Sturgeon not a national leader

Madam, – I refer to the letter from your correspondent Allan MacDougall in which he avoids providing any factual detail to support his defence of the spending habits of the SNP (Those in glass houses..., Courier, March 16).

Maybe I can help him to remember:

The annual cost of Holyrood is around £150 million.

The amount spent providing free university

tuition to foreign students is £100-plus million.

The amount spent on foreign aid is £23m (although foreign aid is not a devolved responsibility.)

Then there are the, as yet, undisclosed costs of the VAT fiasco, the Gaelic language necessity on road signs, police cars, and the costs of blocking FOI requests.

And in his letter, Mr MacDougall is attempting to convince readers that such amounts pale into insignificance compared to the costs of UK

ministers crossing the Channel to confer with their European Union counterparts.

I think his maths calculator requires a visit to the repair shop.

Mr MacDougall tries to claim it is perfectly OK for a “national leader” to undertake frequent foreign trips with an accompanying entourage, forgetting that Nicola Sturgeon is not a national leader.

She is the leader of a devolved regional government within the United Kingdom to which a majority in Scotland chose to belong

in the 2014 vote.

Really it is high time that the SNP was called to account for its budget management.

Or is Nicola Sturgeon trying to take a leaf out of the EU rule-book that prevents any audit of its accounts?

Derek Farmer. Knightsward Farm, Anstruther.