IT puzzles me a bit why National columnist Michael Fry supports Scottish independence when, as his column in Tuesday’s paper shows, he is not against the 1707 Union with England (WW1 victory came at a heavy cost to Scotland, in more ways than one, November 13). How can this be?

In its penultimate paragraph the article reads: “The Scotland constructed since the Union of 1707, a workshop of the world built on the democratic intellect, by 1918 stood revealed as an illusion. Now its prosperity was gone, with its culture soon succumbing to bureaucratic centralism.”

Thus Mr Fry adjudges the disproportionate 1914-18 Scots casualties of the so-named Great War. There is also the comment: “The soldiers who survived came back to a homeland bled of its Victorian vigour. There was no return to the halcyon days when Scotland had been an industrial world-beater”. The word halcyon is seldom seen as befitting Victorian times and would astonish anyone familiar with Oliver Twist and other novels by Charles Dickens, who was writing about conditions at that time in London. It is a seldom disputed fact that during the time of Dickens, in the Victorian era, when Britain’s Empire was at its zenith, the worst housing conditions in the whole of Europe were in Glasgow.

I for one would not reckon this to be worth the honour of being called an industrial world-beater.

This kind of evaluation is more realistically dealt with by Hamish MacPherson in his final account in the same edition of The National (The aftermath of Culloden cast a long shadow, November 13). Here he shows how the crushed Jacobite spirit was exploited by Britain’s London government in the aftermath of Culloden and converted to numerous regiments of Highland soldiery. Such was the economic impoverishment of their communities that they proved ready helpers in extending and consolidating Britain’s Empire. It is too tempting not to assert that the same thing was repeated at the time of the 1914-18 war.

Ian Johnstone
Peterhead

READ MORE: WW1 victory came at a heavy cost to Scotland – in more ways than one​

IN Michael Fry’s response in Sunday’s National (November 11) to my letter of November 6, he paints a glowing picture of Inverness and puts it all down to the capitalist system.

Indeed, Inverness is a great place to live and I’m glad I moved here from the Central Belt in 1977. All of the wonders that Michael describes are to be seen, but scratching below the surface reveals a rather different picture. Modern capitalism is based on a false premise that growth can be unlimited and everything and everybody is to be exploited. The privately-owned bus services are unreliable, the routes change with the weather and our roads are rutted and potholed. One area has the dubious distinction of being one of the most deprived in Scotland and those private estates, with their uniform houses and no facilities, bring joy to the banker’s heart as they are mortgaged to the hilt.

The private banks issue the nation’s currency in the form of debt, with little restraint, and the resulting flood of phantom money means that the cost of a house is now ten times the average annual wage. It was three times the wage back in the seventies, but Thatcher and subsequent leaders unleashed the financial sector, believing in the myth of neo-liberal economics.

Perhaps Michael forgets that a socialist government in 1945, with the country on its knees after the war, gave us the NHS, a welfare system (recently undermined), a huge private and public house-building programme and they nationalised the mining, steel, public transport and energy industries. Despite all of this government investment, it is a fact – not an opinion – that since 1945 Labour governments have borrowed less and repaid more than Conservative governments.

All of the wonders that Michael Fry speaks of are built on credit and another crash is inevitable. We owe nearly £2 trillion to the private banking industry, a sum that we can never pay off. In terms of wealth, we are living in one of the most divided countries in the developed world, and that is the price of unrestrained capitalism. In 1976, the gap between the richest and poorest was the least in modern times.

Since the inception of neo-liberal economics that started around that time, the gap has widened and that process is accelerating. We need a combination of Keynesian economics and true socialist values to restore sanity to our beleaguered country.

Tony Perridge
Inverness

MICHAEL Fry, in his article on World War One, mentions that General Douglas Haig believed the tenacious Scottish regiments would win the war for him. Mr Fry continues: “God would help a bit too, but of course he was on Scotland’s side anyway.”

My father, who enlisted as an under-age teenager, like others of his generation never spoke about World War One, apart from one incident. He came upon the body of a German soldier and was shocked to find that the buttons on the dead man’s tunic bore the words “Gott mit uns”. Dad’s only comment was, “Aye, they lied to them as well.”

Anne Cormack
Pitlochry

THANK you for an appropriate photo in Tuesday’s National of PM May striking her imperious pose at the Lord Mayor’s banquet. Michael Fry’s article discusses the numbers killed in The Great War. He ends: “...we shall see what happens next”. Yes indeed, given he supports an ethos whose underlying greed has played its part in creating much suffering, past and present. Scotland has a chance, through independence, in designing fairer means of exchanging global resources and protecting the planet.

If not, beware of world trade wars and capitalists rattling the sabres we’ve sold them, falling into hands which hover over a nuclear button.

Iain R Thomson
Strathglass