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I have vivid memories of a Saturday in autumn 1969, when thousands of protestors packed Murrayfield for what was to be the apartheid Springboks’ last match on Scottish soil. Huge barricades, and careful police-enforced segregation, ensured that there was no pitch invasion, and no interruption to play. But the protest worked, in that an apartheid South African team never returned to Scotland.
My English Tory uncle, who had emigrated to South Africa, berated me for my part in the protest. ‘Keep politics out of sport’ was the then usual mantra of the right. But years later, as apartheid crumbled, he had the grace and decency to tell me that I’d been right, and he’d been wrong on the issue. He had realised that sporting and other isolation, including Gordon Brown’s role in the 70s campaign to exclude South Africa from the Commonwealth Universities Conference in Edinburgh, had played a part in the downfall of apartheid. Dripping water can erode granite.
So it will be with Israel, currently extending plantation on Palestinian territory, and a few other things, in the face of international law. Protests at sporting and cultural events do have an impact on the internal policies of states eventually.
David McVey (8 November) should acquaint himself with some history on the subject. I’d be glad to help him with my wee tuppence-worth.
Dougie Harrison
I enjoyed Bob Smith’s cartoons as usual (8 November). I was surprised to see him using the catchphrase ‘Sausages is the boys’. I didn’t expect anyone to remember it now. It was coined by my late father Andrew McIntyre and his friend Jack McLeod when they were writing scripts for the BBC Scotland radio series ‘It’s All Yours’ which ran from 1949-53 (as I remember) and starred Jimmy Logan and Stanley Baxter. My father died in 1997, but I am touched to see that the memory lingers on.
Jill Stephenson
In response to Anthony Seaton’s comments in The Cafe (6 November): The oceans are not warming, rather they are cooling. The current phase of global warming stopped with El Nino in 1998, and the graph has effectively flatlined ever since. Sea levels are dropping rather than rising. Climate change is a fact of life, always has been since time began, but there is no evidence to link it with any anthropogenic activity.
The single biggest mover and shaker in the climate change stakes is the sun. In fact, in geological terms, there’s less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been for the last 500 million years. The whole AGW industry is grinding to a shuddering halt as more and more scientists and even the IPCC and their colleagues in East Anglia are issuing new reports that are in stark contrast to those promoted over the last 10 years.
As a consequence, Mr Obama is not thinking about global warming and hurricanes – he’s thinking about extracting as much oil and gas as possible from American land and sea, coal as well, so that the USA can be energy self-sufficient for the next few hundred years. Mr Cameron is thinking about this as well. There’s bucket loads of shale gas under English soil and sea-bed. More than any other country in Europe, and up there amongst the world leaders.
How handy is that? Let’s jettison those annoying Scots – we don’t need their North Sea oil and gas any more. And with a whole new tranche of nuclear reactors about to be commissioned in England, good old Blighty just might be able to give the finger to Gazprom. What joy, indeed, and not a ‘green’ thought in mind. But we’ll still be paying our green taxes for renewables investment, you can be sure of that, unless there is a popular revolution to challenge the energy companies, armed with the real facts about climate change. Hanging on to a discredited orthodoxy serves none of us consumers well.
Judith Jaafar
You couldn’t make this up, could you? The scientist Brian Cox said he was prevented by the BBC on health and safety grounds from listening for signals from space on the radio dish at Jodrell Bank on the ‘Stargazing Live’ programme. Cox said: ‘The BBC actually said "You can’t do that. We need to go through the regulations and health and safety and everything in case we discover a signal from an alien civilisation".’
Dermot McQuarrie
I read Kenneth Roy’s article (23 October) with interest and agreement concerning Sir Jimmy Savile and the BBC’s complicity in this sorry and ongoing affair. The so-called honours system leaves me in complete despair for several reasons: both those who are chosen and the majority who are not. Frankly, the whole thing is a farce. I would like to be asked so that I could refuse point-blank. Personally speaking, I have struggled all my working life with being titled Rev because I know that I’m far from that. I agree entirely with Kenneth that we are all simply human beings and that is how I conducted my entire ministry and continue to do so, under the motto of putting people first.
Ian Petrie
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