Christine’s kindly party politics are sadly lacking in Queensferry - Bruce Whitehead
I was glad to see my excellent LibDem local MP Christine Jardine welcoming in these pages the election of Britain’s first Somali, Sagal Abdi-Wali as an MP.
Christine was very nice indeed about Andy Burnham’s Labour party, prompting me to wonder whether she might be planning a flit when she steps down as Edinburgh West MP at the next election, whenever that may be.
However, I do disagree with her view that Zack Polanski's defeat in the same by-election was "good news for Britain". Although the Greens have been pilloried for voting to declare Zionism, the belief in a Jewish homeland, to be a racist ideology, Amnesty International and The International Court of Justice along with leading human rights agencies including Israel's B'Tselem have described Israel as an "apartheid regime".
Christine’s kindly politics, though, are sadly lacking among her unruly subordinates in the constituency, squabbling with one another over measures to curb antisocial driving, and with the local Queensferry & District Community Council over high school provision in Almond ward.
In some ways, community councils are the bedrock of our representative democracy: the entry-level forums which - in theory at least - feed local views into local authorities, and which ideally inform and influence those views fairly in decisions affecting planning, housing and education and industrial development.
So when the three Liberal Democrat councillors for Almond ward snub their constituents by petulantly refusing to attend community council meetings for over a year, should they expect support when the council elections come around next May?
When will they resume attendance at Community Council Meetings? They need to tell us or explain why they won't attend.
Are Trump and Musk Russian assets?
With Trump removing early warning intelligence that could have saved dozens of innocent Ukrainian civilian lives, and with his ex-buddy Elon Musk hobbling satellite systems that could allow Ukraine to defend itself, it’s hard to see how the pair are anything but Russian assets.
How else can their constant support for the fascist aggressor and constant undermining of the hapless victim be explained?
When we look back at the rise of the Nazi threat in the the 1930s, it’s intriguing to imagine ourselves as a whistleblowers able to forecast what is about to happen.
Assuming we could have convinced the world of the danger, when could measures have been taken which would have stopped Hitler in his tracks? Immediate military retaliation for the re-occupation of the Rhineland in 1936? Economic blockade for the occupation of Austria in 1938, for the persecution of Jewish Germans? Instant strikes for the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939?
A similar disaster route-map of milestones can easily be seen along which Russia's dictator, president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is travelling: 2008 occupation of Georgia; 2014 occupation of the Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine; 2015 support for the Assad tyranny in Syria; 2022 full scale invasion of Ukraine, along with sabotage and attacks on her NATO allies and neighbours.
When will the UN and the European Union, along with ASEAN, wake up and apply a total global embargo on all trade with Russia and any nation helping Putin - for example China, North Korea and Iran, which supply military assistance?
Until politicians stop toadying and appeasing the child tyrant Trump and join together to resist gangster states, the world will slide further and further towards an economic nightmare and military stalemate.