Richard Simpson MSP and others
Andrew Watterson and Rory O’Neill
The lobbying scandal, like almost all the other scandals to hit the ‘Mother of Parliaments’, doesn’t seem to have touched our Scottish Parliament. Indeed, since its foundation, the SP has prided itself on being open and transparent. The level of interaction with civic society has been huge.
The petitions system has allowed individual Scots with a concern affecting them and others to present those concerns. The numbers of petitions submitted since 1999 is almost 1,500. Moreover, the declaration of interest system has sometimes been interpreted to ensure that the smallest potential influence is transparent. Wendy Alexander famously declared a bouquet of flowers.
The interaction of MSPs, the public, patients, professionals and organisations working to all our advantage will, I hope, be seen in the forthcoming health and sport committee report on ‘Access to Medicines’. The government decision to consult and endeavour to reach a consensus on fair access on this difficult issue may prove to be one of the best examples of transparent, interactive, democratic policy creation we have seen since 1999.
Richard Simpson MSP
Dick Mungin (18 June) is worried that we are voting for an independent parliament within the UK. Would he rather that we were having to conduct this vote under the auspices of the United Nations? Does he want David Cameron to do his negotiating a changed relationship with the EU from outside of it?
Further, he worries that he and his kind are being characterised as fascists by some journalist on an electronic news-sheet. He is obviously not a reader of the mainstream media journal Scotland on Sunday which recently altered a saltire to a swastika on its front page and accused the nationalists of being fascists. Neither accusation is a) true or b) helpful to the debate. The silence engendered by a little less name-calling and accusations about name-calling would show up the absence of any real engagement with the momentous consequences of either result on 18 September next year. There is little enough time already to inquire and inform; playschool complaints from either side do not help.
Randall Foggie
Iain Banks spoke at a meeting in Bladnoch distillery on Sunday 6 May 2007 on Scottish literature. He was asked what he had voted on the previous Thursday. He said Scottish Socialist Party first past the post and the same for the regional list.
Ian Millar
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