Readers' Letters: Leave box blank if you don’t rate a candidate

Political scientist Sir John Curtice is very wrong when he says that you should “keep on ranking candidates so that you put the party you really don’t like at the bottom” (your report, 30 April).

Political scientist Sir John Curtice (Picture: John Devlin)

If a voter intends to vote on independence/unionist lines rather than voting for the candidate who might make the best local councillor, then he/she should leave the vote box of any party candidate “you really don’t like” blank. Only in that way will that candidate not get some sort of supportive vote.

There is no need to put a number in each box. Sir John should know that.

Adair Anderson, Selkirk, Scottish Borders

Gravity matters

Scotland is suffering a cost of living (with Westminster) crisis as recent reports reveal the full impact of Brexit on soaring inflation and food prices, despite voting almost 2 to 1 against this damaging policy. Economist Adam Posen, a former Bank of England policy-maker, warned Brexit is largely responsible for our soaring inflation. Brexit has made the cost of living crisis worse for Scotland, in particular, due to the hard border down the middle of the English channel.

The Brexit trade agreement between the EU and the UK came into force one year ago. New research reveals the impact of new barriers on trade, including a six per cent increase in food prices in the UK, according to the LSE Centre for Economic performance.

Other studies, produced by think tank UK in a Changing Europe, conclude that there has been a clear and sizeable drop in imports from the EU following the implementation of Brexit, with UK imports from the EU falling about 25 per cent compared to imports from around the world.

Businesses have been hit with increased costs, paperwork and border delays and our food and drink sector is being unfairly disadvantaged, with a number of industries suffering worsening labour shortages and supply change problems as a direct consequence of Brexit and the pandemic.

Speaking at a conference held by UK in Changing Europe last week, Posen, who heads the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said 80 per cent of the reason the UK will see the highest inflation of any G7 country next year is due to the impact of Brexit. Predictions about Brexit have turned out as many had predicted. “Gravity matters” in economics, which is the real reason you trade and invest primarily with the economies that are closer to you geographically and historically.

D W Lowden, Mannofield, Aberdeen

For the record

SNP candidates standing across Scotland clearly want this week’s council elections to be about anything other than their party’s record in office. A cursory look at the SNP’s record across a range of issues will see why this is the case.

On core council funding, the SNP have presided over year-on-year real-terms cuts, despite the record financial settlement received from the UK Government this year.

The SNP have also presided over the worst A&E waiting times on record, with things getting worse rather than better – for example, waiting times.

The Sick Kids Hospital in Edinburgh opened nine years late. Construction flaws cost the taxpayer over £23 million while the hospital was not in use. Meanwhile, the cost of sorting out the Islands ferries fiasco is estimated to be £400m of taxpayers’ money.

Scotland’s drug deaths are the worst in Europe and have tripled since 2007 when the SNP came to power.

In education, there are now fewer university students from the poorest backgrounds. Also, there are fewer schools and despite pledging to decrease class sizes, the pupil-teacher ratio is still higher than when the SNP came to power.

As well as fewer police officers, Nicola Sturgeon is failing to ensure Scotland’s future energy needs are met by refusing to allow new nuclear power stations like Torness Power Station to be built.

And on the environment, the SNP are failing too. Fewer than half of Scottish waste is recycled. At the same time the Scottish Government has missed its own legal emissions targets for the last three years.

These are the failures Scottish ministers do not want to talk about before the local elections. Meantime, the SNP grievance machine grinds on as, despite the need to recover from the pandemic, it, with Scottish Greens’ support, has devoted £40m of our money to pursue its constitutional obsession with an Independence vote in 2023.

It is therefore crucial that, for the council elections, Scots are aware of the realities and failures of the SNP Government, because across the country many are being made to pay for poorer essential local services.

Tim Jackson, Gullane, East Lothian

Fiasco forgotten

Your headline “Fiascos will not hit indy cause” (30 April) tells us all we need to know about the current state of politics in Scotland. The “indy cause” has entrenched 45 per cent of the electorate to vote SNP since 2014 based on the false promises made by the Yes campaign and allocating blame for everything bad to “Westminster” (i.e. the English). This decouples electoral performance from performance in government, allowing the SNP to embrace incompetence, corruption and secrecy with aplomb.

This is a stalemate which is dragging Scotland down politically, socially and economically and needs to end. As the Scottish "Government" is actually still an executive, the actual UK parliament could intervene and send in the auditors (followed by the Serious Fraud Office most likely) but then the SNP would paint this as unjust interference in Scotland.

Perhaps then the answer is the offer of full fiscal autonomy. This would end the lie that Scotland subsidises England and stop the "free" stuff that keeps middle Scotland voting SNP. Surely none of your separitist correspondents would reject this option?

S J Clark, Edinburgh

Nightmare need

John Lloyd (Letters, 2 May) is right to say that realpolitik must be considered as a way to ending the Ukraine war.

Major General Tim Cross, while in no way giving succour to Vladimir Putin and his cronies, has criticised the Foreign Secretary and others for saying that Russia must be pushed out of the Donbas and Crimea because he believes that this would lead to Putin using tactical nuclear weapons. General Mike Jackson said recently: “I believed that tactical nuclear weapons would never be used in my lifetime. Now I'm not sure.”

Russia has 2000 tactical nuclear weapons, according to BBC Security Correspondent Gordon Corera. They vary in size from 1 kiloton to 100 kiloton. The atomic bomb which killed 146,000 people in Hiroshima was 5 kiloton. If Russia used a nuclear weapon Nato would have to respond in kind.

William Loneskie Oxton, Berwickshire

Hot topic

The Scotsman is right to draw attention to the creeping climate emergency (“Nature is lighting the signal fires of emergency”, 29 April). While our immediate attention is on a European war and lingering Covid-19 effects, the existential global threat is outlined by the latest (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) IPCC report.

This concludes that, if emissions continue at the present rate, the global temperature will have increased by 1.5 degree centigrade above pre-industrial levels between 2030 and 2052. It warns that warming from anthropogenic emissions will persist for centuries to millennia and will continue to cause further long-term chan ges in the climate system, such as sea level rise, with associated impacts. There will also be climate-related risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security and economic growth. An increase of 2 degrees will make it all worse.Do you wonder what would happen if steps are not taken to curb global heating in the long run? If you are not of a nervous disposition read Mark Lynas's book Our Final Warning, Six Degrees of Climate Emergency (2020). He takes the reader through all 6 degrees of heating and spells out the dire results of each. He notes that, according to the IPCC, an increase of 6 degrees in only 100 years is 'plausible'. That could see the end of civilisation.It has become clear that attempts to reduce damaging emissions are largely ineffective worldwide. Emissions continue apace, with the CO2 level in air reaching 419 parts per million (the pre-industrial level was 280). It could reach 500.There is only one way to save planet Earth from becoming an uninhabitable hothouse and that is to screen us from the sun’s heat. Several geoengineering projects have been suggested but rejected by people who think, naively, that emissions can be reduced. One or more of these methods is urgently needed.

Steuart Campbell, Edinburgh

Let’s talk

Anyone else old enough to remember when "having a conversation” about X Y or Z wasn't a euphemism for lecturing everyone else what to say, do and think while jabbing a ten tonne finger of “or else!”?

Mark Boyle, Johnstone, Renfrewshire

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