Holyrood has not improved our democracy one iota. Get rid

The parliament has certainly passed some worthwhile legislation, such as the smoking ban in public places, but, in truth, its achievements are few and far between and it has not had the life-changing impact many had hoped for and some predicted. It has not enhanced our democracy one iota.

The cost of running the parliament has rocketed with many more government ministers, civil servants, lobbyists and special advisors than was originally envisaged.

Donald Dewar - the parliament’s “father”, apparently - initially proposed MSPs should be part-time. David Steel said the semi-circular shape of the chamber would promote constructive debate and not be adversarial. Really?

The price of running a Scottish parliament runs into many, many millions and would have been better spent directly on the priorities, such as health, education, justice and the economy.

Sadly, there are too many MSPs and hangers-on making a very cosy living out of Holyrood to even suggest that the parliament should be reduced in scale. It costs a bomb and totally under-delivers.

Bluntly, it should probably be dismantled and abandoned.

James Miller, Glasgow.

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The focus for Findlay

I DON’T think Russell Findlay could care whether he is commiserated with or congratulated by Ruth Marr (Letters, October 1) on becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party in Scotland. His focus will be on serving the people of Scotland and highlighting and the many failures and missteps of the SNP during its 17 years in power with a view to reversing some of the current trends.

A brief summary of that task would be to address the issue of the highest drug deaths in Europe, the ever-increasing attainment gap, the child poverty increases, the collapse in education standards, the failing economy not to mention the need to close the expensive SNP proto-embassy network and to reverse the SNP suppression of freedom of speech via the Hate Crime Act.

Mr Findlay does not strike me as the sort of person to bow down to Westminster diktat and will be his own man when it comes to policy decisions.

In terms of the Conservative membership in Scotland, Ms Marr should be reminded of the fact that the SNP has lost approximately 50% of its members since 2019.

Christopher H Jones, Giffnock.

A colony of England and USA

JILL Stephenson (Letters, September 27) and her unionist ilk accuse independence supporters like me of obsession with constitutional matters to the detriment of other urgent issues. I cannot see why identifying Scotland emphatically as my home nation and Scottish emphatically as my nationality makes me less caring than others about health, education or the price of fish.

The recent UK General Election stirred no interest or emotion for me as the outcome, a massive Labour majority, was a foregone conclusion before a single Scottish vote was cast or counted. Why so many of my fellow Scottish voters are so lacking in confidence in our nation that they prefer to leave our fate in the hands of our southern neighbours is a great mystery to me.

The notions of Britain as a nation and British as a nationality are meaningless to me and the contention that the UK is a voluntary union of nations is nonsense. We are now effectively a colony of an English state which in turn is a colony of the US state whose military support for its puppet regime in Israel is accepted without question by Keir Starmer, ably assisted by the Labour Friends of Israel, including most notably his Foreign Secretary, David Lammy.

Willie Maclean, Milngavie.

How can we negotiate with Israel?

JOHN Kennedy (Letters, September 30) says he supports “any negotiations that can lead to a ceasefire and the cessation of bombing and killing and the waste and destruction of innocent lives”. Surely obvious to any decent compassionate person.

However, he must recognise that negotiations have been going on in one form or another since not long after the Israeli state was established in 1948 with some 750,000 of Palestinians being expelled from or fleeing from their homes.

UNRWA (The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) tells us that there are today some 5.9 million Palestinian refugees (obviously mainly descendants of those expelled) who need the services of UNRWA. Not all of these refugees stay in camps but can still use the services provided by UNRWA.

For those who do UNRWA tells us “conditions in the camps are generally poor, with high population density, cramped living conditions and inadequate basic infrastructure such as roads and sewers”.

Is it any surprise that “thousands of young Palestinians are growing up with only one aim in life: revenge” (Doug Maughan, Letters, September 25)?

There is another factor to which Mr Kennedy does not refer in his letter: Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, both religious/ethno-nationalist extremists whom Benjamin Netanyahu brought into his cabinet.

Invoking divine support Ben-Gvir said he had “warned the prime minister that if God forbids it, Israel will not enter a ceasefire”. There is no way Ben-Gvir’s God, or I assume Smotrich’s, is going to give Mr Netanyahu such permission, their God being surely one of the earlier war-gods from whom Judaism has moved on.

I ask Mr Kennedy how we can possibly negotiate with such extremists upon whose support Benjamin Netanyahu is so dependent.

John Milne, Uddingston.

Russell Findlay (Image: PA)

Losing the battle for world opinion

AFTER watching Israel murder 1,000 Lebanese people last week in addition to the 40,000 they have murdered in Gaza in the last year, there can be no case to treat Israel as other than as a pariah state.

That means we should support the campaign to boycott and divest ourselves from links with Israel in every way. That means we should not be supplying them with any arms or using RAF Cyprus to give them intelligence advice. That means we should not be meeting them for friendly discussions like Angus Robertson did but instead arrest them as war criminals as the International Criminal Court recommends. That means that Scotland should not play them at football and indeed Israel should be boycotted in all areas as we did with South Africa under apartheid.

The Israelis may think they are winning the battles in Gaza and Lebanon (they aren’t) but they are losing the battle for world opinion. Scotland should fully back the boycott of Israel in every way. Israel is also losing the war in economic and social terms, its economy has crashed and half a million people have left Israeli n the past year.

In years to come people will ask what did you do to end this evil regime. Let’s hope Scotland can say we helped to make the change.

Hugh Kerr (former MEP), Edinburgh.

Name and shame HMRC

YOU have reported on HM Revenue and Customs naming and shaming four Scottish companies in the fast food business which owed more than £2m in tax and penalties ("Scots firms owing more than £2m in tax and penalties named by HMRC", heraldscotland, September 30).

The size of the four companies in question are all classified as “micro” on the official register of companies at Companies’ House in Edinburgh, meaning that none of them made sales of more that £632k in a year. It’s therefore very hard to see how they could accumulate tax bills of more that £1.2 million in a short period, which suggests that HMRC didn’t clamp down on them soon enough.

Surely it’s HMRC itself which should be named and shamed? And as for shaming the companies concerned, they’re now all either in liquidation or about to be struck off so does it really achieve anything by expending resources on naming and shaming businesses that are here today and gone tomorrow?

Alan McGibbon, Paisley.