Flying poodles

So SNP Finance Secretary Derek Mackay reiterates that he believes the SNP will fail to deliver on its manifesto promise to slash Air Passenger Duty (APD). He cites as a justification issues around EU state aid rules that he claims could continue post-brexit.

If this is correct, then it’s convenient for the nationalist party. Isn’t the reality that the Greens won’t countenance APD tax cuts because of the likely consequential environmental damage that would ensue? The SNP is routinely dependent on the fellow separatist Greens to pass their annual budget.

It’s a cliché of Scottish politics that Greens co-convener Patrick Harvie is Nicola Sturgeon’s poodle. However, as this SNP U-turn suggests, the opposite seems to be the case.

MARTIN REDFERN Woodcroft Road, Edinburgh

Clark Cross (Letters, 3 October) is right about the expensive pampering of electric vehicle (EV) owners, but the question is why, especially given the present dire drawbacks of EVS, for example, limited range, imminent electricity shortages and maddening charging problems.

Seemingly simultaneously, several nations’ governments are pushing for EVS to replace those with internal combustion (IC) engines, although that could not happen with buses, lorries, ships or airliners – all conveyances for transporting materials, goods and people in groups. The UK Government intends completion of the policy in 2045. Car manufacturers, even Porsche, are developing electric engines, thus the motor industry complies, perhaps by order of green and political groups.

Is this proposed, very expensive, switch in car engines intended to improve urban air quality or to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Big transport vehicles will still be using IC engines, cancelling out any purported benefits of EVS. These policies seem very typical of much of today’s “greenery” – fashionable, though ill-thought-out, very costly, and of unknown or no real benefit, just as wind turbines are!

(DR) CHARLES WARDROP Viewlands Road West, Perth