West Dunbartonshire has some of the worst health, poverty, unemployment, housing etc etc problems in Scotland.

You would think the local council would be too busy trying to find solutions to these terrible social problems, but no, the complete incompetents running our council are creating a fuss over the weans playing "Hopsctoch" or "Beds" as we used to call it.

It's time real people took control of our council, folk who have the true interests of our communities at heart, not some high paid officials who seem to have time to worry about a wee chalk mark on the pavement, when our communities are at crisis point with elected representatives who seem content to sit back and allow the unelected employees call the shots !

Time for change, time for our communities to take back control !

Charlie Sherry

via email

John Swinney has recently revealed the named person scheme would be delayed by a year. It follows the Supreme Court ruling elements of the policy “unlawful”. However, he added that councils who were already running the scheme should continue. How can local authorities be expected to keep running a programme judges have described as illegal ? Rather than delaying the named person scheme the SNP should abandon this Orwellian power grab. Polling overwhelmingly shows that we Scots do no what state sponsored guardians for our children. It's time the SNP started listening.

Alastair Redman

via email

As regards Andrew McGlinchey's comments (Reporter September 13).

With Mr McGlinchey's latest bout of verbal incontinence I have figured out what he's up to. He's a right-wing impostor. I first met him as part of the Yes Campaign in Clydebank, where he created the impression he was in with the rest of us. Likewise, he also took part in the anti-austerity protests at Garshake.

This was all a con. It is now crystal clear Mr McGlinchey is a supporter of American exceptionalism and rulings from British Courts; not Scottish Independence or working class people.

For example, due to his own vanity, he dreams that the butchers of the American First Nation Tribes and the slave master authors of the American constitution were talking about him when they wrote "We the People..." What a clown. That's ruling class people talking to ruling class people. He's a non-person and an inferior nobody in that company.

Worse, he then takes sides with the multi-billionaire hedge fund manager, George Soros against "Black Lives Matter." Pinch yourself. It's not a nightmare. Of course, "Black Lives Matter" exists because all lives do not matter in the US, especially if you're black and certainly not for Soros. Mr McGlinchey just doesn't know when he's being lied to. Soros is a global viper, a locust and the master vulture of high finance.

Working class Americans, especially blacks, know better than that. 40 million live on food stamps. 20 million live in trailer parks. The US is the most unequal country on the planet and the "99 per cent" know it. Likewise, the US ruling class, the "one per cent ," have played the robber baron and the warmonger across the globe, employing slave labour and child labour. Ask the real Americans, not the the PR, sales and marketing propagandists who represent the giant trans-national global corporations, the arms industry and the Wall Street bankers.

Mr McGlinchey knows I never said, "all science agrees." He doesn't let the truth get in the way of his pork pies. He's referring to a single point I raised, that is, the geological life-time of the material world greatly exceeds the age of man, or the existence of the human spirit. Name one scientist who disagrees with that and I'll show you a fake.

Finally, Mr. McGlinchey's "eco-science" and a 20-year old "UN biological report" don't mean whale dung here in West Dunbartonshire. As your readers are aware, I've written hundreds of letters to the press on rivers, fish and fisheries. To say the least, I was a member of the National Park Fish and Fisheries Forum for over 10 years and I've got an objection into the N.P. Local Plan Public Inquiry just now. If Mr. McGlinchey is claiming he's some kind of big time, hot shot ecologist or a biologist it's strange how no one's ever heard of him round here.

Perhaps, he should take his right-wing propaganda and stick it in the bin where he got the rest of his dross. He's fooling no one. He bought the hype and he's selling us out.

All Hail the Scarlet Banner!

James Graham

via email

The cultural Marxist contributor to this column is treading on very thin ice when he talks of fiction in The Bible. The Bible is founded on the Rock-solid, inerrant Word of God, not the thin brittle ice of human opinion to be wrested at every turn by the private interpretations of fallible men like him. It is one thing to carnally read The Bible, but quite another matter altogether to spiritually discern its contents!

It appears he wrests Scripture with his customary volcanic hyperbole into some kind of fault of the capitalist ruling class - his latest demonstration being my earlier reference to the Biblical "mystery of iniquity", which is linked to the words "anomia/anomie". Apparently, this is "caused by the ruling class system of divide and rule we've inherited and must abolish to break free of it in favour of socialism".

Another of his hackneyed offerings is Christianity being co-opted by the Capitalist ruling class who [then] blessed every bomb and bullet. Conveniently, he failed to mention how many people – to the nearest 100 million – have been killed by communism. He also trots out the old saying about there being one law for the rich and one law for the poor, but The Bible says ALL have sinned, and sin is the transgression of God's law. Bizarrely, he even manages to blame Britain's Union flag – a Christian flag no less – for rigging the (capitalist) system from day one. Who mentioned the Union flag in the first place, and indeed a whole host of other ingredients he has introduced on here for his own opinionated ends?

Moreover, although he frequently reads his Bible, he paradoxically opines we are not living in Biblical times. But the Rock of Scripture says Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, and to day and forever.

The NO2NP scheme was outrageously savaged by him as "adults (ab)using innocent children as a front to promote their own right-wing propaganda". Even worse is his cynical question: "Where's all this Christian honour, love and forgiveness for low paid and battered women and children abused by domineering male Christian slave masters, rapists, and child molesters? Small wonder Jesus was livid about the family". (end of quote).

Jesus was not against the family as an institution. It is utterly preposterous for The Bible and the honourable institutions of marriage and the family to be caustically misrepresented in this monstrous manner.

Your cultural Marxist contributor, with his long march through the institutions, has repeatedly revealed his spiritual blindness by implacably attacking Biblical texts with his secular political opinion, although he is undoubtedly not apathetic.

Let me now end this letter by graciously quoting some apposite Scriptures: "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them because they [the things of God] are spiritually discerned". Also, "A man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition reject".

Andrew Forsyth

Knightswood

Tomorrow, September 21, is World Alzheimer's Disease Day.

Animal Aid is urging anyone hoping to mark this day by donating to organisations concerned with Alzheimer's Disease (AD), to only consider supporting humane charities.

Last year Animal Aid highlighted how the The Alzheimer's Society had co-funded a series of profoundly disturbing experiments on mice. The mice, who were genetically altered to develop a crude approximation of Alzheimer's Disease, were injected daily with a drug used to treat diabetes in humans. They were then subjected to a regime of highly stressful behavioural tests which involved being forced to swim around in a pool of water looking for an escape route. The research was investigating whether a drug used to treat Type 2 diabetes could help to reduce the symptoms of Alzheimer's that the mice exhibited.

Sadly, this exploitation of animals by the Alzheimer's Society continues despite mounting evidence that animal ‘models' of human disease are not indicative of what will happen in people. A paper that suggests a new approach to Alzheimer's research, when discussing genetically altered mice ‘models' of the disease stated ‘none of the models fully recapitulates AD (Alzheimer's Disease)'. Animal Aid is not alone in calling for robust and humane science in place of outdated and cruel animal research.

Jessamy Korotoga

Campaigner