Have Your Say...

IT must be amazing to be born and be instantly employed in a position where you will never have to lift a finger, where you are waited hand and foot by an army of servants, where you will live in palaces and beautiful country estates all your life and you will have access to wealth and privilege that us mere mortals can only dream of.

Contrast this with the one in four children that were born on the same day here in Scotland that are destined to live their young lives in poverty.

Now ask yourself — is this right?

Of course it is not right, in fact it is very wrong. How can we ever begin to create a fairer and equal society when at the very top we have a head of state who, along with the rest of her family, are in their privileged position of power and untold wealth, not through any effort of their own, but through the mere fluke of birth?

I hope the child born to the house of Windsor has a long and healthy life, as I do for every child born, regardless of who their parents may be. But to accept that this child, through just being born into a certain family, is due more privileges and respect than any other child is just wrong.

In accepting the right of of royal privilege, we are accepting that it is indeed justified to have a very unequal society, a society based on “the haves and the have nots” as the natural way of things.

I believe the time is long overdue to replace this well past its sell by date concept of royalty. If we need a head of state, then it should be the people who choose whom that should be.

To rid ourselves of the system that allows status, privilege and wealth through some quirk of birth, is to rid ourselves of the collective psychological mindset that allows the system to continue in the first place.

Charlie Sherry Hardgate AS we prepare to vote in this week'’s general election I am sure many citizens of West Dunbartonshire who voted Labour in previous elections will still be in a state of flux about possibly switching their allegiances to the SNP. Given that the SNP’s policies are the polar opposite of the UK Labour Party in relation to austerity, nuclear weapons, welfare, free prescriptions etc, it is easy to see why so many people are changing their vote from Labour to SNP.

What cuts Labour will make as they pursue the Tory austerity agenda have still to be established but we do know that the winter fuel allowance for pensioners will be ‘means tested’ and there is no doubt that other ‘soft targets’ such as free bus travel and TV licences for senior citizens are also under threat from Labour’s austerity drive.

Despite these significant differences in the SNP and Labour manifestos it is understandable that the Labour Party that our parents and grandparents supported still has an emotional pull for many of us but, just as many of our parents and grandparents have ‘moved on’, so has the political landscape of Scotland. On election day we are not voting for our parents or grandparents we are voting for our communities, our children and our grandchildren (unless we are being selfish and simply voting for ourselves).

So I would ask, before you do cast your vote, think of the future not of the past.

Stevie Gallagher Clydebank The War in Europe ended 70 years ago on the May 8, 1945. With this important anniversary about to take place, I think your readers would be interested in this old photograph depicting events which took place almost exactly five years earlier, dramatically revealing just how close we came to losing.

When the entire British Army became trapped at Dunkirk, in sheer desperation, King George VI called for a National Day of Prayer to be held on May 26, 1940. In a national broadcast he instructed the people of the UK to turn back to God in a spirit of repentance and plead for Divine help. Millions of people across the British Isles flocked into churches pleading for deliverance. This photograph shows the extraordinary scene outside Westminster Abbey as people queued for prayer.

Two events immediately followed. Firstly, a violent storm arose over the Dunkirk region grounding the Luftwaffe which had been killing thousands of soldiers on the beaches. Secondly, a calm descended on the English Channel, the like of which had not been seen for a generation, which allowed hundreds of tiny boats to sail across and rescue 335,000 soldiers. The Channel became like a mill pond. From then on people referred to what happened as “the Miracle of Dunkirk”.

Sunday, June 9 was officially appointed as a day of national thanksgiving. Had it not been for that violent storm and Channel calm, at that precise moment, the entire British Army would have been destroyed and the War lost.

John Williams, By email