An NHS scandal: Part I
Kenneth Roy
Photograph by Islay McLeod
I once spoke to a man who worked in the prison service. I was discussing the TV/phone etc privileges that can be ‘earned’ by good behaviour by prisoners. He put it like this:
Imagine you are confined to your own house. It’s comfy and warm. You like it. It’s not so bad. Now imagine you have to share your house with five other strangers who all have different ideas about hygiene, manners and personal space, three of whom have mental health issues that manifest in anger and shouting, and you cannot leave your house. I would say to you that within a very short time, your comfortable house would quickly become a form of hell on earth. No matter how comfortable prison is, it is still a place you would not want to be.
I always felt that that said it all.
Jacky Cowper
Kenneth Roy beat me to it (29 January) with his sad story of the demise of the Byre.
Just last year the Byre won the Creative Place Award from Creative Scotland and with it came a prize of £150,000. Let me quote from the Creative Place supplement provided in the Herald recently: ‘Part of the winning bid detailed how the Byre Theatre would provide a hub, to be used by all festivals throughout the year…"In some ways, we have done better than we ever imagined", says Alan Tricker, chief executive of the Byre Theatre in St Andrews’.
Ian Munro, a gaffer at Creative Scotland and one of the judges who granted the prize to the Byre, had this to say: ‘These communities are fantastic examples of how embedding arts and culture within the foundation of a community strengthens and improves people’s lives, impacting the social and economic well-being of the community’. Aye, but now the Byre is shut. Yet he goes on: ‘The awards celebrate how arts and creativity can promote the identity and character of a place’. So why shut it, Creative Scotland?
There are resources in and around St Andrews that should be harnessed to keep that great wee theatre space alive. Private funding can be found in affluent St Andrews: the university should come on board, Fife Council and Creative Scotland must bring resources together to keep the Byre alive.
Thom Cross
Kenneth Roy’s article, ‘The avoidable death of a much-loved Scottish institution’, is both informative and well-written, but it contains a factual inaccuracy. With the loss of the Byre, St Andrews will still have the Barron. It may be a student theatre but it is a theatre nonetheless. It has put on a number of high-calibre shows, and deserves the basic recognition of its existence.
Anton Orzel
There used to be a time when Lord Robertson of Wherever and Lord Forsyth of Wherever used to be admired in Scotland for their prominence in high office(s) in Westminster. They were regarded as senior Scottish politicians leading the United Kingdom forward to greater things, along with Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Alistair Darling. Not long afterwards the ’emperors clothes’ moment arrived when we all perceived them for what they really are.
Not Scotsmen in control of the levers of power for the good of their country, but simply men appointed to high political office, incapable of recognising what the future is really all about. They embarked on an illegal war, light touch regulation of the banks, with Gordon Brown waiting for tax on the City of London bonuses to revive his tax gathering potential and every conceivable mis-government action that could possibly be imagined leading to the greatest financial crash in living memory with far reaching consequences that affect everybody.
So two of the worst offenders are now ‘ennobled’ to sit, unelected, among unelected ex-felons, failed or geriatric politicians and other nonentities in ermine on the benches of the House of Lords. From that position of high rank they pontificate on their views on the future of Scotland with a gravity which befits their seniority and intellect. Their contribution, and that of others of similar unionist persuasion, too numerous to mention, is not only irrelevant and harmful to Scotland, but insulting and demeaning.
Happily Scotland’s struggle for independence is a long standing, gentle, democratic one. For these gentlemen the tumbrils of past revolutions are long gone so they can carry on sniping with impunity.
Nigel Dewar Gibb
Elizabeth Roberts
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