NOT content to desist from interfering in the choices open to distressed gender-dysphoric individuals, the majority of whom are relatively young and vulnerable, the Scottish Green Party are once again, despite growing public awareness of the issues, misrepresenting so-called conversion therapy as “cruel and dangerous”. Their spokesperson Maggie Chapman is alarmed at the possibility that the Scottish Government appear to be awaiting UK-wide legislation on the matter and is pressing Social Justice secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville to get a Scotland ban first.
READ MORE: Steph Paton: Scotland should lead, not follow, on banning conversion therapy
What adjectives are appropriate to describe the process of inflicting hormonal and metabolic mayhem and mutilating surgery on poor people, as the Cass report clearly states, without firm evidence of benefit and much evidence of both physical and psychological harm emerging from a gathering demographic who feel devastated by the recommendations of so-called “medical experts” when they were at their most vulnerable and now yearn for help or acknowledgement from their erstwhile advisors about their awful “outcomes”.
Do the words “cruel and dangerous” come to mind?
READ MORE: Questions loom over direction Labour will take on transgender rights
When are these Green pseudo-physicians going to start demanding answers as to what has driven this sea of personal suffering? Why do trans folk I know often feel their concerns are not being addressed because other sufferers who have chosen violence and militancy have drowned out their cries to be heard? What about the silent majority, many of whom support the option of kindly voluntary attempts to bring about a gradual acceptance or transformation of their suffering with the help of peers and loving therapists?
When are the Greens going to return to the environmental and urgent social priorities of the nation in the parliament where they have the privilege of sitting, and reserve their ideological speculations on gender matters to dinner parties within their own social circles?
Dr Andrew Docherty
Selkirk
OFGEM will lift the energy price cap in October. Scots will pay 9% more for what’s already the most expensive energy in western Europe when we produce the majority of the UK’s cheap renewable energy. Scottish renewables delivered an equivalent of 113% of Scotland’s overall electricity consumption in 2022, the highest to date.
GB Energy won’t lower energy prices but will simply funnel public money to private companies. The one thing that would lower bills – renationalising energy – is off the table.
READ MORE: Why are energy prices predicted to rise again in the UK?
The Netherlands, where all water, electricity and gas networks are publicly owned and it’s illegal to privatise any of them, has posted more hours of negative prices so far this year than it did in all of 2023. As renewables capacity expands, these negative energy hours will rise from 450 this year to between 800 and 1200 by 2026.
Scots should be enjoying the cheapest electricity in Europe, but are paying the most. That’s because every stage of energy production – generation, transmission, distribution and supply – has been privatised. Half of UK offshore wind is owned by foreign governments – Denmark, France, Spain and Norway – who reap the rewards. Last year the National Grid paid shareholders £1.6 billion in dividends, money that should be have reinvested into the grid system.
READ MORE: Labour face calls to act after 'alarming' energy price cap projections
Privatisation is why Scotland receives one-seventh of Norway’s oil and gas income – £4bn vs Norway’s £29.66bn. Because Westminster controls energy and tax policy, the UK will collect just £3.8bn in oil taxes in 2023/24 versus Norway’s £29.7 billion.
English Labour won’t renationalise energy for fear of alienating their oligarch donors. Before the election, Reeves bragged to City bankers that Labour’s manifesto had their “fingerprints all over it.”
Time for Scots to revolt?
Leah Gunn Barrett
Edinburgh
I AGREE with Tony Perridge that the lyrics of Scots Wha Hae are “brutal” in places and the lines he quotes from Flower of Scotland are less so, indeed are very fine.
My original problem with “Flower” remains, though ... it is maudlin in sentiment, dirge-like in tempo and awkward musically. Scots Wha Hae has six verses, however ; a national anthem should ideally have only two, perhaps three (some nations’ seem rather comically interminable), so I suggest the first and fourth be used. I am an anti-monarchist (“Brenglish” version, that is – some European neighbours have perfectly acceptable, and popular, monarchies and we might choose to dig up a decorative Stuart Head of State) – we could leave in “Wha for Scotland’s king and law...”
I suspect that a “popular” poll, taken now, would indeed choose Flower of Scotland but that would not mean it is the best, the noblest. I have proposed from the start of this debate that the process of selecting a worthy national anthem (of one of Europe’s oldest nation states) should be seriously undertaken by, yes, “experts”. Musicians, composers, poets, historians etc, in which Scotland is rich.
After all, we can have it both ways: the national anthem for grand occasions and sporting internationals, Flower of Scotland any time you like – on the terracing, in the pub, whatever.
David Roche
Blairgowrie
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