IN a letter published by you on July 19 this year, I correctly predicted that the easing of restrictions would be disastrous in terms of further increases in Covid-19 with consequent rises in long Covid. Our National Health Service will be shortly overrun unless we implement another lockdown by suppressing Covid-19 until everyone over the age of 12 is vaccinated.
Professor Andrew Watterson of Public Health at Stirling University stated more than a month ago that failure to suppress Covid-19 would mean substantially increased numbers of long Covid cases totalling as much as 20 per cent of all cases of Covid-19. We have an estimated 75,000 Scots currently with long Covid and the Scottish Government has failed to create a specialist treatment pathway for long Covid as there are still no specialist clinics for it in Scotland.
Health Secretary Humza Yousaf dismissed the need for specialist clinics on the grounds of taking precious resources away from the rest of the NHS. He only needs to look south of the Border to see England has 80 such specialist clinics. People with long Covid in Scotland deserve better from the Scottish Government.
Sean Clerkin, Barrhead.
OBSESSION WITH RULES IS WEARYING
THE Scottish Government’s continued draconian control of Covid restrictions must surely mean the COP26 climate change conference must be cancelled? How otherwise can Nicola Sturgeon justify making children wearing masks in schools and adhering to daft one-way systems which the pupils have to follow, while the teachers ignore?
And how can the First Minister justify the current cull on foreign travel, if she is going to let all and sundry in? After all, testing is not 100% safe.
It’s time Ms Sturgeon stopped imposing her rules on those who can’t fight back, like children and the elderly.
She may think that she and her Government are invincible, but her constant obsession with not moving on is not impressing the real people and deflecting the criticism to her hated friends in Westminster is wearing very thin too.
Mark Perkins, East Kilbride.
SHOULD WE AVOID AIRPORTS NOW, TOO?
“DON’T go on a cruise ship ever”, is the advice of Devi Sridhar, Professor of Global Public Health, Edinburgh University (“Sturgeon adviser: ‘Don’t go on cruise ship ever’”, The Herald, August 28).
It would be interesting to hear her views on airports and aeroplanes. Would she consider them to be mini germ factories?
Malcolm Allan, Bishopbriggs.
* AS the saying goes, the truth will out. The Scottish Government has been getting pelters from all sides for the problems with the construction of the two ferries lying years late and still in disarray at the nationalised Ferguson Marine yard at Port Glasgow. Perhaps instead we should be thanking the Government for trying to protect us on health and safety grounds from sailing on them.
It appears that all along this may have been part of a cunning plan to save us from ourselves, by doing the Government its best to couple those delays with the knowledge that the existing Calmac fleet of ferries is so old that they will break down frequently. Add to that the recent master-stroke of hiring a replacement ferry which almost immediately failed. All of that has and continues to severely restrict ferry sailings and thus passenger numbers.
Now we have your report on the warning from Devi Sridhar, one of Nicola Sturgeon’s key Covid advisers, not to go on a cruise ship ever because of the potential for infections to spread on board. What applies to cruise ships could easily apply to ferries, should they ever sail. So all along has the Scottish Government been following that advice by stopping as many passenger sailings as possible to minimise the otherwise inevitable spread of Covid as envisaged by Professor Sridhar ? What other reasonable explanation can there be for what has hitherto been considered to be an incomprehensible continuing fiasco?
Alan Fitzpatrick, Dunlop.
NO COMPARISON WITH QUEBEC
JUST as pollsters and think tanks have developed the art of percentage juggling, commentators on constitutional issues seem to be developing the art of word juggling. Michael Sheridan’s comment (Letters, August 28) on David Leask’s laborious discussion about the words nationalism, separatism and unionism (“There is a different way of doing Scotland’s politics: Non-separatist nationalism”, The Herald, August 27) illustrate how easily this technique can obscure the truth.
The desire for the restoration of Scotland’s independence is not comparable with movements in Quebec or the Basque country. Scotland was an established country for centuries before the Union of the Crowns and long before most European countries or the USA existed.
The only case of a genuinely comparable union is that of Norway’s union with Sweden. Norway had been a sovereign state for at least a thousand years. When Norway was ceded to Sweden early in the19th century it was to the king of Sweden, not the kingdom. The history of the union with Sweden was analysed in detail by Nansen in 1903 and his work played a considerable part in the peaceful dissolution of the rather one-sided union.
The relationship of the two independent nations has been a model of civilised cooperation ever since.
The final sentence in Nansen’s book is worth quoting: “Any union in which the one people is restrained in exercising its freedom is and will remain a danger”.
Peter Dryburgh, Edinburgh.
FALLING BEHIND ON RENEWABLES
AS Rebecca McQuillan says, everyone knew oil and gas were finite resources (“A message for Sir Ian and Mr Salmond: spare us all the spin about oil and gas”, The Herald, August 27), but despite the billions a year from North Sea revenues ending up in London there was no serious UK Government investment to facilitate a transition into renewables while giving generous tax breaks to oil companies.
Contrast this approach with Norway and Denmark. The Norwegian state-owned Equinor (formerly Statoil) is operating in 36 countries with investments in renewable energy. Norway is also building hydrogen fuel-celled ferries and cruise liners.
Denmark’s majority state-owned energy company Orsted is the world’s largest developer of offshore wind power, while Danish-owned Vestas is a world-leading wind turbine manufacturer.
Prior to the 2014 referendum, the UK Government dangled the prospect of a programme to support the commercialisation of carbon capture and storage but cancelled the commitment to invest £1 billion six months before it was due to be awarded with Peterhead leading the bidding process.
Following a £20 million investment last year by the Scottish Government and Aberdeen City Council, UK Government ministers have again failed to commit to funding for a ground-breaking hydrogen hub tipped to revitalise the energy sector.
Scotland is a resource-rich country. It has enviable levels of tidal, wind and wave energy but we will never realise our full potential under UK Government control as Scotland hasn’t got a single hydrogen electrolyser manufacturer or any wind turbine manufacturer.
Fraser Grant, Edinburgh.
WE MUST HASTEN THE TRANSITION
WELL said, Rebecca McQuillan, it’s all very well talking about a “just transition” from our oil and gas economy to something more environmentally sustainable, but what does the expression “just transition” actually mean? Politicians have been talking about the need for this transition for a number of years but until someone publishes a plan with details of costs, training needs, timescales and, above all, numbers and types of job the idea remains woolly.
Hopefully the agreement between the SNP and the Greens, and the need for a proper analysis and politically acceptable condemnation of the Cambo project, will hasten the development of the plan.
John Palfreyman, Coupar Angus.
INCONVENIENT TRUTHS ABOUT BOYS
THANK you, Professor Alan Smithers for having the courage to bring up the issue of why boys are falling behind girls at every level of education (“‘Wokeism’ hitting efforts to tackle gender gap in schools”, The Herald, August 28). The response you received from your fellow academics to leave well alone in terms of research, worries me greatly. The numbers of white, working-class boys achieving good grades followed by a university degree are vanishingly small. I’m sure some teachers care about their male students doing well but, since the teaching profession is overwhelmingly female, and girls are seen as easier to teach, it becomes clear what the obstacles are for boys who are left behind.
Another inconvenient truth which society does not like to accept is that boys are emotionally more affected by their parents’ divorce than are girls. A young boy can easily lose heart if he does not have his father close to him to encourage him to do well at school. Dr Sebastian Kramer, Child Psychiatrist, wrote a seminal paper called “The Fragile Male” when he was working at the Tavistock Institute in London. This shows that boys are not inherently lazy and are more complex human beings than they are generally thought to be.
Elizabeth Mueller, Glasgow.
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