Readers' letters: England is growing politically irrelevant

So, Boris Johnson misses a key phone call with Putin (too busy defending himself against accusations of criminal behaviour apparently), spends 24 hours on the well-worn ‘let’s visit Ukraine and look important’ carousel and then returns to find meltdown in Downing Street with the mass resignation of his key staff.

At the same time NI’s politicians refuse to continue implementation of the GB-NI border checks agreed in the internationally binding UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement.

Just another regular week for post-Brexit ‘global Britain’ then - which in reality is toxic, dysfunctional and isolated.

Putin knows that the only capitals he needs to pay attention to are Beijing, Brussels and Washington and that the self-obsessed UK is an irrelevance in international matters and led by idiots.

Unfortunately a Westminster election is still more than two years away and we face the real prospect of endless damaging conservative governments beyond that.

It’s time to face the sad reality that England’s default position is Tory: since 1980 there have been five Conservative governments compared with Labour’s two. The assumption that somehow Tory and Labour each get an equal rotational ‘Buggin’s turn’ to govern at Westminster and that Labour will somehow ‘save’ Scotland, is fantasy.

Sorry, but we simply won’t be fobbed off by this unionist north-British nonsense anymore.

D Jamieson, Dunbar.

Alarming news on fire regulations

The SNP/Green government recently made many of us remove and dump perfectly good smoke and fire alarms to be replaced with ones that were interconnected.

All this was in vain as most SNP councils were so far behind fitting them that they couldn’t enforce their own policies.

Our government now wants to cut a few feet off the lower part of fire doors in schools to allow air to circulate.

A problem with the new regulations is that when a linked alarm goes off, it is no longer possible to detect where the danger is, as all the alarms sound at the same time. This seems another folly.

Alastair Murray, Edinburgh.

Where’s my refund?

Another day another SNP shambles. This time it is the "compulsory" law to install interconnected heat and smoke alarms.

The public have now been told that despite the law being "compulsory" there will be no penalties for non-compliance. I have, therefore, written to Ms Sturgeon and asked for a refund of the £331.16 I paid. Others should do the same.

Clark Cross, Linlithgow.

Nuclear waste fears

William Loneskie (News, February 3) promotes the introduction of small nuclear power stations which he says could produce electricity for 60 years.

Regrettably that’s not all they will produce. Like all nuclear reactors they will produce deadly radioactive waste which will remain lethal for over 50,000 years

We don’t have a clue how to safely store and manage the nuclear waste we have created in the last 80 years and we should not be considering adding to that lethal and expensive problem.

These stations would also be targets for terrorists but the Windscale fire (1957), Three Mile Island meltdown (1979), Chernobyl explosion (1986) and Fukushima disaster which put an end to the building of nuclear power plants in Japan (2011), show it doesn’t need terrorists to turn nuclear power stations into tools of mass destruction.

John F Robins, Dumbarton.

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