It’s a dirty business (James J Paton)

It seems John Tulloch can try to dish out “advice” through your pages, but can never quite seem, on any occasion, to take it. Physician heal thyself?

Mr Tulloch seems to demonstrate arrogance, ignorance and insularity in one sentence about existing bodies of law, EU or otherwise.

Bodies of law can indeed be changed. It’s called democratic reform and has been going on, although very slowly and with many steps backwards sometimes, for over 300 years in the British Isles home nations and across the EU.

Reform would be hastened in the EU if the directly elected European Parliament, and not the EU “House of Lords” (the EU Commission) wielded executive legislative power.

Aspects of both the CFP and CAP legislation have been changed since their inception, but certainly by no means far and fast enough – Miram Brett’s point entirely.

It is a pity Mr Tulloch cannot turn his, what seems very narrow and blinkered view, to the CAP for just a minute. Subsistence farmers and crofters would long have been out of business in Shetland and Orkney, and those in subsistence farming who need the support, have, relatively, been ripped off by the lion’s share of subsidy going to the biggest, wealthiest individual and corporate land-owners and related corporate intetests.

There is not a peep from Mr Tulloch about this travesty. (Before you start your reply Mr Tulloch, I have over 30 years of direct experience of the EU, its treaties – mostly signed up to by Tory governments – and past and current operation. The latter is why I voted to leave on both democratic and anti-austerity economic reasons – not on xenophobic, anti-immigration ones.)

You cannot have it both ways Mr Tulloch. Appearing to back Brexit for the sake of Shetland’s fishing industry – which has had huge amounts of EU and Shetland oil money poured into it – and trying to stop the SNP, at all costs, by singing the praises of the highly ineffectual, yet most pro-EU Lib-Dem representation at both Westminster, where they bedded the Tories, and at Edinburgh, where they bedded Labour.

I don’t mind coalition and consensual politics where it is progressive – like Greens supporting SNP on some things, but not when it is self-serving and damaging in the case of Lib-Dems’ behaviour.

Politics is certainly a difficult, if not dirty business, and it doesn’t get any dirtier than the behaviour of the Lib-Dems, Tories, and indeed Labour, in Scotland and the anti-Corbyn Blairite MPs in England, over the past seven years.

Who will Mr Tulloch be voting for at this election? I think we have a right to be told, given all his apparent misogynistic, ageist and vacuous anti-SNP rhetoric.

You’ve got to be in it to win it. Alistair Carmichael well knows, when he played with the devil (Cameron) and lost on a very dodgy hand. The Lib-Dems are certainly not in it, if they ever were.

While the true and ultimate test has yet to come for the SNP, post-independence, at Westminster, the SNP has been providing the most effective opposition oratory and positive proposals for UK, never mind Scottish prosperity.

Although a Green supporter myself, I have more hope and belief in Ms Brett trying to do the right thing for Shetland and Orkney, than dodgy, sell-out Westminster Lib-Dems and their greedy Tory pals.

Through their austerity regime over 2010-15, they enjoyed kicking the most vulnerable when they are struggling already – the disabled, the young poor (lack of training, decent jobs and fair-rent homes) and elderly poor (bedroom tax, lack of care provision, more NHS privatisation, rip-off energy bills), impoverished by the Tories’ friends in banking, finance and dodgy global non-tax paying corporates, such as those in the oil/fracking and arms industries.

Finally, in singing Mr Carmichael and Tavish Scott’s praises, if that indeed what he is doing, to get his Tory/UKIP pals to back their old, very much former Secretary of State for Scotland, pal Alistair, is Mr Tulloch not aware that the Lib-Dems are the most pro-EU at these elections?

“Oh what a tangled web you weave, when you (attempt) to practice to decieve” – to appropriately attribute in your case Mr Tulloch, albeit amended words of Sir Water Scott – Marmion, canto vi. stanza 17.

James J Paton
4 Milton Street,
Skipton,
North Yorkshire.