Somerville made clear we have different priorities from rest of the UK

The National

7 hours ago

Shirley-Anne Somerville was excellent for the SNP: calm, measured and clearly stating that Scotland has very different priorities from the rest of the UK. She was clear, concise and to the point. She showed what Scotland could be, and is not ashamed to stand up and say it.
Anas Sarwar only has his prepared script about SNP BAD. Once he recited that, he had nothing else to contribute. (The script is dulled through constant repetition by him and Labour politicians). I truly wonder if he has a conscience at all. He supported Starmer's 'reforms', which many Labour ministers clearly misunderstood. PIP and its equivalent in Scotland is to help disabled people to have a normal life, with help with travel costs etc that is needed because of their conditions. And never forget the debt left in Scotland from PFI and its descendants, which has left councils paying huge sums even yet and for many more years.
READ MORE: Theatrics of Unionist duo on Question Time were cringeworthy
Never forget the Waspi women – lauded until Westminster Labour abandoned them and Dame Jackie went into hiding about them. Never forget the women of Glasgow and their years of fighting with Labour over equal pay, which the SNP had to sort out and pay out. We may think this is old news, but unfortunately the debts incurred have not yet been paid off.
Is it the case that it is only with rebellion that we can see a faint shadow of what Labour should be?
Radio Scotland on Friday morning could get no-one from Scottish Labour and had to resort to an English Labour peer – Sarwar cannot even own his thinking and explain or humbly admit the U-turn.
The BBC are certainly on the side of Reform. The way they promote them while ignoring the LibDems and the Greens, especially in Scotland, is a disgrace. One thing about Reform people is that they can talk, even if what they say is student politics and pie in the sky with no depth of thinking and no real answers to anything, just power-hungry millionaires.
Mind you, that might just as well apply to the Labour Party.
Winifred McCartney
Paisley
SUCH a moral victory for those Labour MPs who threatened to scupper the government's planned withdrawal of support for some disabled people. Will they now support the amended bill: a bill that merely delays the cruelty until next year?
Apparently, the moral high ground is time-limited!
Peter Barjonas
Caithness
IN response to Alexander Potts and his concerns for 'answers to a great number of questions before independence and not after it' (Jun 20), I can wholeheartedly recommend reading Lesley Riddoch's Thrive, if he hasn't done so, and her inspiring and multi-faceted approach to our constitutional crisis. For in the face of a widening gap between the Scottish people and their Scottish Government, we are heading for a crisis of democracy.
Like a lot of independenistas, I also look forward to the day when the UN agrees that we are a colony of England. That day could be a lot closer than might be expected if only the alleged Cabinet Secretary responsible for the constitution would decide to act in the interests of Scotland's citizenry rather than play the lackey to his tartan Sir Humphrey.
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Whilst I've no problem supporting Alexander's plea for a rerun of the Scottish Constitutional Convention, the correspondence in The National Conversation demonstrates there is plenty of will but there appears no clear way of achieving our goal.
The UN's International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, however, is a clear route as the Covenant is unambiguous, in Part 1, Article 1: 'All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.'
The only minor difficulty is that the Cabinet Secretary of the party of Scotland's independence declines to support the petition to have the covenant adopted into Scots law. Those behind the petition have defeated the argument spouted by the English civil service that adoption of the covenant is an infringement of reserved powers in the Scotland Act and while the petition PE2135, with 6931 signatories, is still under consideration at Holyrood's Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee, it needs support.
In particular, it needs the support of independenistas in Edinburgh Central and constituents of the said Cabinet Secretary, so that they might have an MSP who better reflects their views on our country's independence.
Iain Bruce
Nairn
I WAS delighted by Roger Mullin's review in the Sunday National of a long overdue biography of my friend Neil MacCormick, whose distinguished career spanned so much in the fields of law, academia, politics and university life (This telling of my old friend's life can best be described as a joyful challenge, Jun 29).
About a week before I was privileged to conduct his funeral in a packed Greyfriars Church in Edinburgh, I visited him at home. He was very frail, but the first thing he said was to ask how my two-week-old grandson was doing. That showed the true measure of a great and generous humanity, which undergirded all his public achievements and inspired his political service. Would that today, in a dark world, we would see this quality in public life.
Iain Whyte (Rev Dr)
North Queensferry