Dischargingtruth

The mishandling of the Lochaber FOI claiming not to have paperwork that the SNP Scottish Government did have, the impact of transferring our elderly into care homes as Covid was rife, the census that one quarter of our households have chosen not to fill in (and I doubt it has anything to do with Ukraine or the cost of living), the ongoing ferry saga and the concerns about the financial guarantee given to Sanjeev Gupta in return for the creation of 2,000 jobs, of which only 50 have materialised.

And that is just in this week. What will next week bring? I can only hope that it is the electorate waking up and realising that the SNP are not stronger for Scotland. They have tainted the love I have for my country with their nationalism. They have destroyed our education system, our NHS and our streets both on a national and a local level. The sooner people realise that the “freebies” that they enjoy come at a cost to other areas of government, the better.

I’m sure you’ll get letters telling me how bad things are in England but I don’t live there. I want Scotland to be a country we can be proud of, not one that has a government that is more interested in comparing us to the rest of the UK in the hope that we’ll be satisfied. JANE LAX

Aberlour

Can you see a difference between the following statements? “There is no statistical evidence that hospital discharges of any kind were associated with care home outbreaks” and “The discharges were consistent with a causal relationship between discharges and outbreaks”?

The first, published in a report by Public Health Scotland (PHS), is the one Nicola Sturgeon quoted in parliament last year to try to exonerate herself and the SNP from blame. The second, issued by the Office for Statistics Regulation after dismissing Ms Sturgeon's statement, is the truth. PHS were forced by the Regulator's intervention to issue a new report in which they stated that a link “could not be ruled out” – certainly closer to the truth but still phrased euphemistically. Yet once more Ms Sturgeon quotes the same untruth at First Minister's Questions this week (Scotsman, 29 April)!

Anas Sarwar and Daniel Johnson are making a good fist of taking her to task for her culture of secrecy but they really should not be allowing her to continue to spread disinformation to the Scottish people. Indeed, should not the Presiding Officer be intervening in such cases of repeated blatant evasion of the truth? Fat chance!

COLIN HAMILTON

Edinburgh