FRIDAY April 13 is an important anniversary in Scotland.

Nineteen years ago, just two weeks before the opening of the first Scottish Parliament, the UK Labour party passed the Scottish Adjacent Waters Boundaries Order 1999.

This annexed 6000sq miles of Scottish waters and transferred them from the original internationally agreed boundary to English jurisdiction.

It was no coincidence that the area just happened to contain six oil wells!

The real disgrace here is how every single Labour MP and every single member of the Labour hierarchy in Scotland let this attempt at cheating Scotland out of some of its oil and gas wealth go without a single cheep of protest.

How can we trust Westminster – especially now in the throes of a Tory power grab – to look after Scotland’s best interests in the future when they failed us so badly in the past?

David McCann

Alloa

READING The National of Friday April 6 I noted that the long letter from correspondent John Andrews was a peon devoted to the death warrants of as many living creatures as could be encompassed (Grouse shooting is a boon for wildlife and rural communities).

Advocates of the torture, mutilation and destruction of living creatures for money often seek to launder their cruelty in fabrications gilded in whichever smokescreen (usually conservation) as can usefully serve.

Like the case of the National Rifle Association in America which organisation lauds the right to bear arms, but falls silent on the greater right to life.

John Andrews constructs an encirclement of torture and destruction. It is a structure constructed in language and enforced in pain, suffering and death. Regard how his letter designates selected sentient creatures as a “crop”.

This squalid manoeuvre is camouflage. It explains Mr Andrews curious lapse when listing causes of mortality in persecuted birds of prey. The word missing from his list was the word poison.

Those unlucky enough to be within Mr Andrews encirclement may find themselves designated (Mr Andrew’s words) as a “legitimate target”. Thus the degraded lexicon of computer gaming serves the wilful, casual destruction of life. Mr Andrews donned his camouflage once again in the offering of his dissembling phrase “fieldsports”.

Mr Andrews, in this, there is no sport, but there is much blood, degradation, destruction and suffering.

You will find these words in your dictionary in close proximity to the words compassion and empathy.

Those who patrol and enforce this encirclement of persecution will bring us all, in this proxy war on nature, to destruction. A choice, therefore, for humanity – an encirclement of compassion, or a scorched earth and prison of delusion?

Keith Steiner

Aberdeenshire

IT SHOCKS me how little awareness we have of Scotland’s sovereignty and how the current Russia-phobic hysteria are inexorably linked.

Brexit will undoubtedly invoke a second independence referendum, in which all recent polls suggest growing support for Yes. However, the UK Government can stop any referendum in its tracks, and also legally dissolve the Scottish Parliament at any time it chooses if it can present an absolute cast iron case for doing so.

This can only be done by the UK Supreme Court, which still has absolute power over English and Scottish law. Lord Smith of Kelvin stated this openly in an article in The Herald in December 2014, quoting: “Yes the Government can do this, but they would suffer a plague of boils if they did”.

What other reason would they need than the nuclear weapons facility on the Clyde and a synthetically made superpower enemy such as Russia.

The Clyde would once again then be “essential” for “British national security” and for the strength of the Nato alliance.

Nato states, which are clearly only vassals of the US have already shown their hand by linking arms in open provocation of the Russian Federation in, thanks to Boris Johnson, undoubtedly the most botched-up, amateurish, false flag operation in history.

They will also support the British state in everything and anything it does, and it is just naivety to think otherwise.

Russia-gate is a British state-manufactured premise to the Brexit car crash that is rapidly approaching and the constitutional chaos that will then ensue.

The British state, the monarchy and the existing London political hegemony must survive Brexit at all costs, and do any of you think that deceit of this magnitude is beyond this ultra-right Tory Cabinet’s consciousness?

Graeme Goodall

Address supplied