YET again the Tory government managed to shake its magic money tree to find over £20,000 to send former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnston to Afghanistan to avoid having to vote against Heathrow airport expansion – as he promised his constituents (Boris Johnson skips vote on Heathrow third runway as SNP abstain, The National, June 26).

If he did so, he would have been voting against his own government and would have been expected to resign at that time (rather than blunder along for a few weeks longer). The estimated £20,000 cost of this last-minute trip to Afghanistan only covers the cost of his staff and not for Boris Johnston, so the total figure would certainly exceed this amount.

All this money was found to give him an excuse not to keep his word with his constituents, or to vote against the Government. What a complete waste of money from an uncaring Tory government who have forced austerity on the rest of us but at a moment’s notice can find over £20,000 to avoid their bumbling former foreign secretary from embarrassing them (again).
Cllr Kenny MacLaren
Paisley

BREXIT and the underlying Sturm und Drang unfolding in Middle England is disturbing.

Never before have the main English-based UK parties been at war with each other and within each other. For a retro-nation like England, that still has not moved beyond the Second World War, let alone the first, we see the resurgence of placards in trendy shops exhorting to “keep calm” plus other slogans from of yore. Yet, the warring nation down south is at war with itself and is not keeping calm.

The media, the parties, former leaders like Gordon Brown, the self-appointed Union missionary-preacher to his fellow North Britons, keep popping up and attacking his party leader and exhorting North Britons to seek social, political and economic salvation by remaining in a Union which is the sole cause of its problems. The Tories have their own internal rammies.

More disturbing is the open rebellion by characters such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnston, pictured, and other Tories who are being drawn to the likes of Steve Bannon.

At least in Holyrood the governing party is not an appendage of Middle England’s parties.

As one who looks in vain for a sensible ENP, it is depressing to see the enfolding chaos across all sector of English civil society, public and private bodies ill at ease with all daggers drawn.

The Westminster system, that self-congratulatory, inward looking anachronism of democracy is in existential crisis, though it does not see it. It is no longer the norm. It has no self-evident entitlement to demand what it wants. It is perplexing that the foreigners on the continent are not bowing and scraping.

So it is blame and counter blame.

Such are the manifestations of decline in former world imperial powers. It is mirrored in the political cess pit Donald Trump has put in place to “drain the swamp”. There, too, a covert imperial power is waining.

So, as the English press and English society fight it out in an Anglian Götterdämmerung, what next?
John Edgar
Kilmaurs

IN his letter J F Davidson has touched the surface of the problem, which runs much deeper than the heinous culling of Hares (Estates have no interest in protecting our wildlife, The National, August 16).

We should examine the origins of the ownership of these vast tracts of land. How did the proprietors acquire them? Whether they were inherited from antecedents or purchased from a heritor, the fact is that, in the first place, they were simply appropriated!

If I steal a car and sell it to you, several consequences follow. Firstly, I am guilty of theft. If you knew the car was stolen, you are guilty of reset. If you purchased the car in good faith, not knowing how I got it, the car still does not belong to you.

The fact that the car is movable and the land is not makes no logical difference. The principal is the same, ie the land was stolen and whoever occupies it now is either guilty of theft or reset and the property should be returned to the people.

Land should be held in trust by the Government and leased at varying rentals according to use. For the construction of a school or hospital, rent free; a house, a modest charge; a commercial premises, farm, factory etc, rental based on profitability and, for shooting estates, a thousand pounds per acre.

I grew up in a family which shot and spent some of my school holidays working with the keepers on a “sporting” estate where, if all the hand-reared pheasants which were released into the woods did not come back as corpses for the Game Dealer, there was hell to pay.

The shooting of “game” birds would only be sport if the birds had guns too.
Les Hunter
Lanark