Scotland Matters Letters

BY THE TIME of the Holyrood Parliament elections in 2026, it will be 23 years since the pro-UK parties won a Holyrood election. Surely, with the election of Humza Yousaf, they can’t fail again Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon and bogeyman Boris Johnson are gone. Brexit and Covid are in abeyance, people are fed up with SNP failures, hype and scandal. Meanwhile, the UK Labour and Conservative parties are both evolving sensible policies to recharge and reform the UK. Humza Yousaf was indeed the continuity candidate: continuity of independence transcending everything, continuity of the Green tail wagging the dog, continuity of spin, hidden truth and scandal, and the disastrous continuity of his failures in Transport, Justice and Health extending across the whole devolved portfolio. Poor old Scotland. I hope the Opposition mark the occasion by taking a lead from their Westminster colleagues and producing election-winning policies that will enthuse people to go out, vote them into power and win Scotland back for its people. They can’t rely on Humza’s failures to do the job for them. Allan Sutherland, Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire.

WITH THE new SNP leader announced, we have only one part of the burning question answered. The other is pretty much equally important: who will succeed Peter Murrell as SNP CEO? Perhaps the remit of the new CEO will be modified, to ensure that no single person again has the extreme power within the organisation that Murrell wielded for almost a quarter of a century. But who is going to choose the successor? In this case there will be no votes or public campaigns. That leaves the question of whether Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell have really left the SNP’s stage or whether they can continue to exercise power behind the scenes. Jill Stephenson, Edinburgh.

I EXPECT Humza Yousaf to be as much use to his country as First Minister as he has proven to be as Scottish Transport Minister, Scottish Justice Minister and Scottish Health Minister. If Kate Forbes and Ash Regan have a single shred of integrity left in them, they will resign from the SNP immediately and serve out their remaining time in office as independents. Scotland is finished. Mark Boyle, Johnstone. Renfrewshire.

WHEN Michael Gove was asked about Nicola Sturgeon’s greatest achievement, he was stumped. He sums up what many Scots feel. She did little to aid Scotland but did a huge amount that was regressive. Scotland has been ruled by spin but that eventually runs out of energy. The next First Minister will need a massive push to restart it. Not likely, is it? Gerald Edwards, Glasgow.

APPARENTLY, according to Nicola Sturgeon, someone who is female should aspire to be first minister. Just do not have Christian faith and live outside the Central Belt of Scotland. She and John Swinney, who backed Humza Yousaf, may not have actually said the last part but they may well have done so, in my opinion. What it shows, however, is that when you live in a political bubble, you seem to think that folk care more about same-sex marriage views and GRR legislation and equality law than some of the actual problems, such as Central Belt bias, ignoring north-east Scotland and letting the Scottish Green Party dictate whether infrastructure projects like the A9 and A96 actually happen or not. It was interesting, as someone who delivered groceries around Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire and attended the SNP Conference in Aberdeen, that Nicola Sturgeon said we owe a great debt of gratitude to the NHS in her conference speech. It would be quite interesting to see how the country would have coped during the Covid-19 pandemic without lorry drivers, supermarket workers, bus drivers, train drivers, refuse collectors, gritters and, dare I say it in case I upset the Scottish Green Party, oil workers and all the other key workers who worked during the pandemic, not forgetting folk that deliver the vaccination letters, the Royal Mail delivery staff. Most of things in our homes or offices are made using oil and the best of it is from just off the Scottish coast, so demonising oil workers and the oil industry will not work, in my opinion. Things need to change but they only change if you recognise what the problems actually are in Scotland. Unionist and federalist opposition political parties are also failing to recognise that the 46% who voted for Scottish independence are as much part of the Union as the 55% who backed it in 2014. They have truly failed to come up with any meaningful reform of union or timetable for reform in the last eight-plus years. Then we have a Scottish Government that fails to recognise that building ferries before fully designing them does not make sense. They need to ensure health, education, public transport are working and understand the country extends beyond the Central Belt of Scotland, or they are unlikely to win Scottish independence, in my opinion. Peter Ovenstone. Peterhead.

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