Don't trust Starmer or Sunak to keep election promises - readers' letters

I have been following the pre-election rhetoric from the two hopefuls for No. 10. As a man who has been through many elections and heard the promises made, I have no hope that they will be kept.

It has been a long time since we had a Labour government, so the electorate tends to forget their shortcomings. It was the last Labour government who led us into an illegal war. It was the brilliant chancellor Gordon Brown who presided over the financial disaster of 2008. He said that nobody could have seen it coming, although that was his job. The fact that the banks were acting like casinos and winning was being reported in The Scotsman. Until the crash.

Labour tell us that their policy is “change”. I would say, beware what you might wish for. Previous Labour governments have raised their tax via means testing. They want to tax private schools, We sent both our kids to a private school, it was a struggle, my wife used to pay in saved cash alongside the ladies from Pakistan, who paid in notes. I hate to think what would have happened if we or they had not been able to pay. The reception of the pupils at the state schools would have been horrific.

Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer go head-to-head in a BBC TV debate. One reader has little faith in the pledges made by either leader (Picture: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA Wire)

The Tories, on the other hand, have blown £66 billion on HS2, a rail line from a suburb of London to Birmingham, About half the distance promised, and twice the price. There was also London Crossrail, three years late and costing £18.8bn, well over budget. It makes our ferry fiasco look like a roaring success.

They promise to spend more on the NHS. My son who lives in England has to pay £9.90 per item on a prescription. With the MoD, Its not always how much but how it is spent. The Tories want to privatise our water and sewage systems in Scotland.

I am presently being stalked by Ian Murray. With leaflets every few days, he doth protest too much. No other party seems to want my vote.

Sandy Philip. Edinburgh

VAT’s crazy

D Mitchell’s comments about the impact of VAT on independent schools must be disputed (Letters, July 2).

Many teachers involved in state education would disagree with the remark that “the rather flimsy argument that this policy will put pressure on public service schools just does not hold water”. In Edinburgh, for example, more than 20 per cent of families opt for the private sector, thus saving the local authority millions of pounds every year.

State education is already struggling with class sizes, workload, staff shortages and lack of resources, so how can they cope with an influx of child refugees whose parents can’t afford the school fees any more? Money from VAT won’t go anywhere near in making up the financial shortfall,sadly.

Large numbers of overseas pupils come to board and study at private schools in Scotland and are in fact an invisible export, making a significant contribution to the economy. Remember that these institutions also provide jobs, not just for teaching personnel but also for catering, domestic and support staff.

If this misguided idea is implemented, we’ll yet again see what happens when ideology and virtue-signalling collides with grim reality.

Martin O’Gorman, Edinburgh

School ‘mortgages’

Although many people are extremely unhappy about the anti-aspiration Labour policy of adding VAT to private school fees, I think there is a solution.

When we buy a house, we obtain a mortgage through a financial institution, which pays the money asked by the seller and charges us a monthly amount which includes capital and interest. Normally, this is over a period of 25 years. It can be increased, subject to certain conditions where necessary. In Germany, they have multi-generational mortgages to pay off very sizeable sums to buy large estates, for example.

I don’t think that it is beyond the wit of man to come up with financial packages, spread, perhaps over ten years, or longer in the case of multiple children and paid over 12 months each year, rather than just during term-time. That will keep the repayments down, as will the term of the agreement. Interest rates would echo those for mortgages. Children would, thereby, be able to stay at school and the reputation of private schools in places like Edinburgh, as well as the number of pupils would be secure.

Problem solved.

Andrew HN Gray, Edinburgh

Tartan austerity

The First Minister is urging people to vote SNP to avoid “more austerity cuts from Westminster” (Scotsman, 2 July).

Yet apparently Mr Swinney would be happy to accept the ten years of austerity which the SNP’s own Growth Commission calculated that Scots would need to thole were Scotland to break away from the UK.

Presumably he considers austerity in a tartan tin from Edinburgh to be more palatable than the London variety.

Jane Ann Liston, St Andrews, Fife

Nuclear’s safe

Once I lived on the tenth floor of a tower block in Cumbernauld. It was all-electric. When we experienced power cuts, not only did the lights go out, so did the heat, the oven, the fridge, the water, the lifts, and the electric train to Glasgow. So we were ahead of the game in experiencing what the future could soon bring for everyone on a frosty windless winter’s day if the Greens and SNP have their way.

At present, gas-fired power station kilowatts keep us warm and fed and clean at such times. But the waste that is produced by their generation goes directly into the atmosphere.

By any measure it is already enormously more dangerous to the planet than all the waste ever produced by nuclear power stations, and it will go on being so for years to come, even when we have stopped burning fossil fuels to generate electricity.

Lorna Slater (Scotsman, July 2) is right to mention nuclear power station waste, but wrong to use it as an anti-nuclear argument. Its volume is very small and its radioactivity decays rapidly enough for it to stop giving off heat after about a decade. It has been managed safely in the UK since electricity generation from nuclear power started in 1957, a process that produces no greenhouse gases.

Hugh Pennington, Aberdeen

Snail mail

It seems to be a shock or a scandal to various ministers, prospective MPs and MSPs that postal ballots have been held up. The usual blame game and point scoring has ensued.

Royal Mail have declared there is no backlog and that anyway it is someone else’s fault, thereby waving us all on, nothing to see here.

Most of us ordinary folk have long been aware of the chronic delays in receiving letters and the resulting disappointment and inconvenience. So much so that most of my family and friends now post letters and cards a couple of weeks in advance of due dates rather than a couple of days to ensure delivery on time.

Whilst denying someone’s democratic rights due to postal tardiness is unacceptable, the real shock and scandal is that all these august persons who are currently so offended by this, or indeed Royal Mail themselves, cared far less when it was merely the crucial hospital appointments, bills, new credit cards and, of course, birthday cards of us ordinary folk.

Lorna Thorpe, Alyth, Perth and Kinross

Bin strike déjà vu

It looks very much that we face the possibility of another strike by the cleansing workers like we did two years ago, with all the massive inconvenience to the citizens of Edinburgh that this will bring (Scotsman, 2 July). The employees have a difficult and dirty job and I am not criticising them for taking the balloted industrial action appropriate if they do go on strike.

It is undoubtedly the local authority’s most basic and vital service. What we have learned, however, from the strike in 2022 is never to trust the words of our esteemed City of Edinburgh Council leader Cammy Day, who claimed that he had “contingency plans” while the city at Festival time was submerged under a deluge of rat-infested filth.

Jim Park, Edinburgh

Amateur dramatics

The announcement of the plans for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe centre in the former South Bridge Street School (Scotsman, 2 July) brings to mind my only Fringe appearance there in 1972, and underlines the unforeseen complications Fringe shows can face when using non-theatre venues.

I was a member of an amateur theatre group based in London and having investigated affordable venues, two of our group visited Edinburgh to explore options and chose the hall of the then functioning school.

We arrived two days before opening and set up our performing space in the school hall. The next morning the Fire Safety Inspector arrived to check it out. To our astonishment he informed us the hall’s doors opened the wrong way – in rather than out – and unless changed we could not perform.

“But it’s a school hall. It regularly holds hundreds of children”, we replied in disbelief. “Different regulations”, the fire officer responded.

Fortunately one handy cast member rehung the doors (and returned them to their previous state at the show’s end) and our first night audience of 13 (by the last night 51) presumably were thus far safer than the hundreds of schoolchildren that crowded into the hall in term time.

Barclay Price, Edinburgh

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