Dog’s dinner

Donald J Morrison (Letters, 16 August) presented a very good case as to why he believes the Scottish Government’s highly controversial Named Person Scheme should be consigned to the dustbin of history.

To say I was astonished at the response from serial SNP apologist Gill Turner (Letters 17 August), who accused Mr Morrison of “appalling ignorance of how the scheme is envisaged to operate”, would be an understatement.

Mr Morrison, just like the Supreme Court judges and the thousands of people who took the trouble to sign a petition opposing it, understands exactly how the scheme was envisaged to operate.

Ms Turner parrots the “single point of contact for children who may need additional support” mantra that was repeated ad nauseum by government supporters in an attempt to give the scheme a more cuddly image, but the lie is given to that by the fact that over the course of the various pilots which were operated, children and their families were not even aware that they had a “Named Person” who was engaged in the process of gathering and illegally sharing private family information. How could they use a point of contact of whose very existence they were completely unaware? I know this to be true because I discovered it when I asked The Highland Council for all the information which it held on my family, at the same time as I was telling them that my grandchildren do not require a named person and we do not want one.

After a year of trying to work out how to circumvent the Supreme Court decision, education secretary John Swinney, instead of doing the honourable thing and consigning the scheme to the dustbin, has come up with a ruse whereby he has simply transferred responsibility for the decisions on data sharing to the named persons and other professionals. Meanwhile, those responsible still don’t know whether the scheme is compulsory or not (though I have been told by one of the architects of it that it is not).

Mr Swinney has now turned the scheme from an unnecessary, draconian nonsense into a dog’s dinner, and when the dog doesn’t want it, we all know where that should end up.

ALAN THOMSON The Old Barn, Strontian