This week's East Lothian Courier letters: November 7, 2024

Brunton legacy

It was somewhat disappointing but inevitable why the council made the decision last week to demolish the Brunton Hall.
After 51 years, the building will be no more, alas.
It is heartening, however, that, like a phoenix, the building will rise from the ashes. It occupies an extensive site on Ladywell Way and it is sad that the Brunton will no longer be used for the council offices it has presently. Surprise, surprise, they have been decanted to Haddington.
Commendably, the son of the founder of Brunton Wire Works made a £700,000 bequest in 1951, when he died, for a building and theatre to be set up for the common good for the town, East Lothian and Scotland as a whole. 
The bequest was massive in the years just after the war. Now, taking account of inflation, the sum would equate to around £20 million according to the Bank of England’s figures. Just think what could be spent on the town from the common good John D Brunton idealised?
East Lothian Council needs to realise the commendable ideals and legacy of the Brunton family. Even in the 1980s, at Musselburgh Grammar School the mills were big employers. Who would ever have known that drawing wire as an industry was such a money-spinner!
John James
Bush St
Musselburgh

Deliver theatre

Regarding the closure of The Brunton theatre, I don’t need to reiterate all of the reasons why a new theatre is needed to replace the much-loved Brunton.
All I want to say is that I take my hat off to Councillor Andy Forrest, who represents the town and said: “The loss of The Brunton will be devastating for everyone who knows it. We have to make sure a new theatre rises like a phoenix from the ashes.”
We must now throw our weight behind Councillor Forrest so that he can deliver the theatre.
Adrian A. McDowell
The Promenade
Musselburgh

Come and talk

As councillors, it’s often difficult to find ways of getting to hear as many people as you can on issues, partly due to time pressures but increasingly because of how some public spaces, either online or at public meetings, can become particularly noisy in relation to one side of an argument.
These environments unfortunately exclude people: those not comfortable talking in public, those concerned about facing a ‘backlash’, those with caring responsibilities or those with new ideas.
As a community activist at heart, I’ve been discussing with my fellow SNP councillors how we find ways of enabling more people to access our representation. For all the reasons above and bearing in mind that, for most strategic and policy issues, the decisions we make don’t just impact our own ward, it’s therefore really important for us to be able to listen to people, rather than simply fielding emails.
So, from this month, we are trying something a bit different and we’re going to host group surgery sessions in each of the wards so people can come along and talk to an SNP councillor about the issues that matter to them.
The first one will be in North Berwick on Saturday, November 16, at the Hope Rooms from 2pm to 4pm, and details will be available on the SNP East Lothian Facebook page of this and forthcoming sessions.
I look forward to some good conversations in the months ahead.
Councillor Lyn Jardine
SNP Group Leader
East Lothian Council

Waive the levy

After the anti-business budget from Rachel Reeves, let’s hope there’s still a hospitality industry left to greet the new visitors’ levy when it arrives.
This new tax would extend Haddington’s dead hand into the wallet of every person paying to stay overnight in East Lothian.
A forward-thinking local authority might consider waiving such a levy for 10 years to gain a competitive advantage over Edinburgh. This could boost visitor numbers, increase local tax revenues and create much-needed jobs here.
Instead, our council will likely view the levy as yet another opportunity (like the Cockenzie Power Station land) for rentier capitalism, where communities are drained of economic vitality to provide a lazy source of government income.
This same thoughtless approach is being copied by the Labour Party at Westminster as it hikes National Insurance, effectively taxing jobs. The Labour Chancellor inherited a grim fiscal situation from her predecessor, who was spending a trillion pounds in public funds annually. While the Conservatives earned their defeat at the polls, can the country really afford a Labour Government intent on raising and spending an additional half trillion (bringing annual spending to £1.5 trillion)?
Public taxation and borrowing on this scale can only come at the cost of private sector growth. Instead of increasing the size of the economic pie, this Labour Government seems determined to consume it all to sustain an unproductive public sector. Douglas Alexander MP repeatedly sold us on “change”, but what we’re seeing is state stagnation.
Business confidence in the UK is collapsing as the bond market falters, energy infrastructure becomes unreliable, public services decline and the brain-drain resumes. Without a decisive shift toward policies – both locally and nationally – that foster growth, productivity and innovation, we risk burdening future generations with the unsustainable costs of today’s government.
Calum Miller
Polwarth Terrace
Prestonpans

