Readers' Letters: Banning oil-based plastics will harm healthcare

I can only imagine that the “Just Stop Oil” protesters have not been in hospital recently, otherwise they would be well aware of the importance of plastics in healthcare – and where do plastics come from?

This campaign seems to be unable to differentiate between oil as a resource and oil as a fuel. We cannot turn the clock back, not enough horses, but we can but try to sensibly move forward without creating new problems while trying to solve existing ones. A planned overview needs oil as part of the totality of solutions, extremism has no part to play.

D Gerrard, Edinburgh

Disruptive anti-fossil fuel protesters are missing the big picture, reckons reader (Picture: Stu Forster/Getty Images)

Time and tide

News coming daily from the Ukraine clearly shows that Russia is concentrating on destroying the power-generating stations in that country. We in the UK should be learning from this, as those who control the building of power stations are still intent upon building larger and larger plants.

As possible conflict with Russia creeps ever nearer, surely we should be generating our electrical power more locally and through, for example, wind turbines and similar smaller and separate sources. The unfortunate disadvantage of wind power is that we can never guarantee the strength and quantity of available wind.

A far better source of power that, sadly, does not seem to be getting much attention is shore-based tidal power: it's there 24 hours each day for generating phenomenal quantities of power and as an island nation it lies all around our coasts.

Let's have more, smaller sources of power, properly linked of course, but all feeding electricity directly to, at least, our coastal towns and cities.

Archibald A Lawrie, Kingskettle, Fife

Amazing SNP

The SNP election manifesto has been greeted with amazement and only shows that after 17 years in power, they have run out of ideas.

They want the rest of the UK to pay higher taxes so that we in Scotland get more via the Barnett formula. Then they want full fiscal autonomy that would result in the loss of the block grant and Barnett consequentials. Confused?

They want to rejoin the European Union, knowing full well that the incoming Labour government will not entertain that.

They intend to impose windfall taxes on companies making “excess profits” without defining what excess profits are or how much these taxes will raise And, to cap it all, they believe it is wrong that sunscreen is subject to VAT and caviar isn't. Truly amazing.

Jim Houston, Edinburgh

Scottish austerity

As promised, the SNP manifesto has independence on page 1, line 1. Coincidentally, on the same day as the manifesto launch I received a leaflet from the SNP candidate for Edinburgh South. I naturally expected to see the issue of independence prominently on display. I looked in vain, however, for even an appearance of the word “independence” on the first page, the second, third and onwards until finally, there it was on the very last line of the last page! It was looking rather forlorn, I have to say, as if it had been forgotten about and only been slipped in as an afterthought.

That, I predict, is how the SNP campaign will go. Independence will be a bit part player while they concentrate – certainly not on their own abysmal record in government – but on panning the Tories and misrepresenting the Labour Party.

It isn't difficult to see why. The Institute of Fiscal Studies has warned that the cost of independence would be at least a decade of deeper cuts in public spending and higher rises in income tax than the rest of the UK. That is the reality. Vote for independence for austerity made in Scotland, for Scotland.

Colin Hamilton, Edinburgh

Think bigger

If John Swinney and the SNP really want to achieve their aim of Scotland being a separate state, they should change their tactics entirely.

Right now they can only ever send fewer than 10 per cent of all MPs to Westminster to jump up and down on the sidelines, shouting, “What about me? Look at me!” Instead, they should field candidates in every constituency in the UK.

Were they ever to gain enough seats to influence or, heaven forfend, form a government, the way to their fantasy land over the rainbow would be like a stroll in the park and they would hardly need another divisive, destructive and poisonous referendum.

Not much chance of them taking my advice, I suspect, because they know that they are a turn-off for about 90 per cent of the country. I'm aware they have a certain number of MPs at present but it's beyond me why they're invited to take part in national debates at all.

Bill Cooper, Kinross, Perth and Kinross

Little change

It was once a fundamental value of the Labour Party to use taxation as the means to redistribute wealth, either by direct financial transfers through the social security system or by ensuring good public services for everyone.The manifesto launches this week confirm Labour’s current offer as substantially less than that of the Lib Dems, a one-time coalition partner of the Conservatives. The Lib Dems propose a much greater injection of desperately needed funding into health and social care which would carry through into the Scottish Government’s budget.

Scottish Labour continues to focus its campaign on devolved matters, criticising the SNP as if this election offers change at Holyrood. It doesn’t, other than the devolved financial settlement.

Where, one wonders, are all the bold claims made by Scottish Labour of the SNP government such as the 2002 demands for free residential care and £15 per hour for social care staff?Nowhere to be found is the answer, because UK Labour will not tax to fund it. Labour’s position now sits to the right of the Lib Dems confirming that the only “change” on offer is the transformation into a version of the Conservatives.

Robert Farquharson, Edinburgh

Chicken run

From the very first time they took office in a devolved Scotland, one thing has remained constant and uniquely SNP. They have assumed they were running a separated country, with all that entails, not a devolved region of the UK.

Thus, for all those years we have had a succession of first ministers and administrations entirely focused on things outside their remit. We have had uninvited trips to international conferences attended by huge entourages. We have had eye-watering sums of money invested in “prestige” projects or sent to a cause favoured by a first minister where the UK has the responsibility for aid. We have had “fake embassies” opened in various countries and countless unnecessary overseas jollies and an influx of special advisers in numbers that that would embarrass the president of the US. SNP first ministers have all had one thing in common – Ben Nevis-sized egos.

Meanwhile our NHS is starved of funds; our drug deaths remain well clear at the top of the European, if not world, league table; our major roads are not improved despite being promised… the list is neverending. These matters have been considered irrelevant to the greater cause and left to rot on the vine by the SNP.

But it seems that at last Scottish chickens are coming home to roost and the SNP will pay dearly for what they have done to our country on 4 July.

Alexander McKay, Edinburgh

Follow the fleet

The weather was kind for the King’s Birthday Parade fly past. Royal Navy and Army aircraft have, in recent years, taken part in fly pasts to salute the sovereign, but not last Saturday. The RAF operates half of frontline aircraft, the other half is Navy and Army. There were no Fleet Air Arm or Army Air Corps aircraft last weekend, the only nods to the Senior Service were the lovely sailor-inspired outfits worn by two princesses and the young princes’ navy blue blazers.

With fleet reviews seemingly history, how does the Senior Service take part in national ceremonial? There’s no Jubilee until at least 2047, so street-lining sailors will seldom be seen.

To help counter our nation’s sea-blindness, we must do more to promote Maritime Britain. By volume, 95 per cent of UK trade comes in ships – the sea matters.

To mark the 80th anniversary of the Fleet Air Arm’s successful operations with the British Pacific Fleet, naval aircraft should surely fly past in 2025.

Lester May (Lieutenant Commander, Royal Navy – retired) Camden Town, London

A special talent

The greatest moment of Donald Sutherland, who died this week, was hippie tank commander Oddball in Kelly's Heroes – arguably one of the greatest war movies of all time, based on the equally bizarre true story of renegade US and Waffen SS troops uniting to steal Germany's gold reserves hidden in Bavaria in early 1945 (only two bars were ever recovered).

Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas and especially Sutherland lampooned not merely the oversanitised war movie genre far tighter than later efforts Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket managed – Oddball's tank unit playing soothing music during their merciless slaughter and destruction of a rail depot became a trope in itself – but even their own recent hits Battle Of The Bulge and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly were mercilessly parodied with a straight face.

A true treasure of film and stage, Sutherland will be much missed – but what a legacy.

Mark Boyle, Johnstone, Renfrewshire

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