Letters: Council is running out of time to save Castlebrae

In reply, the city’s education leader Paul Godzik said: “No thanks”.

“Save the Brae” – and Sheila – are dumbfounded. Is the council telling the Government it doesn’t want any hand-outs? This could solve Edinburgh’s housing crisis and unlock land for 2,600 homes.

We want council leader Andrew Burns to say:

“Mr Salmond, a new school will not only mean that 200 kids can sleep happy at night, it will mean that all Craigmillar families will have an opportunity to go local. A £16 million school for Craigmillar centre will be full in no time – we have the plans, so it’s shovel-ready. It’ll be a real alternative to Holy Rood. It will boost land values and draw in developers, unlocking the land that’s sat here empty for 12 years. Persimmon will build its 400 new family homes in New Greendykes with confidence, ready for the Sick Kids staff in 2017, because the new road to the ERI opens next month. We can build a new school today, re-build a community tomorrow and solve the capital’s housing shortage the day after.”

But Councillor Burns can only ask for the cash if he ends the school consultation at the education committee today. Time is short. The stakes are high. If he misses this chance, the next education committee will not be until March, by which time the extra money will have gone elsewhere.

Kev Findlay, chairperson, Save the Brae; Sheila Gilmore, MP for Edinburgh East

Moore should be talking Scots up

It is disappointing to see Scottish Secretary of State, Michael Moore, use his trip to the US to talk Scotland down, when it could have been used as such a wonderful opportunity to talk the merits of our nation up.

Mr Moore comments that independence will reduce Scotland’s clout on the global stage. This is intriguing given the UK’s already diminished impact on that stage, with declining military forces and viewed in many parts, especially of the Muslim world, as an international pariah given the illegal war in Iraq.

Much of this global impact is in part due to membership of the European Union, a membership which is to be tested by Mr Moore’s Con-Dem government through an inevitable referendum, with UK public reaction in favour of withdrawal.

Many smaller nations have used independence as an opportunity to act as a force for good in the world, and one only has to look to the example of Norway in the Middle East and Sri Lanka to see this in action.

An independent Scotland acting in such a way will clearly have a greater impact than the UK, whose international reputation is considerably tarnished and which is trying to cling on to the vestiges of a global influence that has not existed for some time.

Alex Orr, Leamington Terrace, Edinburgh

Shocking bias from the BBC

I WATCHED, with growing anger, the BBC News reporting on the Doha climate change conference.

The BBC ran footage of icebergs and the mandatory polar bear and her two cubs.

I had not realised that BBC stood for “Biased Broadcasting Corporation”.

Since 2006, the BBC has claimed that its position of promoting the catastrophic global warming fraud and censoring the appearance of dissenters was justified.

The justification for this was that in 2006 a meeting of the country’s 28 “best scientific experts” had unanimously told them that there was no scientific doubt that mankind was responsible for climate change.

The BBC refused to say who these “28 leading scientists” were and spent licence payers’ money employing top barristers to prevent us finding out.

These names were recently leaked online.

So, who are Britain’s 28 “leading scientists”?

None of Britain’s 100 leading scientists are among them.

There is an MP, a Church of England dignitary, representatives from Greenpeace and Stop Climate Chaos, the US government, BP, those with vested commercial interests, people from the foreign “aid” industry and “environmental” activists.

The “best scientific experts”?

Such conduct would have embarrassed the Soviet Union.

Clark Cross, Springfield Road, Linlithgow