SIR, It is indeed a bizarre situation, as Alex Orr observes in his letter in the Peeblesshire News last week, in which Labour Scotland can grudge £95 million for primary school meals while supporting Trident’s replacement at £100 billion.

Bizarre, but now characteristic of a party that is seeing its traditional supporters depart in droves in the knowledge that Labour is no longer the genuine socialist party up here: the SNP is unequivocally opposed to Trident, and its socialist record in government stands up well.

However, the Labour rot set in long ago. Tony Blair sold the soul of British socialism in his invasion of Iraq.

People who had never before marched in protest flooded the streets in major cities of the UK and throughout Europe. There was a huge turnout in Edinburgh. Everyone knew it was a phoney war - and yet two in three Labour MPs voted it through! Gordon Brown and Jim Murphy were two of them. It was no surprise to me when the pair teamed up with the Tories, the Coalition and the Westminster establishment to campaign stridently against their own country’s independence.

Had just a few more Scots (about one in 10) voted positively last September, the Scottish government would now be telling the remainder of the UK how long it had to rid us of monster Trident, and Scottish Labour would be wringing its hands in apology for mistaking the mood of the people, rather as big brother UK Labour did in the wake of Iraq, a million innocents having perished and their country in deepest chaos.

“Yes,” they conceded, in tune with a morally bankrupt Westminster establishment, “mistakes were made.” The charge of moral bankruptcy seems scarcely adequate.

I am, etc.

John Melrose Whitehaugh Park Peebles