Readers' Letters: Labour won’t win by being second-rate SNP

Just who is advising Sir Keir Starmer on Scotland if he thinks that the priority of any incoming Labour Government is more powers for Scotland? (your report, 29 January).

Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer and the leader of Scottish Labour, Anas Sarwar, in Glasgow last week (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Labour will only get elected again at a UK level if they look and sound like a Labour Party. They cannot compete with the SNP on the constitutional question. If the Labour Party do not understand the value of being in a union, then what do they actually believe in? Surely they, above all others, should understand what the arguments are.

If they want people to vote for them, then they should make themselves visible and relevant to the electorate. Instead of trying to find an angle on the constitution, they should simply go out and find a whole lot of doctors, nurses, shop workers, lorry drivers and policemen to stand for them as candidates, people who really understand what is going on in the world at present. We will need ten years to get properly out of the Covid situation. Concentrate on that, and Labour might stand a chance. Play the game that the SNP want you to play and you can forget about it.

Victor Clements, Aberfeldy, Perthshire

Safe deposit

Leah Gunn Barrett follows faithfully the SNP party line on nuclear power and trots out the argument about nuclear waste as the killer blow (Letters, 29 January). As a regular user of long-lived radioactive isotopes in virology research, I made it my business to find out, and went behind the scenes at Dounreay and Sellafield, leading me to conclude that dealing with the waste has been a big success and that future plans are sound. The contrast with fossil fuel waste causing climate change and going on to do it for decades to come, particularly when the wind doesn't blow, is overwhelming.

Hugh Pennington, Aberdeen

Go figure

Gill Turner describes columnist Brian Wilson as writing with confident authority but questions the validity of his sources (Letters, 31 January).

Firstly, she disputes his point about the cost of civil servants preparing for another independence referendum on the basis that the Freedom of Information request that the Sun based its story upon did not give a cost. This is true but it did give the numbers and grades of civil servants involved and the £700,000 estimate is readily calculated from that. Since it is an estimate, there is some question of its accuracy but, even if it is in the range £500,000 to £1 million, the point Mr Wilson makes remains valid; it will not be enough to build an economic case in support of secession.

Then she seeks to justify the US $112 price of a barrel of oil used in the 2014 White Paper by noting that in July 2008 the oil price was US $147. During her research, she may not have noticed that this was a very short-term blip in the oil price caused by particular market conditions. The price rose rapidly to this peak and then fell back equally rapidly. By the end of December 2008 the price was below US $34. I don’t think even Alex Salmond would have tried to use this six-year-old market anomaly to support the assumption in the White Paper.

Ms Turner appears willing to clutch any straw, however feeble, in defence of her beloved SNP.

George Rennie, Inverness

Gullible

In disputing the costs of civil servants supposedly working on an Independence prospectus Gill Turner completely misses the point, which is whether employees who should be apolitical in their duties and loyal to the Crown should be engaged with plans to break up the UK.In truth, I’m not all that exercised by this, and the clue is in “supposedly”. I suspect there is no serious planning, just a load of paper shuffling waffle to keep gullible separatists happy

Andrew Kemp, Rosyth, Fife

Missing the bus

While Helen of Troy had a face that could launch a thousand ships, yet again the SNP have proven themselves to be utterly incapable of launching what should have been a simple scheme – this time it is not a ship or a ferry but the under-22 travel scheme which launched on Monday this week (“Delays feared over free bus travel scheme”, 31 January).

Industry chiefs are reporting that about 65,000 new cards have been issued and many under-22s won’t have theirs as a result of low publicity around the scheme “due to the pandemic”. With Nicola Sturgeon able to provide weather reports, as we saw at the weekend, and her proclivity to be on our TV sets, I am utterly astonished at this excuse. With 930,000 eligible to receive these cards, 7 per cent uptake is extremely low.

