Letters / Tories re-writing history
Your piece about the recent visit of Messrs Halcro-Johnston (MSP) and Eagle (MSP) with their quotes about protecting the indigenous fishing industry are nothing short of lying about the past. Perhaps their news release should have been fact checked?
Young fiddler returns, fishing talks, islands debate and more …
It was the Tories who took us into the then EEC and it was the Tories who took us out of the EU with the Brexit referendum. On both occasions promising fishermen things they could not and did not deliver – protections for our fishing industry.
This terrible Tory twosome are perhaps too young to remember their party’s previous betrayals of our nation in ’74, then ’79 by adopting American monetarism, after the shock from their capitalist friends – largely extremist Islamic oil producing nations, trebling the oil price, causing global shock, huge inflation and the simultaneous eventual destruction of much of our indigenous industrial manufacturing industries.
This was conveniently blamed on our trade unions, at the time campaigning for fair wages and anti-poverty measures like job creation and investment, where the following Labour governments of Callaghan and Healy – the Blair and Brown of their day – turned Tory, just like Starmer’s lot.
Any young reading this will not know, as their grandparents were untouched by it all as oil development boomed here.
No wonder fishermen or rather their desperate supporters look to Reform given the Tory betrayals. But they too have even shorter memories, however.
Brexit was Farage’s pressure on the Tory party, forced the referendum out of Cameron, who arrogantly and stupidly thought he’d win, and forced the Tory party even further to the right, if that was possible, until it imploded.
Is it any wonder almost 35 per cent don’t vote in England. They’ve got four versions of the same ideology, four shades of capitalism. Other, newer than the 17/18th centuries economic models are available or awaiting to be created, than the one that keeps failing.
Labour and the Lib Dems – the Tories coalition pals – all failed. Brexit was so badly handled by May, Boris, Truss and Sunak that they did not save us from the austerity they’d already sunk us into, then completely mishandling, often corruptly, Covid and now no salvation in their ideology of global capitalism.
Now Trump gives the final kicking, playing Russian Roulette with Putin – how apt, but how frightening. In the absence of neither intellect nor one iota of human compassion or understanding, Trump’s tariffs and Putin’s power craze is creating an environment akin to the ’74 oil price hike.
James Paton
Lerwick
