YOUR VIEWS: 'Stagecoach should reduce timetable'
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Readers continue to share their views on local bus services and a range of other issues.
‘Stagecoach should reduce timetable’
With continuing problems around cancelled city bus services Courier reader James Rorison wrote in suggesting Stagecoach should reorganise its timetable, reducing services if necessary to at least provide people with certainty about if/ when a bus would arrive.
“I moved to Inverness 13 years ago and in that time I have actually lost count of the amount of times the timetables have changed, how many public consultations there has been and how many times the service was going to ‘improve’... and here we are still with a desperately bad service.” – Kirstin Rattray
“For a company that is partially public funded it’s a disgrace. Reduce the timetable but guarantee the buses that do run will turn up. It’s criminal when I see pensioners waiting hours on a bus that has been cancelled. The majority of older people don’t have Twitter either so can’t even tell if the bus has been cancelled. Come on Highland Council, Drew Hendry, can either of you shove a 2 Bob rocket up Stagecoach?” – Maggie Blyth
Plug pulled on city piping festival
Organisers of the Piping Inverness pipe band competition event, which was due to be held in Inverness next summer, said that it is no longer financially viable and won’t be staged in 2023.
“As a member of a competing pipe band it was great to play in the capital of the Highlands. We would travel up on the Friday and return on the Sunday. With an entourage of 30+ the funds we put into accommodation, food and socialising would have been a fantastic boost to the economy.
“With over 100 bands from around the world attending, Inverness will be a sad loss to the calendar. Hopefully the event can be organised elsewhere in the Highlands.” – James, Stirling
King cannot speak out on green issues
The contributor to the Energy North supplement in the Inverness Courier, 15/11/2022, Andrew Bradshaw, shows a considerable degree of political naïvety in his article, “Champion of climate was oddly absent”.
Are himself and the BBC’s alarmist correspondent Justin Rowlatt unaware that our royal family must be above politics, particularly our constitutional monarch?
Both men have urged that our new head of state, King Charles III, ought to be grandstanding his interesting personal views on our planet, its environment and evolving climate on the world stage.
He just can’t!
For Charles to step into the day-to-day political debate would put the survival of our monarchy itself at risk.
To do so would be to demonstrate that he has learned nothing from his dear late mother HM Queen Elizabeth II.
It’s quite obvious why “doomsdayers” around the world, particularly in the west, crave for His Majesty to speak at outside the real world events like the COP conferences.
They want this most prominent world figure to be poster boy for their wrong-headed and absolutely misguided views on our ever-changing climate, and how we can/should adapt to live with it.
I wonder if the leading American environmentalist author Michael Shellenberger and/or the Danish government’s former environmental adviser, and now prominent author on the subject, Bjorn Lomborg, were invited to address the attendees at COP27? I wouldn’t put my hard-earned money on it.
Duncan Maclean
High Street
Invergordon
UK economy is victim of Brexit
News that London has lost its crown as Europe’s largest stock market to Paris should hardly come as a surprise.
The French capital has successfully closed a trillion-dollar gap since the 2016 vote on Brexit.
This was further hastened by recent currency movements following former prime minister Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-Budget, which saw the pound sink to its lowest ever value against the US dollar.
Former Bank of England policy maker Michael Saunders recently reinforced this, restating what we already knew, that the UK economy has been “permanently damaged by Brexit” and had this act of economic self-sabotage not taken place we wouldn’t be talking about an austerity Budget this week.
The UK economy is now the weakest performer of the G7 economies, with Brexit significantly reducing the economy’s potential output, and the only one not to have recovered to pre-Covid levels.
Leaving the EU has been an unmitigated disaster for the UK, and by fundamentally weakening the economy the Brexit chickens are simply coming home to roost as we enter a new era of austerity.
Alex Orr
Marchmont Road
Edinburgh
Are opposition politicians just as much to blame?
It is a fundamental principle of law that those who incite a crime are as guilty of the crime as the actual perpetrator.
If we apply this idea by analogy to the grievous errors over energy policy, quantitative easing and Covid measures which have led to the country’s present predicament, we would conclude that the opposition parties and the broadcast media are as much to blame as the government.
So, when Sir Keir Starmer, Nicola Sturgeon and endless BBC pundits respond to the chancellor’s autumn statement with cries of Tory austerity, we should remember that they not only supported the policies which made this inevitable but wanted even more of them.
Otto Inglis
Crossgates
Fife
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