IF they were called “Glasgow Action on Drugs” the funding would be doubled, never mind available (Glasgow asbestos charity hits out at ‘cynical’ council).

It’s funny that a charity that supports mainly older people who worked all their lives and paid taxes and contracted a horrible disease in the process are being treated like this when Glasgow City Council are giving money to all and sundry.

My dad died of mesothelioma and although we only visited this charity once not long after diagnosis, the information they gave us was invaluable as we knew nothing – it is needed, but obviously doesn’t fit the council’s agenda!

Anne McAdam

READ MORE: New bridge cannot be worth this price tag

THE enforced amalgamation of regional police forces into Police Scotland is a continuing disaster.

The latest scandals are that Police Scotland need £50 million to avoid axing 750 police officers. Senior Police Scotland officers have also revealed they will need to retrain 17,000 officers and upgrade IT systems to enforce the smacking ban. They refuse to say how much this will cost and that is usually the sign that it will be colossal. Another SNP we-know-best disaster.

Clark Cross Linlithgow

READ MORE: Confusion over where city bins have been placed

IT is striking to note Scottish Secretary of State Alister Jack (right) has ruled out a second referendum on independence even if the SNP won a majority at next year’s Holyrood election.

This is strange because a gentleman, also called Alister Jack, in the run up to the General Election last month, conceded that an SNP majority would be sufficient to trigger a second referendum.

The SNP won a landslide victory in that election – winning 80% on a mandate for an independence referendum – while the Tories lost more than half their MPs. This was on a platform of stopping Scotland’s right to choose.

Nineteenth-century Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell famously noted that “no man has the right to fix the boundary of a nation. No man has the right to say to his country, ‘Thus far shalt thou go and no further’”. How appropriate a statement that is in this context.

The Smith Agreement, following the 2014 independence referendum also noted that “it is agreed that nothing in this report prevents Scotland becoming an independent country in the future should the people of Scotland so choose”.

Scotland’s future must be in Scotland’s hands, and it is not for Boris Johnson or his apparatchiks to resist this.

Alex Orr