The recently published Elections Bill in the UK Parliament is an attempt to rig our electoral system to favour the Conservative & Unionist Party. It will makes changes to the administration and conduct of elections with the stated aim of ensuring that 'UK elections remain secure, fair, modern, inclusive and transparent.' How this will impact elections in Scotland is unclear. But given this dysfunctional, discredited, bunch of people led by the great discombobulator anything can happen.

There is a lot of talk these days from people advocating we should be trying to achieve Net Zero carbon emissions as soon as possible to stop the planet heating up even further. However most of this is greenwash, it's meaningless or deception, it's a global con being used by fossil fuel industries to continue doing what they are doing. What we should be talking about is Zero Carbon, or as close to it as we can get.

East Lothian Liberal Democrats have appointed Stuart Crawford as their interim convener following the resignation of Kit Fraser. He takes up his position with immediate effect and will hold the post until the year end.

Stuart is a former army officer and political and media communications expert who has lived in East Lothian since 1998. Born and educated in Glasgow and Somerset, he spent the earlier part of his life abroad in various

As you will be aware, the recent Scottish Parliamentary elections results were extremely disappointing for us, with a reduction from five MSPs to four. Of the seventy-three constituency seats contested we lost deposits in fifty of them. Here in East Lothian we had set a target of getting at least 7% of the turnout and saving our deposit. Despite of the best efforts of our candidate Euan Davidson and a small band of activists we managed only 3.4%.