Scotland Matters Letters

Where is the money that is used to support our police force going? I moved to Montrose in May 1967 from the Merchant Navy to a shore job. This was to run a small company and with my sea experience build it up. Coming up for Christmas I was approached by one of the local police sergeants to buy tickets for the annual police ball. Montrose at that time had a population of about 15,000 and its own police station (now closed). The station was fully staffed 24 hours per day with an inspector, sergeants and around 20 constables. Locals knew most of the police by their first name and were on friendly terms. The inspector lived two doors from me and we mixed as neighbours, particularly at Hogmanay. Before I moved from Montrose in 2016, I was informed by a police officer that the whole of Angus was covered by two constables during the night. It is no wonder riots are taking place in Dundee when we see how our police force has been decimated under so-called modernisation. I am sure we shall see no improvement until we go back to localised policing, but I won’t hold my breath. Tom Robertson, Rutherglen, Lanarkshire.

We all know by now that the ruling SNP is not very good with figures. Its failure to produce any kind of detailed plan for Scottish independence is one indication of this, as are the fantasy figures produced for various issues, which are mostly designed to show that Scotland is performing better than England. Reporting of Covid figures was a part of this. Ms Sturgeon’s recent inaccurate claims about the percentage of renewables powering our electricity is another indicator. Now there is the issue of hospital admission waiting times, where it seems the figures have been manipulated so that, as the UK’s statistics watchdog points out, “patients who have not yet been treated, some of whom may have been waiting a long time, are not included in [SNHS] figures” (“NHS waits data ‘misleads’, The Herald, November 2). This means that the figures “could potentially mislead some patients about the length of time they may have to wait”. This is far from being an isolated instance of skewed figures in Scottish public services. This raises two important points. First, why are staff in the SNHS and elsewhere using manipulated figures to misrepresent the situation? Well, we know why – to make things appear better than they actually are. But who tells them to do this? Is there a written order instructing them to do so? Does this come from the top – the ministers, the First Minister? Are there relevant emails deep in the interstices of the internet? Secondly, it should be a matter of profound relief to Scots that the UK’s statistics watchdog is indeed scrutinising the Scottish administration to learn about its shabby practices. We need more of this, especially where the SNP administration intrudes into reserved issues. The one thing missing is relentless publicising of the fact that our rulers have been imparting fake news to us while concealing the much less palatable truth. It is beyond time that Scots were treated as adults and kept accurately informed of the performance of their public services. Jill Stephenson, Edinburgh.

Pol Yates again rolls out the notion that the NHS is about to be sold off and privatised and that the only way to save it is Independence (Letters, 2 November). Never mind asking who on earth would buy it in its present state, it wasn’t a Project Fear argument that won for Yes in 2014. Healthcare has always been fully devolved. I know, because long before parliamentary devolution I used to attend meetings of the Public Health Laboratory service as the Scottish observer, its remit didn’t extend north of the Border and we did our own thing in our own way with Scottish money. It would also be good if Mary Thomas (Letters, same day) acknowledged that the generosity of the Barnett formula enables the Scottish budget to fund more healthcare staff and hospital beds per capita than England. Hugh Pennington, Aberdeen.

There is utter chaos right now in the NHS and there are bigger problems to come. Humza Yousaf seems unable to cope so it is down to his boss, Nicola Sturgeon to step in. One problem is Sturgeon going off on a pointless trip to Egypt to hover around in the background at COP27. Tell that to the patients waiting on trolleys. Gerald Edwards, Glasgow.

Nicola Sturgeon’s planned attendance at COP27 is accompanied by inevitable virtue-signalling about her impressive green credentials and her determination to tackle climate change. But hang on a minute! Is this the same Nicola Sturgeon who, not so long ago, intended to slash Air Passenger Duty herewith with the intention of dramatically increasing the number of flights into Scotland? And is this the very same Nicola Sturgeon who has just stated she intends to use North Sea oil and gas revenues in an attempt to kickstart the economy of Scotland, in the unlikely event it were ever to become independent? Surely Nico-la Sturgeon’s frankly risible greenwashing of her environmental record reeks of political opportunism of the very worst kind? Martin Redfern.

Share this entry