Film set living

Haddington’s transformation into St Andrews a couple of weekends ago revealed what an asset the High Street could be.
Why ‘revealed’? The street’s fine array of historic buildings are always there, the shopfronts only having been tweaked here and there for the filming. There were cars and buses aplenty as nowadays, though these were the more rounded, characterful models I remember from my youth. And there were lots of people: onlookers, film crew, actors and a crowd of extras.
What was different was that, with the road blocked at either end, there was no through traffic apart from the occasional bus. Without a stream of cars using High Street as a route to get somewhere else, it became a calm, pleasant, pedestrian-friendly and spacious place worthy of the town’s ‘historic market town’ billing.
What would Haddington be like if its heart was designed around people rather than vehicles? If we copied the ‘pizza-slice’ circulation plan of Ghent, in Belgium, by making it inconvenient to drive through the town centre (while retaining access), perhaps we could permanently be living in a film set.
Donald Smith
Haddington

‘Boycott Israel’

Well done Paul McLennan MSP for using his column in the Courier last week to highlight the genocide being carried out in northern Gaza by Israel.
Over 1,000 innocent men, women and children have been slaughtered by Israel as it lays siege to northern Gaza. Israel is deliberately stopping aid deliveries of food, water and medical supplies from reaching a population already on the brink of starvation.
When will ‘enough be enough’ before the Labour Government in Westminster takes direct action against the Israeli government and fully supports a worldwide campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel?
The BDS campaign is a campaign the Israeli government fear. We need to treat Israel as a rogue state, like apartheid South Africa. Nelson Mandela said in 1994: “We South Africans cannot consider ourselves free until the Palestinian people are free.”
Our MP, Douglas Alexander, sits at the centre of the decision-making process. Mr Alexander presently argues against BDS, saying it would further isolate the Israeli public and give more support to Benjamin Netanyahu. This is a weak argument.
The public in Israel feel isolated because of their government’s propaganda that they are surrounded by hostile Arab countries. It is a lie.
Mr Alexander needs to take a principled stance and support BDS. As a United Nations member, the UK has an obligation under international law not to aid or assist a state committing atrocities against innocent civilians.
Paul McLennan also needs to take a principled stance within his own party and Government. The Scottish Government can take the lead in the UK and implement the principles of BDS throughout Scotland.
It is time for politicians to stop talking and take actions that will stop Israel’s aggression.
Colin McFarlane
Innerwick

Socialist ideals

I am surprised, but heartened, when people tell me they read my correspondences that are printed in the Courier; I am approached by them with questions of agreement or disagreement, but mostly being asked why I bang on about socialism and a new workers’ party.
I believe that, in this social era convulsed with war, economic, social, political and environmental crises, capitalism is not able to play even a relatively progressive role in advancing the needs of humankind and the planet.
From the threat of potentially unmanageable climate change to facing proxy wars, workers’ lives are blighted by fear, uncertainty and the relentless attempts by capitalism to erode the social gains of the past. That is why Labour’s Lothian East MP is being economical with the truth, saying that the Labour Government will herald in an “era of growth”.
There is no going back, as some of the older generation would like, to a post-war economic and social boom of 1948 to 1974, which represented capitalism’s answer to the economic and social devastation caused by two world wars and social revolution.
At present, there is an enormous gap between the material objective crisis in the capitalist system and the level of anger against its consequences, on the one hand; and working-class cohesion  and understanding of the working classes’ latent social power on the other.
Vital as the trade unions are, capitalism cannot be deposed by trade union struggle alone. To achieve that, the working class needs its own political party; 124 years ago, that was the formation of the Labour Party, but today the Labour Party are just ideologically Tories.
Hence the need for a new mass workers’ party that will lead the socialist transformation of society through taking into public ownership the top companies and banks that control 90 per cent of the economy. This would break the power of the capitalist class and lay the basis for the development of a socialist plan of production that would meet the needs of humanity.
Jimmy Haddow
Socialist Party Scotland
Tranent

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