Today’s correspondents give their opinions on subjects such as George Osborne’s “bank raid”, uranium capture, religious aspects of the great dictators, fiscal imprudence and the future of small police stations.
Sir, Perth and Kinross Council has spent more than £1 million pounds since 2008 on laptops and mobile phones for staff. Why?
A council spokesman said the technology allowed employees to work while out of the office and be contacted in emergencies.
Meanwhile, our councils complain about government-led economies which they say will mean a reduction in the level of essential services.
New laptops and mobile phones for all are apparently more important than filling in pot-holes and collecting our refuse. I have first-hand experience of wastage in many areas of public service.
I have seen perfectly good school equipment such as radios, desks, books and even buildings ditched as a result of sudden changes in education policy.
I have witnessed the disposal of furniture and carpets from hospitals when still in excellent condition and their very expensive replacement.
As I type this letter, I have behind me a filing cabinet in excellent order bought at bargain-basement price when it was rejected by Murray Royal Hospital. The beautiful, solid-oak desk at which I am sitting, was sold by the police when they vacated their old police headquarters in Perth.
I bought it for a song at auction. It has central, mostly keyless, locking and is probably a vast improvement on the desks the police now use. Council and public service waste? Tell me about it. It is not their money, so what do councillors and officials care?
The sooner we bring in stricter auditing and inspectorate control of how council and other public departments are run, the better. At the moment, it seems, anything goes.
George K. McMillan.5 Mount Tabor Avenue,Perth.Is bank levy Coalition ploy?Sir, Chancellor George Osborne’s surprise £800 million tax levy on “livid” banks may strike some cynics as being too good to be true. It makes Mr Osborne look as if he is being tough on banks and it helps to dilute public hatred of them.
But conspiracy theorists may suspect that the levy has been agreed in advance with the banks as a price worth paying for them not to be broken up later this year.
A supposedly independent commission will decide this issue by September and it would look pretty fishy if the government rejected a break-up decision.
Keeping banks intact and lumping savings accounts under the same roof with risky, bonus-centred investments, would mean taxpayers would still have to bail out banks in any future collapses.
Angus Ramsay.34 Kings Road, Rosyth.Pipe dream of uranium captureSir, Stephen Grieve (February 14) is putting a lot of store in a very experimental process when he champions the Japanese research into extracting uranium from the sea.
So far, they have managed to extract a total of one kilogramme of yellow cake from three large cages full of absorbent material left in the ocean for nine months.
To extract the 8000 tonnes of usable uranium Japan currently needs would take in excess of 20 to 30 million of these cages. The world’s current needs would require about 300 million.
These numbers would increase exponentially as we became more dependent on nuclear.
All of these cages would have to placed close to shore as deep water is unsuitable where deployment, monitoring and recovery are concerned.
Crucially, the costs of this scheme far exceed that of renewables while the costs of decommissioning nuclear plants and waste storage are still not addressed.
The greatest argument against nuclear is its infeasibility in terms of plugging the gap in the world’s future energy needs. It is accepted the world is incapable of constructing nuclear plants in the numbers necessary to ensure those energy supplies and demands for uranium would soon exceed supply even if it could.
Uranium from the sea is not developed enough to satisfy that demand in the timescale required, even if we ignore the ecological and financial costs.
Stuart Allan.8 Nelson Street,Dundee.Dictators with faithSir, While it is good that John Montgomery accepts evolution (February 15), it is sad that he believes the lie of Hitler’s atheism.
Hitler’s views on Christianity changed, from Catholicism in his youth, to Lutheran leanings in the 1930s, to hostility in wartime. He criticised the Soviets for their atheism and persecuted atheists.
That leaves Pol Pot and Stalin, both products of Christian faith schools but the claim that they were driven by atheism is almost as absurd as the claim that atheism is a religion. They were driven by blind commitment to a quasi-religious political ideology, which happened to have atheism as one of its dogmas.
Atheism has no precepts. It is simply an absence of belief in any god.
(Dr) Stephen Moreton.33 Marina Avenue,Great Sankey,Warrington.Threat to small police stationsSir, The Strathclyde Chief Constable seems hell-bent on criticising smaller police forces and is now making comment about the shooting tragedy in Whitehaven, Cumbria, emphasising that the smaller forces cannot respond to such major incidents.
In any remote area, it takes time for any of the emergency services to reach the location. His idea would suggest that we have teams of trained firearms officers based in all the small towns, whereas, in reality, his idea of a national police force would simply eliminate such locations from the map of effective policing.
John McDonald.14 Rosebery Court,Kirkcaldy.
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