Contrary to the implication in the article about teachers spending less time with pupils, teachers do not have 10 hour’s preparation time (News, June 20). We have 7.5 hours per week , to cover planning, preparation, assessment, recording, reporting and correction . I, and my colleagues, spend most evenings and weekends planning and preparing lessons and activities , because we care deeply about effective learning and teaching.

There has previously been no time allocated for teachers to speak to parents after school or liaise with colleagues and support staff. Staff willingly do this in their own time. The McCrone deal recognised that teachers work many more hours than 35 a week and, even after the deal was concluded, we are still working many hours over that number. From August, teachers’ planning and preparation time will be cut to 6.5 hours per week .

Like Scottish Parent Teacher Council development manager Judith Gillespie, teachers have concerns about how the 1.5 hours of non-class contact time will be managed. During this non-contact time teachers will be able to speak to parents, develop areas of the curriculum and so on – all things we did in our own time previously.

Teaching is not a nine-to-five job, or anything like a 35-hour week. We work an additional 35 hours per year on our professional development plus many extra hours at home. Our holidays may seem long: 30 working days during the summer . We can’t take a day off outwith these holidays, everything has to be arranged around school opening times.

Parents do need to be vigilant about how this non-contact time is managed and the effects on their children’s learning , and voice any concerns. They are the ones whose opinions count.

Margaret McKay

Glasgow

Drinking-up time

Last Sunday you reported on English football fans and the English disease of alcohol fuelled mob culture ... alongside Dr Ian Anderson’s sensible suggestion of “knocking the f*** out of the neds” (News, June 20).

To conclude that football-related thuggery is an “English disease” takes the Scots delusion that everything English is flawed and everything Scottish is irreproachable to new heights. There were 56 murders in Scotland last year (population less than five million) where the perpetrator was drunk. The streets of Glasgow run with blood whenever there is an Old Firm derby and alcohol fuelled disorder reigns on any Saturday night in any Scottish city.

The Scots might like to hate the English, but let’s not delude ourselves that we don’t share the English disease of having a very unhealthy relationship with alcohol.

Dave Robinson

Aberdeen

Orange disorder

Muriel Gray, while extolling love, described an Edinburgh parade as “nauseating”; Orange walks as “public spectacles of human malice and violence” designed “to peddle low-life hatred”, paraders as “thugs”, and those watching them as “slack-jawed, dead-eyed, drunken, swearing cretins … dragging their collective knuckles on the pavement” (Seven Days, June 20). Wow!

There has been an outbreak of moralising about the Orange Order recently. In your sister paper, The Herald, Monsignor Peter Smith called – in the name of “tolerance, respect and diversity” – for all Orange walks to be banned because of their “bile, bigotry and boorishness”.

As the author of a book about the Orange Order (The Faithful Tribe), I was on Lesley Riddoch’s show on BBC Radio Scotland along with Smith, who was complaining bitterly about the number and nature of Orange walks passing his church. I was fascinated to find that it had never occurred to him to get in touch with anyone from the Orange Order, to tell them it was bothering him.

I am an atheist of Dublin Catholic stock who took the trouble to find out about the Orange Order by attending parades and having conversations with members. Among the many fine people who are in the Order because of its dedication to civil and religious liberty is Ian Wilson, the Scots Grand Master. Is there the faintest possibility that Smith and Gray might speak to him, or are they happier to stay self- righteously ignorant?

Ruth Dudley Edwards

London

Why, in all the debate about sectarian marches, has nobody challenged the Orange Order on what they are marching for? Why as Scots do they have as a hero a man whose reign saw murder at Glencoe, betrayal at Darien and thousands of Scots suffer or die during a famine he did nothing to assuage and even made worse?

They say it is for freedom and liberty for all. So why did Presbyterians in Ireland become second class citizens after King Billy’s “victory” and why did they oppose Catholic emancipation?

Maybe Jack McConnell should be asked why lifting this veil of historical ignorance in our schools is not part of his anti-sectarian campaign.

Jim Thomson

Glasgow

Unchristian act

As a Christian, I take exception to the obvious implication of Archbishop Conti’s observations, which is that to oppose the EU is to act in an un-Christian manner (Seven Days, June 20). Since its inception, the EU has been party to acts and policies which can only be described as lacking any Christian content. One particularly horrifying example is its cynical policy of dumping food surpluses on world markets, which causes massive damage to Third World food producers and thus contributes to the problem of under-nourishment amongst the human beings occupying this globe. It also has a policy of prohibiting as many state subsidies as possible, thus preventing the public authorities from performing their very Christian duty to assist the indigent and the needy in their plight.

I would also dispute Conti's claim that the EU is responsible for 60 years of peace. The treaty establishing the current EU, which was the Treaty of Rome, came into effect in 1958, by which time all the major western European nations who faced each other in the first and second world wars were firmly entrenched in the NATO alliance.

Whatever one may think of NATO, it is highly improbable that members of the same military alliance would go to war against each other.

Walter Cairns

Manchester

Paying for votes

Your report, “Scandal dogs the Canadian election trail”, forgot 32 million winners in the upcoming vote (News, June 20). It is true that political parties are fighting like rabid dogs for the left-overs of a decade of Liberal rule – recently, the opposition even accused the prime minister of being soft on child pornography. But voters will be the real victors.

The spoils after the ballot boxes are emptied on June 28 are millions of dollars in public funds. For the first time, proportional financing means every vote does count.

