Conservatism works for the wealthy, not the poor

Topic of the week: Adam Tomkins and the Tories

HOW nauseatingly self-important was the quote from Professor Adam Tomkins MSP who opined: “I’m not sure I would come here [to Scotland] now, partly for economic and partly for political reasons” (From left-wing firebrand republican to Ruth Davidson’s brain: Meet Tory MSP Professor Adam Tomkins, People behind the power, May 14). Yet he has deigned to grace us with his presence in our Parliament, at our expense.

Referring to the Scottish Government’s freeze on the 40p income tax band, he asks: “Why would I do the same work in Glasgow, rather than Oxford, if I was going to be taxed more for it?” It seems he overlooks the facts that the NHS in Scotland is miles better than its counterpart in England. We have free prescription charges and we pay no university tuition fees – pretty good value for a very small difference in tax payable only by the relatively wealthy. If he finds Scotland so little to his taste, perhaps he might like to go back to Oxford from whence he came.

Roy Pedersen Inverness WE are expected to believe that Adam Tomkins went from being a republican, and presumably an egalitarian, to joining a party whose policies are in favour of the accumulation and retention of wealth for the richest, while exhibiting callous indifference to the weak and marginalised. Why join a political party he professes he didn’t believe in? Because Ruth Davidson bent her ear to his alleged expertise.

He would not have chosen to live in Glasgow because of “politics”. The same “politics” has encouraged him to join a party which landed the UK with separation from the EU, the world’s largest tariff-free trading block, instigating economic fear, social division, violence against minorities and a political leadership wallowing in xenophobia: the self same Commonwealth whose citizens flitting to the UK caused Enoch Powell and his ilk to wallow in the same poisonous shoals which reflect Brexit.

GR Weir Ochiltree