Why can't politicians focus on the basics of doing their jobs?

The Herald Scotland

04-05-2025

It also leads me as a fellow Christian to wonder if any other religious leaders were in attendance? In this wonderful Utopia of equality they're aiming for were the leaders of the Presbyterians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jehovahs, Mormons et al in attendance?
Perhaps the Lord Protector Swinney could publish a full list of all who attended including the two chosen journalists Mr McKenna also failed to name.
Make no mistake, as a Labour voter, I am deeply disturbed at the way this country of ours is being governed by the zealots with agendas that are a very serious danger to democracy and our way of life.
Get a grip the lot of you, show some courage, state your case and face any challenges head-on. Don't hide away in like timid wee mice patting your selves on the back, it's pathetic.
Get out and see the mess you're making. Ayr town centre is dystopian at best, Glasgow city centre is a filthy, run-down mess. Our road signs are illegible because they're never cleaned. Potholes are everywhere. Beautiful buildings are left to rot. Our once-wonderful parks and Botanic Gardens therein, are crumbling. We have ferries costing hundreds of millions over budgets, subsidised shipyards bankrupt and on and on.
All my life I worked in jobs with targets set and performance measured on achievement. That was the case as a joiner, a sales rep and a managing director. Achievements were rewarded, failures were addressed and actions taken. It was sink or swim, or accountability as they say now. It's the only way for an organisation to succeed in any walk of life.
Never mind all your personal agendas, just try and do the basics of your jobs and earn the massive pay rises you've just awarded yourselves.
John Gilligan, Ayr.
• Kevin McKenna claims that the UK Supreme Court had unanimously decided 'trans women aren't women'. It didn't. It decided that this is what the 2010 Equality Act said. There is a difference.
Reading what Maggie Chapman said about the Supreme Court judgment, she would appear to be under the same misapprehension.
I bet both Kevin and Maggie are thrilled to be holding the wrong end of the same stick.
Douglas Morton, Lanark.
Read more letters
BBC is letting down Scotland
Well said, Andrew Tickell ("Loss of soap not trivial as we drown in art from elsewhere", April 27).
Using Scotland and the BBC in the same sentence is oxymoronic. The BBC is obligated 'to reflect, serve and represent the diverse communities of all the United Kingdom's nations and regions' and it patently fails to do so with regard to any subject it covers (or does not cover) in Scotland.
I pay the same licence fee as those in other parts of the UK, but receive a much poorer service in return. Where is Scotland's serious (and non-partisan) news coverage and analysis? Is there a pathway for Scots (for example ethnic Scots overlooked for dramatic roles in Scotland) living in Scotland to advance their BBC career? Where is our long history reflected in drama or documentary?
Text news and sport is ludicrously bad, yet we were promised improved coverage in return for previous BBC Scotland cuts. Why would we believe the BBC over new cuts to programme making?
Holyrood should hold an inquiry into the BBC and why Scotland gets such a bad deal from its licence fee contribution. If the BBC wants to contest any complaint, it should allow scrutiny of unredacted minutes of the BBC Board meetings where Scotland has been discussed.
If the future of the BBC comes up then it should stay as it is for England, but we Scots should look at Irish or Danish broadcasting for our new template.
GR Weir, Ochiltree.
What a way to run a railway
The Cambridge Dictionary definition of nationalisation as "a process in which a government takes control of an industry or company and becomes its owner" is a strictly technocratic one that fails to capture exactly how nationalised enterprises actually function.
We have a Rail Voucher worth a little over £20 and planned a weekend visit to Dundee. I booked the hotel and tickets for Discovery Point and the V&A museum online without a hitch. It was only when I tried to buy train tickets from ScotRail that the whole project started to come off the track.
Advance return tickets from Glasgow to Dundee were available on the Scotrail app at a cost of £34. Despite the Rail Voucher having a barcode and a reference number it couldn't be used online. Apparently, I would have to go to a manned ticket office. When I finally got to the front of the queue the lady at the ticket desk in Glasgow Central said the tickets for sale were almost double the price as those available online. When I showed her the ticket price on the Scotrail app she informed me that because my proposed date of travel was more than eight weeks away those prices weren't available on her system. Why ScotRail discriminates against walk-in customers was a question she skilfully and politely ignored. I was advised to come back in four days, because then the cheap tickets would be available on her system. I pointed out that there were only a few of them left and that in four days they might not be available. Yes, she concurred, that was a chance I was going to have to take. And with that bureaucratic admonishment, I departed, empty-handed.
