that global warming must be capped at 1.5C to avoid serious harm to current and future generations. Yet any progress is abysmally slow. Even if governments meet their own 2030 targets, warming could still be between 2.4 and 2.8C, according to Climate Action Tracker, and the Scottish Government has just abandoned its key 2030 target for a 75% emissions reduction. Real, urgent change is needed, and this requires imaginative, compassionate rethinking of all our systems, including the cities we live in.
In other words, this is about safeguarding our children’s lives and their right to good health, including mental health, but also about giving
I READ a recent article in
The National with a mixture of anger and disbelief. It was headed “Plans to export green hydrogen to Germany” (May 24). In it Mairi McAllan, Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero and Energy, is quoted as saying it will be a “great export opportunity”.
The article title is self-explanatory and reveals the Scottish Government is well on the way to turning exploratory plans into reality. It appears that Scottish hydrogen exports could potentially meet 22% to 100% of Germany’s hydrogen import demand by 2045. In essence the wind turbines which cover an ever-increasing area of our land will produce hydrogen to power the homes and businesses of Germany.
The Scottish Government is currently investing our taxes in a foreign-owned factory to manufacture cables to assist in the southward export of wind-generated electricity and in a so-called green freeport to assemble the turbines. It
I read a recent article with a mixture of anger and disbelief
is not entirely clear from the recent article how the hydrogen will find its way from Scotland to Germany. Perhaps the Scottish Government will soon be announcing a sizeable subsidy to assist in building a factory to produce a large number of pipes or an even larger number of road tankers!
Since the 1970s we have seen the export of oil and gas, and now ever-increasing amounts of windgenerated electricity is heading southwards. While the export of hydrogen may well assist in a country’s balance of payments, is no-one in the Scottish Government considering the people of our land unable to heat their homes while their taxes could well be contributing to hydrogen-filled tankers possibly driving past their homes on the way to Germany?
Perhaps it is time for the SNP to revive the concept of a national power company.
Brian Lawson
Paisley
NOTE this is very much my personal opinion and not that of the SNP or any other group. Now that a General Election has been called, we don’t have any more time for mucking about or trying to ease up to what we know we need to do. We need to rip the plaster off and get on with it.
The SNP are the only pro-indy political party that the antiindependence media give any credence to, and for months now they have been relentlessly hammering on a narrative of a party in crisis that is slipping in the polls. Now that message has gone into overdrive.
If the subject of a hung parliament comes up,the SNP don’t even get a mention, only the LibDems seem to exist despite them not having been the third party in the UK Parliament for nine years.
Governance at Holyrood is streets ahead of the clown show at Westminster but the recent string of self-inflicted injuries has seen the SNP slip in the polls.
The media are desperate to capitalise on that and fluff the chances of Labour seeing a resurgence in Scotland.
But despite the polling for the SNP being dire relative to previous highs, support for independence continues to bob along quite merrily at roughly 50% of the voting population. With demographic patterns and trends being what they are, that might well be north of 60% within 10 years.
But this General Election might be the last chance Scotland gets for decades, or indeed ever, to demand selfdetermination. If the SNP can’t maintain a majority the media narrative will be of collapse, and there is a real chance we might see an anti-independence government in Holyrood in two years’ time.
Anas Sarwar and his gang of cronies will make Liz Truss look like a walk in the park.
I fundamentally believe that the indyref in 2014 sparked a fire in an entire generation of Scots, inspiring millions to hope for a better future. Not just a slightly better managed version of the status quo, but a true vision of a radically different nation where social justice, environmental responsibility, and progressive economics transform our lives.
The further away we have gotten from that referendum and the inspiring vision it conjured, the less enthused the voting public have become. When they feel independence is on the table they come out in droves, when it gets shuffled to the bottom of the pile, not so much.
If the SNP does not want to sink into irrelevance in this General Election, we need to make it manifestly plain that independence is very much the only thing on the table. We must lean in to independence as our only real policy. It’s what 50%plus of the voting public want, and a route back into Europe is what 70%-plus of voters want.
That is what our manifesto must say and what all of our candidates must be saying. We need to lean in to the hopes and dreams of our voters rather than just offering them a slightly more credible version of the managerialism Labour are offering.
And we must lean in to the price.
There is little question that there is a risk in doing so. Many voters might desert the SNP if they think their vote is going to be counted towards independence. We might lose a whole bunch of seats.
We must lean in to that. We must say, this is the most radical manifesto we have stood on in many years and we know we run the risk of scaring away some voters, but that is a risk we are willing to take. We might lose a few seats but if we win a majority of them that will be a clear mandate to go down to Westminster and negotiate the end of the Union.
Chris Hanlon Kincardine