IAN Smith's letter (March 3) in which he defends the continuation of warrant sales to recover domestic debts deserves some comment. If Mr Smith is writing in a personal capacity I would have expected him to include his home address, as I have done in my correspondence. The address given by Mr Smith is in fact premises occupied by a firm of sheriff officers. This is a serious omission, obviously intentional on Mr Smith's part.
Notwithstanding his apparent duplicity he then seeks to portray the summary procedure of debt recovery in Scots law as something indispensable, when in fact every academic study shows that warrant sales are spectacularly unsuccessful in recovering domestic debts. Mr Smith will not be incognisant of this, compounding his mendacity even more.
The current legislation as contained in the Debtors (Scotland) Act, 1987, in my opinion, provides for an act of violence perpetrated by the legislators of this discriminatory and hostile piece of legislation and carried out by agents. Indeed, a former partner in the sheriff officers' firm which occupies the address at 10-12 Church Street, Coatbridge, Colin McKinnon, is a co-author of the manual on debt recovery, a guide used by most sheriff officers.
It provides for all sorts of double-dealing on behalf of the client, while the Act itself uses the cloak of humanitarian measures such as not carrying out a poinding, or forcibly entering a debtor's house when there is not an adult present. How gracious!
Tommy Sheridan is absolutely correct and morally and intellectually justified in his proposals to change the law governing debt recovery. In its current form it is a procedure which provides only for the oppression, further impoverishment and degradation of the people and the debasement of human nature itself. Its structure and enactment is a classic example of the perverted ingenuity of man.
Kenny McGuigan,
38 Bankhead Place, Airdrie. March 5.
Reader Ian Smith of a c/o Coatbridge address seems to have his political groupings in a twist. If, as he states, Tommy Sheridan ''will come running with his trusty Socialist Worker'', then I and many others would relinquish our membership of the Scottish Socialist Party. As an affiliated member through the Scottish Republican Socialist Movement I adhere to the politics of the SSP and Convener Tommy Sheridan's declared aims for an Independent Socialist Scotland, an ideal we have consistently supported when Tommy's maw was still a member of HM Imperial Labour Party.
The paper of the SSP is the Scottish Socialist Voice and not the London-based, anti-Scottish organ of an external faction of HM Labour Party mentioned by the reader. The Socialist Worker was proud to support Brian Wilson's 1979 ''Scotland Is British Campaign'', along with the Conservative-Labour Parties, CBI, Chamber of Commerce, and the far-right, neo-fascist, Economic League and Aims of Industry. The latter two Great British allies smashed the Miners' Union by creating a dummy union then abandoning it, smashed the print workers of Wapping by supporting Rupert Murdoch, now a supporter of the GB Labour Party (as do the Socialist Workers come every election) and run a blacklist of communists, socialists, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh Nationalists (but not fellow Great British Nationalists), trade-union militants, and poll-tax dodgers, etc.
As for Tommy advocating non-payment of a hated regressive tax (which Adam Smith also opposed on the grounds of its unpopularity which would make it impossible to collect) the reader may have noted the letter across the page by SSP Economy spokesperson Alan McCombes advocating a more regressive and fairer local income tax based on the ability to pay. This would actually increase the coffers of cities like Glasgow. Having over half its citizens on benefit unable to pay any tax can only result in an even bigger pothole of poverty from which, like the everlasting Celtic Knot, there is no beginning and no end.
Donald Anderson,
22 Southampton Drive, Glasgow.
March 4.
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