Readers' letters: Edinburgh is on the wrong tram track

I note that SNP councillors in Edinbugh have said they will press on with tram extensions if they are returned to power in the local elections (News, 13 April).

I left Edinburgh in January 1957 to do my National Service. I lived in Buchanan Street, a very short walk to Pilrig where I could get on a tram to the outskirts of the city, including Newhaven. There were some parts of the city that required changing trams, but Edinburgh was fully accessible by tram.

Two years later I returned to find that buses had replaced the trams and that the suburban railway that carried commuters in large numbers from the outskirts was also under severe threat.

My fiancée was able to leave her office in St Andrew Square, travel to Joppa for lunch and be back at work within the hour. Impossible nowadays!

What nobody had foreseen was the huge increase in car ownership and the problems this created with bus timetables.

Most of the factory chimneys that belched smoke over the city had gone, but were now replaced with fumes from buses, cars and lorries, causing the city to once again justify its Auld Reekie title.

Times have changed from when cars were very much the minority mode of transport and were rarely seen parked outside tenements.

I will not be around to see the next method of transport for the masses, but I doubt that trams will feature highly in Edinburgh.

George Wilkie, Cambridgeshire.

Are we in Scotland being taken for fools?

Each week we hear that Scotland is too poor to be viable and must cling on to its UK membership in order to survive. But there is little evidence to support this endlessly repeated assertion.

Unsurprisingly the UK Government’s annual GERS Report promotes this view, projecting a large theoretical Scottish deficit, whereas in the real world the Scottish Government (unlike the UK one) balances its books every year.

Naturally the GERS Report treats Scotland as a GB region, which therefore has to bear its share of the enormous GB ‘national infrastructure’ costs, (irrespective of whether we benefit from them or not - eg the HS2 rail project to Manchester (Phase 1 Budget £45 billion), the Hinkley Point nuclear power station in Kent (est. cost £23 billion), London’s CrossRail (est. cost £19 billion) and of course the cost of running the fleet of Clyde-based Trident nuclear missile submarines (currently @£2.4 billion per annum and rising).

So in fact GERS shows that Scotland, as a GB region, is impoverished by its costly membership of the UK.

In contrast, Scotland’s similar size near neighbours are thriving. World Bank data for Denmark and Ireland reports their GDP per perso1 as an astonishing $60,230 and $93,181 respectively, compared with just $46,482 for the UK.

This independent source shows that both of these ‘small’ countries are more prosperous and economically successful than the ‘large’ UK. And indeed that ‘little’ Ireland’s per capita GDP is more than double that of the UK!

These facts emphasise the lie that Scots are daily told about their country’s wealth. The reality is that independent countries with territories, populations and natural resources smaller than Scotland’s, prosper when independent.

There are no benefits to Scotland from our membership of the British union. Scotland (pop. 5.3m) may well just about survive its miserable existence as a neglected GB region, but it will never flourish.

Look aboot ye Scotland – you’re being made a complete fool of.

Mr D Jamieson, Dunbar.

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