Scotland Matters Letters

Surely John Swinney is having a laugh asking the Chancellor for more money to pay wage increases? Westminster has been throwing money at Scotland since the pandemic was at its worst and to blame anyone except the SNP Government for the situation we’re in is sheer brass-necked hypocrisy. Scotland’s finances have been mismanaged to a point of no return by the reckless spending of various finance secretaries, all under the watch of Nicola Sturgeon. And still, they try to convince us that we would be better as an independent country. If their selfish, uncosted, crazy plans ever do achieve independence get your savings under the mattress before they get their mitts on it. Ian Balloch, Grangemouth.

As with all SNP publicity, it sounds great to say that higher education is free in Scotland but as with everything it comes at a cost. To be able to provide this “free” education, you require fee-paying students to take a high number of the spaces available. It is a lazy excuse to blame Brexit for Scotland not having qualified professionals when many of our great students have to go south of the border to gain the education not available to them here. When you rely more and more on foreign students taking places to keep the universities’ funding sources going. you are starving your own future generations of the chance to give back to society here, where they were born and/or raised. At Edinburgh and St Andrews universities, only 30 per cent of the full-time students are Scottish citizens before they enrol. That is 70 per cent of Scottish-educated students where the majority will return to their home-lands. The SNP never think of the consequences of their desire for a great headline. They claim that access to education should be based on the ability to learn, not to pay. I couldn’t agree more, but access is being denied by this government not funding the education places properly. Jane Lax, Aberlour, Moray.

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:

Hammer home their failures – trains, ferries, schools, NHS, jobs, deficit, housing, drugs – and Scotland’s decline since 2007.
Highlight the issues: the border, currency, NATO, pensions, the £180m debt, the COST and UPHEAVAL to all Scots.
Get the message to every one of Scotland’s 4.3m voters.
AND BOYCOTT any illegal IndyRef2!!

However, this costs a LOT of money. PLEASE CONSIDER DONATING TO OUR CROWDFUNDER AND LET’S DERAIL INDYREF2 TOGETHER!!

As the election of the new Conservative leader becomes more tense and difficult to guess, one thing has been made crystal clear by both contenders: That there will be no second referendum in Scotland in 2023. The Supreme Court in October will then confirm that this matter is a reserved power that the Scottish Government doesn’t have. Scottish folk will then give a sigh of relief that we don’t have to go through that awful experience again which divided Scotland and introduced nasty aggression to Scottish politics that had never been seen before. Dennis Forbes Grattan, Mugiemoss Road, Bucksburn.

Reform Scotland is proposing “a system requiring repayment of student fees by those who can afford to do so while anyone with a little financial benefit as a result of attending university will repay little or nothing”. I’m one of the thousands of Scottish kids who left university in the ’60s, 70s and ’80s, with a world-class degree and no debt, having been selected on merit and funded based on need (in my case, a full grant when my dad died). I hardly know where to start on this cherry-picked answer to years of pumping up and dumbing down Scotland’s education industry to the point where it is verging on collapse, both in its basic objective of producing a steady stream of brainy people to man the important, necessary jobs and its more recent one of flogging courses abroad to subsidise a diluted deluge of sports management, digital media, international relations and psychology graduates doomed to fulfilling the little financial benefit as a result of attending university” criteria for having their debts paid. How about organisations such as Skills Development Scotland (the clue’s in the name) working with academia to forecast what skills will be required in the coming years and setting quotas for the number of courses allocated to Scottish kids, paying the costs of the best students based on qualifications and family circumstances, and paying for it by reducing the number of superfluous courses? Allan Sutherland, Stonehaven, Aberdeen.

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