Poverty more a talking point than a priority for the SNP
THE SNP denounce “shameful cuts” by the UK Government, citing Scottish Parliament research service analysis indicating 200,000 families will receive less cash as a result of welfare reforms (“Almost 350,000 children ‘worse off’ after cuts”, The Herald, August 3). Of course the UK Government aims to improve the incentive to work at the margin, where the maximum of benefits is compared with the pay from available jobs. The hope is that the recovering economy offers more opportunities for those wanting to take control of their own lives. Nevertheless, it is of course a concern that there will be those who for a range of reasons find their potential to escape from poverty is limited.
However, it is a bit rich for the SNP to get on their moral high horse, when their policies in matters devolved into their control have singularly failed the most vulnerable in society over the course of the last eight years.
In education, we have poor attainment figures for those from the most deprived areas. In the Scottish health service, which those in poverty depend on more than most, we have gaps in funding impacting on A&E waiting times, delays in critical illness testing, and most recently a looming gap in GP funding. Then there is the long-term squeeze on local authority budgets that has in turn greatly reduced funding to the voluntary sector across Scotland. Hundreds of social care projects serving tens of thousands of the most disadvantaged in society have been left struggling to fund their critical work.
It is always the poorest and the dispossessed that suffer the most during hard financial times. In relation to poverty, the SNP are great at the rhetoric and blaming others, but it seems poverty for nationalism is more a talking point than a real priority. Keith Howell, White Moss, West Linton, Peeblesshire. THOM Cross mentions “the 56 with their principled and indefatigable opposition” (Letters, August 1). However all SNP MPs have signed a self-denying ordinance against public disagreement with the party line and are thus puppets obedient to the instructions of the puppeteer. It is axiomatic that a puppet does not possess free will and consequently cannot possess principles; or cannot exercise principles if such are possessed in thought.
Democracy is a very curious business. A former colleague defined truth as “truth is what I say it is”. Ditto the SNP on the subject of democracy. William Durward, 20 South Erskine Park, Bearsden. WHAT a mish-mash of a letter from Richard Mowbray (August 1)).
Only two things are clear: he confesses to be a Unionist Tory but writes like a Ukip fan, and he hates the left and social justice, particularly the SNP.
However, his line of thought is a bit muddled. Despite the SNP winning 56 seats out of 59 in Westminster in May, there is not an independent Scottish Government, so I struggle to comprehend how the drop in oil prices affects the Scottish non-existent budget by several billion pounds? The last time I looked, the Scottish budget grudgingly given to Scotland by George Osborne was around £30 billion, and falling, and not one penny of oil money is given. Perhaps he used these figures in conjunction with Labour in the referendum so much that he thinks they are real?
To clarify matters for him, the drop in oil prices means less money for the Treasury, that means all Britons An independent Scotland would need some time to prise money and powers from the aforesaid Treasury, and with the turmoil in the Middle East, the North Sea could be the safest place to go for oil supplies in the future.
His facile comparison of Scotland and Greece is laughable, as there is no independent Scottish economy, just a portion of the UK one. In any event an independent Scotland would crack down on tax avoidance and evasion and would not have to pay for a House of Lords, or Trident.
Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz said at the time of the referendum that there was a greater risk for Scotland staying in the UK and the UK leaving the EU. Jim Lynch, 42 Corstorphine Hill Crescent, Edinburgh. AS the jester Trinculo says in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows’’. And so we find, by his own admission, arch-Tory and Unionist Richard Mowbray revelling vicariously in the success of socialist Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership campaign in the hope that somehow this will dent the SNP fortunes in his adopted homeland.
The General Election result in Scotland must have compounded his misery, as he has been prophesying their demise for some time.
Now his hopes for the EU referendum hang on the success of those detestable Labour lefties attracting voters away from the equally detestable Nats in order “to save Scotland and the UK from further entanglement with the European Union’’.
What a position for a true British patriot to find himself in. James Mills, 29 Armour Square, Johnstone.