Scotland Matters Letters

During a Holyrood debate on the Gaelic and Scots languages this week, the SNP’s Emma Harper stuttered a scripted contribution in `Scots’, including the bewildering sentence: ‘The Scots leid is a michtie important pairt o Scotland’s cultural heirship, kythin in sang, poems and leeterature, and in ilkaday yaise in wir communities forby’ — which turned the farcical into the unintelligible. A verbal mangling that would have made Officer Crabtree of Allo Allo’s `grittest hoots’ album. Not one single participant in the debate highlighted her inability to speak the language. Neither I or anyone I know have ever heard a normal Scot talk like this. Surely in these days of inclusion and desire for more immigration and social mobility, this weird, middle-class amalgam of regional accents and dialects puts barriers in front of them. As Goad is ma wutniss, ah’m fair scunnert! Allan Sutherland, Stonehaven, Kincardineshire.

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THE Auditor General is warning that SNP ministers have been too slow to react to financial pressures (“Warning SNP government faces bursting its budget”, The Herald, November 17). Kate Forbes warned that the public sector required reshaping with staff levels and the number of quangos needing to be reduced. John Swinney would have been aware of this warning when he stepped in to cover Ms Forbes’ maternity leave but nothing has been done. The Deputy First Minister has announced £600 million in budget cuts, with £400m of that being in health and social care. This is a political choice. The SNP has increased the number of quangos by one-third in the last 10 years, with the cost of government increasing from £2 billion to £4.5bn. This SNP government continues to spend £0m on overseas offices that duplicate the work of British embassies. It spends £20m on constitutional issues, having used at least 20 civil service staff to produce the first of its series of papers campaigning for independence. The SNP would rather cut the money spent on the nation’s health than cut the number of spin doctors, which has risen from 115 to 176 in the last four years, costing us around £4m a year. Unless the SNP starts to realise that we all have to cut our coat to suit our cloth, next year’s budget would be reduced by any overspend, perpetuating the issue. The SNP needs to wake up to the fact that the current economic situation requires it to make tough choices and it needs to make them now. Maybe it could start with some of the examples above. Jane Lax, Aberlour.

Peter Cheyne believes “Scot-and is crying out for love and attention” (Letters,16Novem-ber). He further states, “I love my country but feel the only way to change direction is by independence”. My impression is that the majority of those who crave independence only have emotional reasons for doing so. Never economics, never financial facts, nothing to show how Scots will be better off, nothing to show if our children and grandchildren will prosper. Unfortunately, far too many Scots are happy to take a completely unknown and untested course because it appears no one on the independence side is prepared or willing to tell them exactly how it will be. Douglas Cowe, Newmachar, Aberdeenshire.

In the media recently we learned that Nicola Sturgeon is attempting to impress on Prime Minister Sunak that she has every intention of fulfilling her election manifesto of staging another independence referendum. Such a statement may well satisfy the aspirations of her SNP followers, but it is certainly not representative of the overall feelings of the people of Scotland. In the last Scottish Parliamentary elections Sturgeon and the SNP did not achieve the 65 seats needed for a majority – they got only 63 out of the 129 seats at Holyrood. Only with conditional support from the unelected Scottish Green Party was Sturgeon able to form a government – and obviously, the Greens will have their price for such support. And on the subject of a referendum on the question of Scottish independence let us not forget that the SNP failed in 2014 in their attempt to persuade the folks of Scotland that independence was the best way forward. A total of 2,001,926 Scots voted against the case for independence from the UK. While 11617,926 Scots voted for Scotland to become independent. Any ongoing case for Scottish independence is all in the minds of a small group of zealots – most folks could not really care less. But one thing is absolutely certain – an independent Scotland would be much worse off than it is as being an integral part of the UK. Perhaps we should all give thought to where the surge in Scotland’s economy is going to come from if it goes independent? There will certainly be no more financial support from the Barnett formula of the Westminster exchequer. And, rest assured, that if her quest for Scottish independence fails – which it most likely will – Nicola Sturgeon, her husband, and many other prominent figures in today’s SNP will soon disappear from Scotland’s shores to retirement in sunnier parts of Europe. Her independence supporters will be left behind to get on with their lives. But at least they w111 have the strengths of the UK to support them. Robert I G Scott, Northfield, Ceres.

Stewart Falconer (Damned if you do and damned if you don’t, November 15) complains about the “vanity projects” that we would no longer have to pay for in an independent country. Among these he lists the “multi-million-pound warships” which sustain shipbuilding at Rosyth, and now on the Clyde,
much more effectively than the ScotGov version we currently have to endure. Separately, you outline expert opinion being given on this (IndyRef2 putting warship building “at risk”). Whether you agree with Trident or not, much of the ongoing costs goes on wages of those employed in the Helensburgh area The Scottish equivalent of the Crossrail project might be the trams project in Edinburgh, and we can debate that. Or, possibly, a better comparison might be the rail project that was cancelled in Glasgow by ScotGov, much to our regret now no doubt. Renovating the Palace of Westminster is hugely expensive, but is itproportionately more expensive than Holyrood which eventually cost 10 times the initial estimate, and has a multi-million-pound annual maintenance requirement? At the same time we hear of the reported £1 billion cost of setting up a new Scottish benefits agency, which is essentially the cost we must be expected to pay for duplication of systems that already exist. This is being proposed by the Scottish Government, not Westminster, and we are told that the detail will be sorted out once legislative consent has been given by Holyrood. In the world we live in today, the cost of doing stuff is huge, but for every questionable Westminster project we can name, there is a Scottish equivalent, and we can pass comment on those too. There are no savings to be made through independence, quite the opposite. Duplication of everything we have already got will be the first priority. Victor Clements, Mamie’s Cottage, Aberfeldy.

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