As an old friend and comrade of Jeremy Corbyn's I was disappointed by his remarks on TV about Scotland ("Labour reborn in Scotland, Corbyn tells party faithful", The Herald, September 28).
For the record, the SNP record on social housing is far superior to Labour's eight years in power at Holyrood. Not only did Labour build fewer social housing, they also extended the right to buy to housing association tenants, resulting in the loss of many thousands of social houses. The SNP have stopped the sale of all social housing and are building thousands of new ones despite budget constraints.
As for Mr Corbyn's allegation that the SNP privatised ScotRail, this is plain nonsense. The railways were privatised by the Tories just before the 1997 General Election. Labour could have stopped this by promising to bring them back into public ownership but they didn't and neither did they in 13 years of Labour government at Westminster.
At Holyrood I well remember Scottish Labour voting down Tommy Sheridan's bill to take ScotRail into public ownership. As for CalMac, it is in public ownership and hopefully will remain so; that is certainly the wish of the SNP.
However, the worst action of the Labour conference at the weekend was not to debate Trident, in particular the hypocrisy of so called " left" union leaders whom I have heard speak at CND rallies yet who quietly killed the debate because it might impact on some of their members jobs. As the STUC report on Trident showed, many more jobs would be created by peaceful industries. Also, the SNP wish to make Faslane Scotland's main naval base which would guarantee many of the fewer than 1,000 workers employed by Trident.
In the end, Trident is a matter of morality not economics. I know Jeremy Corbyn believes this. Let us hope that the debate allows Labour to make a principled decision at next year's conference. In the meantime Scottish Labour have a real chance to make a decision based on principle at their Scottish conference next month. Will they take it?
Hugh Kerr,
Wharton Square,
Edinburgh.
We've had Old Labour and and New Labour and now we appear to have Two-Faced Labour. Jeremy Corbyn declares that it "would not be a disaster" if there were two different opinions in the Labour Party with regard to Trident but, given their new leader's declared opposition to renewing the nuclear deterrent, the fact that Labour wouldn't even debate the issue at their conference speaks volumes, and must have been a big disappointment to all those decent Labour Party members who supported Mr Corbyn's leadership campaign.
Being brimful of affability and good intentions is not enough. Voters need to know what they are being asked to vote for, and a leader who seems to be out of step with many on his front bench, as well as copious numbers of his backbenchers, makes me wonder if the road ahead for Mr Corbyn will be full of U-turns, and if he will end up not only as a string-pulled puppet leader but whether he is even in the right Party?
Ruth Marr,
99 Grampian Road,
Stirling.
Your report that the Benno Schotz bust of Keir Hardie is to go on display at the People's Palace for the first time since the mid 1980s is incorrect ("Century since death of Keir Hardie to be commemorated", The Herald, September 26). Hardie's bust along with that of RB Cunnighame Graham both featured in the displays of the People's Palace from 1975 till their removal and consignment to deep storage in 1991. Other items the were "disappeared" at the same time included a superb plaster bust of William Morris, a bust of Matt McGinn, the charcoal portrait of John MacLean by Ken Currie, the portrait of Guy Aldred (by the suffragette Jane Parkes) and a fine oil painting of James Maxton. All of these removals took place under the curatorship of Mark O'Neill and the direction of Julian Spalding.
The convenor for arts and culture at the time was none other than Frank McAveety.
Michael Donnelly,
343 West Princes Street,
Glasgow.
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