This is the closest we’ll ever get in this country to proportional representation so we intend to make the most of it. Any party that gains more than 2% of votes nationally will get $1.75 for each voter, each year until the next election. With extremely tight donation rules, it makes for a fairer system, though perhaps no less nasty.

For a party such as the Green Party of Canada, currently polling at 7%, this could be a huge boost for those who want to be the new Canadian “left”.

The New Democratic Party is neither “new”, nor “democratic”, nor much a “party” these days. With the Greens set to grasp more than $1 million in taxpayer cash and even beating the NDP in some ridings, a new left may be about to be born, helped by democratic funding.

Unlike the American anti-Ralph Nader excuse in 2000, there can be no wasted votes here any more. Each Canadian is now worth $1.75. As one of millions of voters, I’m the real winner this time round.

Edith Hodgell

Vancouver, Canada

Brought to book

I write in defence of chain bookshops, which Ron Butlin severely criticised in his article on the publishing industry (Seven Days, June 13). I take great exception to his inaccurate pronouncement that all publishers have to pay to be included in any book promotions, and that the whole system is corrupt. Whilst this may be the case in some “mega-chains”, it is not true of the company I work for, Ottakar’s.

Publishers do pay for window space for big promotions, but no money exchanges hands when we select our “Scottish book of the month”, which I co-ordinate. More importantly, the “staff recommends” are genuinely books that our staff have read and felt worthy of appraisal to our customers, who have often told us how valuable these recommendations are. Many of these are for older backlist titles, not new books which publishers may be trying to promote, and staff take real pride in seeing the books they have praised sell.

This is a hugely important part of booksellers’ motivation, as they certainly don’t work for monetary gain, and it is insulting for Butlin to dismiss “staff recommends” as just a way of selling “products”. This is not how booksellers at Ottakar’s view books, and it would be appreciated if we were not all branded as shallow and corrupt, which we most certainly are not.

Eleanor Logan

Lenzie

Just a Jack-in-office

Further to your interview with Jack McConnell, maybe the First Minister should look at himself for reasons why Scotland has a cringe culture (Seven Days, June 20). Is he trying to say that 30 years of Labour telling Scots that they are “too poor”, “too small”, “not good enough”, to run their own successful, independent country has had no bearing on the national psyche? If Scots were allowed for one moment to believe in themselves, they might show it at the ballot box and this is the last thing Jack and his ilk want.

If McConnell’s real opposition is the Conservative Party he must be enraged when he sees that in Perth and Kinross and Dundee City the largest party in these councils is not the party in power because a Labour/Conservative coalition cosily controls both.

Caoimhin Cordell

Broughty Ferry

Dundee

PLA fair

Your correspondent Mike Martin misunderstands the concerns raised over the initiation of a group from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to perform at this year’s Edinburgh Military Tattoo (Readers’ Views, June 20). He claims that protest against the PLA is mean-ingless given the numerous other violations of human rights carried out across the world – suggesting that the only possible response is that of inertia. Oh dear.

By contrast, Amnesty International’s vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international standards. We have strongly urged the organisers of the Tattoo to take more care over who they invite to take part because this is an engagement that conveniently glosses over the PLA’s terrible human rights record.

The PLA are not only implicated in the awful human rights abuses apparent in Tibet. Continued persecution of such spiritual movements as Falun Gong and Qi Gong, the extensive and arbitrary use of the death penalty in China, and the use of the “war on terror” as a pretext for the repression of peaceful democratic protest are all central to the unease with which the Tattoo’s decision has been received.

John Watson

Programme director of

Amnesty International Scotland

State of pensions

As a pensioner activist who has been a trade union member since 1939, I was interested to learn about last weekend’s march in Edinburgh about pensions. At long last the slumbering monster has blinked an eye and realised that pensioners have been getting a raw deal.

In October 1996, at a pensioners’ congress in Glasgow, the STUC demanded that the state retirement pension be available to everyone at age 60 and that the pension be set at 50% of average earnings for married couples and 33% for singles. At the same event they demanded that when a Scottish parliament was set up it should establish mechanisms to ensure that Scottish pensioners would be able to effectively influence those decisions which would affect their lives and welfare.

Around that time, Messrs Blair and Brown were bitterly criticising the Tories for betraying pensioners by breaking the earnings link with pensions and for downgrading the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme. They proclaimed Labour would retain SERPS’s vital role in providing good second-tier pensions, saying they would put pensioners’ voices at the heart of government and include the National Pensioners’ Convention as the largest co-ordinating body for representing pensioners’ organisations.

After seven wasted years we still await actions rather than words. Now that the STUC appear to be rising from their slumbers, perhaps they might consider convening an all-Scotland pensioners’ congress similar to the last one in October 1996.

Louis Howon

Kirkcudbright

When in Rome …

I was surprised and disappointed by Duncan MacLaren’s Small World article (Magazine, June 20). The article dealt with an unfortunate incident in Rome, when a bag was stolen and the assumption made that the unseen culprit must have been Roma.

The Roma are the most marginalised and discriminated against ethnic group in Europe. Many live in horrendous conditions suffering disproportionately high rates of illiteracy and ill-health due to flagrant denial of healthcare and education. In part, that discrimination perpetuates through negative stereotyping, with tendencies towards criminality part of the stereotype. MacLaren refers to this as a “vicious circle” in which Roma act out the stereotype because it’s expected of them, thus cementing their reputation in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Most Roma are not in a position to break that circle. Neither are they in a position to end the systematic marginalisation that created and sustains it. We however, as its creators, are. I doubt whether such an article would have been published had the content dealt in a similar way with another, better represented, group.

Ivan Mykytyn

Glasgow