For anyone trying to cope with the cost-of-living crisis in Scotland, I have a top tip. Pretend you’re a multinational media firm with $12 billion revenue, claim you’re making an unwanted comic-book movie and wait for the SNP-run Glasgow City Council to transfer £150,000 into your account. Kapow! D Bone, Ayrshire.
In relation to your lead letter (“Truss insulted us all. Now get ready for even more acrimony”, August 3), it is curious how “attention-seeker” is such an insult, but “an empty vessel filled only with ambition” is valued journalistic insight and perception. As your columnist fain Macwhirter says elsewhere, politicians say things about one another, get over it. It is not as if Ms Sturgeon hasn’t spent a career doing this sort of thing herself, and has got much worse in recent years with the army of spin doctors she now has available to her. Her relentless sniping and talking over people are orders of magnitude worse, and Ms Truss has only said out loud what many of the rest of us think. Ms Truss, to her credit, is thick-skinned enough to deal with these things. Ms Sturgeon and her supporters, apparently much less so. Victor Clements. Aberfeldy, Perthshire.
SCOTLAND MATTERS reached well over 1 million people at the Holyrood election, 1.4m at the Council Elections and in both elections the SNP’s vote and seats won were far below their own predictions.
Now they want another referendum in October 2023. We need to:
However, this costs a LOT of money. PLEASE CONSIDER DONATING TO OUR CROWDFUNDER AND LET’S DERAIL INDYREF2 TOGETHER!!
John Swinney has huffed and puffed that Liz Truss deriding Nicola Sturgeon as an “attention-seeker” shows “contempt for Scotland”. How? Ms Truss shows contempt for Ms Sturgeon, certainly, but since when did Ms Sturgeon embody the very concept of Scotland? Will she soon be standing on the podium to proclaim, “I Am The State”? The SNP frequently equate themselves with Scotland, holding themselves to be the only pure representatives of the nation. To criticise them is not to criticise just one of a wide spectrum of parties and policies but to criticise Scotland itself, and so anyone who votes for another party is an un-Scottish traitor or an evil foreigner. The SNP will deny it of course: they often protest that they are multicultural, inclusive and “civic”. But this latest statement from Mr Swinney is another occasion when the mask has slipped and we see the arrogance of their self-regard and how they belittle their own countrymen. If any party has a “contempt for Scotland” it’s the SNP. Robert Frazer, Dundee.
John Swinney and the SNP are asking the UK Government for cash to help them alleviate the pressure on councils which are struggling to fund pay rises for workers. The SNP was able to set aside £20 million for independence, so why can’t it simply redirect this cash to councils and help tackle the cost of living crisis? David Pettigrew, Glasgow.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon criticises the Tory leadership race in which only a tiny percentage of the population actually has a vote —yet she was elected leader of the SNP and FM in 2014 by a tiny percentage of the population also. The only difference is that the Tory party members get a democratic choice as to which candidate they prefer, whereas the SNP members only had one candidate — Nicola, what a hypocrite! Gordon Allan.
How to ignore Sturgeon – Effie Deans