Rather than waste more time and money going into Glasgow again, I tried the ticket counter near my place of work. In between puffs of his vape, the ticket assistant behind the screen advised me not to buy tickets in advance because "you know what the trains are like. They'll probably not be running'. And he warned grimly: 'You'll not get a refund either with they Advance ones'. The sickly smell of his vape and the reek of privileged socialist indifference was overwhelming. I left, still without tickets, and still unable to use this voucher.
Relating my woes to a colleague he asked 'how can you run a business that way'? And that is of course the point; ScotRail isn't a business. At least, not in the sense that the private shops on the high street are businesses. Roger Scruton observes, in his Dictionary of Political Thought, that nationalisation can be regarded as a process for enterprises to become inefficient, subsidised, and protected from control of the market. Now that seems exactly like a definition of how nationalised enterprises like ScotRail actually function.
Graeme Arnott, Stewarton.
Keep mobiles out of class
I read with interest Dr James McTaggart's article on mobile phone use in schools ("An ineffective ban is probably worse than no ban – but schools must help pupils develop a healthy digital diet£ April 28). Irt seems to me that Dr McTaggart has not recently taught a class of young people in this era of mobile phones. As someone who has in various schools can I point out the following?
Dr McTaggart states that those who use their phones in class tend to do so during short "in between" spaces in even the best-planned lesson. This is not my experience. Their surreptitious use by admittedly a minority of pupils can be highly disruptive to the classroom learning experience. Moreover since some 40% of pupils now identify as requiring Additional Support Needs (ASN) – that is 13 out of a class of 33 – any such use of phones provides an extremely challenging situation in class for any teacher.
He attempts to take a "nuanced" and "balanced" academic approach but this is naive. To state that if mobile phones were banned in schools an unintended consequence would be that a pupil could not complain about cyber bullying is patently absurd. Phones have been used to film pupils being seriously assaulted.
I draw readers' attention to the recent book The Anxious Generation by Jonathen Haidt, a social psychologist who is Professor of Leadership at New York University Stern School of Business Studies who writes about the awful and insidious power exerted by smartphones on the minds of children since their instigation in circa 2010. He points out that they have been designed to be addictive (like a dopamine drug) by the presence of algorithms, cause fragmented attention span, disrupt sleep and deprive young people of meaningful real world social interaction. As we know some big tech sites have resulted in young people taking their own lives in suicide and self-harm sites. Hopefully the new Digital Safety Act will go some way to tackling this. More sinisterly Meta is facing a string of lawsuits over the psychological distress experienced by moderators employed to take down social media content including depictions of murder, extreme violence and sexual abuse. This is what our children are currently being subjected to on their mobile phones.
Where I do agree with Dr McTaggart is that an ineffective ban would not be workable. What we do need is a total ban on mobile phones in schools. Where this has occurred in Australia studies have shown that there has been an improvement in attendance, attention span and most notably behaviour. This has also been borne out in schools which instigated a ban in England.
I am in favour of a Digital Service Tax on Big Tech companies which can be ringfenced and used to finance existing and new technology as an alternative to mobile phones in our schools.
Jim Park, Edinburgh.
Should mobile phones be banned from classrooms? (Image: Colin Mearns)
Ukraine is not our affair
In his lengthy piece on the Ukraine conflict, David Pratt concludes by speculating whether Trump will "at least let Europe buy crucial weapons from America, to give to Ukraine" ("David Pratt on the World", April 27).
I presume that by "Europe" he means the EU and the UK, which begs the question, why should we get involved ? Don't we have enough domestic problems, including the national- security one of finally getting to grips with cross-Channel migration? If I wished to harm the UK, I'd be smuggling in my lads loaded with phials of viruses, ready to use when the order comes.
Those who wish to assist Volodymyr Zelenskyy should organise a whip-round. Personally, I wouldn't give him the time of day.
George Morton, Rosyth.