Transport Scotland claim that most under-22s knew they needed a new card so the question is, why have they not applied? Has the SNP launched a scheme with very low demand? Have they ignored the consultation results yet again? The wheels on the bus may be going round and round but it looks like many don’t want to get on this SNP one, free or otherwise.

Jane Lax, Aberlour

Clash of ideals

The SNP is proposing to allow men who wish to change their gender to live as female for only three months before being able to register as women. However, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) says that “more detailed consideration is needed”. The EHRC response will protect women who are deeply concerned about men entering women-only spaces by claiming that their “acquired gender” allows them to do so under the ill-considered and under-researched proposed SNP law.

However, at the same time, Baroness Kennedy has been commissioned by the same party to address the matter of misogyny (but not misanthropy). The likely outcome is that this group will recommend the criminalisation of misogynistic harassment.

The combined effect of these two nominally praiseworthy, but unworkable, schemes is that the SNP may be found guilty of misogyny by allowing men who identify as women into female-only spaces, because the women in those spaces feel threatened thereby.

Andrew HN Gray, Edinburgh

Find a fall guy?

First it was going to be published in full, then it was delayed to allow evidence to be collected, finally we are told an amended Sue Gray dossier is cleared for publication with sensitive parts redacted. The report, when published, is likely to do little to allay suspicions that Boris Johnson and his staff felt it was safe to party because top civil servants, portrayed in BBC’s Yes Minister as really in charge, actively encouraged such a culture.

Boris Johnson claims to having been persuaded by senior civil servants to join parties, or work events as he called them, to thank staff. In so doing, however, he was satisfying his desire for being the centre of attention, blinding him to his civic duty of following his own rules and to the consequences of his actions. As PM he should have been setting an example to a nation struggling on by largely obeying his Government’s rules.

Should the Conservative party put up with an inept Prime Minister, covering up his own inadequacies with lies, or find a top civil servant to be his fall guy? History will judge Johnson as a pathetic pompous leader, merely a manipulated figurehead relying on questionable advisers who also felt they were above the law. Power eventually corrupts, as other prime ministers found to their cost. The Conservative Party can’t afford to continue to allow Johnson to bluster and cling on to power or they will surely lose it.

If he perseveres, then the cash-strapped Scottish electorate will equate a Johnson-centric Westminster that treats Scotland with impunity with Mrs Thatcher’s 11 years of tyranny. Another generation drawn to independence putting the union in peril. Let them eat cake?

Neil Anderson, Edinburgh

SNP’s power grab

It is now 15 years since the SNP won power to govern our affairs and so make our lives better by improving public services, health and education. However, these ambitions have become a pipe dream, as rather than being “governed”, we are being “ruled” over by what is close to being a “dictatorship” and any improvements in our services are nowhere to be seen.

Now we have the extraordinary situation where senior legal and highly respected minds deliver some of the sharpest rebukes to this SNP administration, and indeed, more strongly than they did over the wholly discredited Named Persons Scheme. The latest power grab by this dictatorship (without a single comment of dissent from a single SNP MSP) to make temporary Covid powers permanent is shocking and the bypassing of Holyrood scrutiny is extremely concerning. We have very respected legal minds such as Alistair Bonnington, former honorary professor of public law at Glasgow University, saying the proposed legislation demonstrates a “profound ignorance of democratic government” and Adam Tomkins, professor of law at Glasgow University, saying “freedom isn’t merely ill in Nicola Sturgeon’s Scotland – in fact, it’s dying”. Further, Alex Neil, a former SNP MSP and minister, states “no government should get such draconian powers”.

We have departed from being a proud, outward looking and welcoming nation to an insular, carping and grumbling nation where everything is somebody else’s fault – primarily, of course, that being Westminster. Is it too much to hope that this insular and inward looking administration might just step back from these undemocratic proposals? Regretfully I think I know the answer. One hates to think about the outrage that would have erupted from SNP MPs in Westminster should the Tories have proposed such a “power grab” without any parliamentary scrutiny!

Richard Allison, Edinburgh

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