Sending out the wrong messages

HOW nice of Martin Redfern to read Nicola Sturgeon’s New Year message (Letters, January 6), but he neglected to read or comment on Theresa May’s message – perhaps she did not issue one. Of course, he would have one from the Queen, last seen on BBC with a golden piano in the background (I bet that fair impresses the attendees at food banks).

He maybe got too involved with the EU – we remember the horror stories at the time of the independence referendum in 2014, and he helped to bruit them about – but he seems ignorant of the economic and social disaster about to hit these scepter’d isles – virtual ferries, virtual seaports, 1,000 Scottish police sent to Northern Ireland. I wonder if they can be funded from the billionpound bung the DUP got from us?

He denigrates Nicola’s greeting and wishes her to concentrate on running Scotland, but it seems to me he ignores what is happening on the ground up here. Food banks are flourishing, Universal Credit is halted for a wee while, and the poor are getting poorer. These are the things Westminster is responsible for. His party leader wants more money for higher-paid people in Scotland but does not say where it is to come from – block grant, finite, cannot borrow, so money for the wealthy must come from the poor.

But then what’s wrong with that old Tory mantra?

Jim Lynch Edinburgh