Readers' Letters: Shortcuts into government are wrong

There’s too much patronage at higher echelons of UK Government, says reader

​Poppy Gustafsson is set to be the UK’s next baroness – if the King agrees – so she can enter the UK Government as its Minister of State for Investment. In her article of 13 October in the Observer she said that when Prime Minister Keir Starmer asked her to become his government’s investment minister, “it was an easy yes”.

I’m sure it was an “easy yes”. Unlike Labour MPs, she didn’t have to go through the slog of getting selected as a candidate by a constituency branch, visiting voters and non-political organisations in the constituency, giving media interviews, making speeches and delivering leaflets, and the stress of a general election day and count. Keir Starmer passed over his Shadow Attorney General for England and Wales, the elected Emily Thornberry, in favour of the unelected, later “ennobled”, Richard Hermer. Similarly, there may be Labour MPs who have been passed over for the post handed to Poppy Gustafsson.

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Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak created – with the cooperation of the monarch – Gerald Grimstone and Dominic Johnson as Lord Grimstone of Boscobel and Lord Johnson of Lainston, to get them into government as their Ministers of State for Investment.

Poppy Gustafsson, seen with First Minister John Swinney at last week's Council of Nations and Regions, looks set to be ennobled so she can serve in the Cabinet (Picture: Andy Buchanan/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)Poppy Gustafsson, seen with First Minister John Swinney at last week's Council of Nations and Regions, looks set to be ennobled so she can serve in the Cabinet (Picture: Andy Buchanan/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
Poppy Gustafsson, seen with First Minister John Swinney at last week's Council of Nations and Regions, looks set to be ennobled so she can serve in the Cabinet (Picture: Andy Buchanan/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Like her predecessors, Poppy Gustafsson will enter the House of Lords effortlessly, unelected and unaccountable to UK voters. It’s another example of No Change from Keir Starmer.

E Campbell, Newton Mearns, East Renfrewshire

Reeves U-turn

Can I suggest to the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, that she should insert the following sentences into her budget speech on 30th October.

“When Labour took office the public finances were in a dreadful state after 14 years of Tory mismanagement. I had to take immediate action then in order to stabilise them and send a message to the markets of our fiscal prudence. That action included a range of measures including removing the winter fuel payment. I knew that this would not be a popular decision but it was an honest one. However, now that I have stabilised the economy I have been able to re-fund that payment, but not for all pensioners. Except for higher rate tax payers, I am now in a position to fund the winter fuel payment from this December onwards".

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This would undoubtedly cause uproar in the Chamber and the Deputy Speaker would struggle to maintain order. But it would be a popular decision in the country.

William Loneskie, Lauder, Berwickshire

Sporting hero

As probably the most famous Hearts supporter and our greatest Scottish first minister, Alex Salmond deserves a minute’s round of applause at Tynecastle on Saturday, not least as I have stood to pay respect to several people who had absolutely nothing to do with Scottish football and given Alex Salmond’s long-term association with the Tartan Army, such a tribute should be extended to all football grounds this weekend.

Salmond was a lifelong Hearts fan who, when he was younger, regularly travelled on the Linlithgow Hearts supporters’ bus and as First Minister, at the behest of administrator Bryan Jackson, spoke to Lithuanian politicians to help seal a rescue deal when Hearts were facing liquidation. At the weekend, Lord George Foulkes graciously posted on social media that Alex Salmond “was a great help to us during difficult times when the club twice faced administration.”

As Lynsey Bews alluded to in her obituary (Scotsman, 15 October), Mr Salmond was also a passionate supporter of golf and a strong advocate of the Government-backed Club golf programme. When Barclays gave up sponsorship of the Scottish Open, Salmond’s Scottish Government, together with the financial clout of Aberdeen Asset Management, gave it security and a platform upon which it could thrive.

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A genuine fan of football and golf, Alex Salmond always promoted Scotland whenever he could and we will never see his like again.

Fraser Grant, Edinburgh

A Scottish Icarus

They say “nil nisi bonu” (“speak nothing but good”) when it comes to the dead, but I don't think that means that we cannot be honest about those who have died when they were, like Alex Salmond, very divisive. I am sure that Mr Salmond was wholly sincere in his belief in Scottish independence, but I still wonder what made him so anti-British.

Mr Salmond was not one to be seen as shy and retiring and he was, without doubt, a very skilled orator, especially when it came to inspiring a nationalist belief in some Scots, but that is a very superficial attitude to have taken while ignoring the massive contribution both Scotland and the Scots made to the world as Britons. We should remember that our prosperity in the 18th and 19th centuries, not ignoring the 20th, was dependent upon the prosperity brought by being part of one of the richest economies in the world, namely the UK. As an economist, he can hardly have been unaware of that. As a medieval historian, the same applies.

I, for one, saw the man who had swaggered about with such personalities as Sean Connery and who rubbed shoulders with the late Queen, clearly enjoying the limelight. Who could blame him?

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But I also saw a man who could (being an economist) be economical with the truth, especially when it got too close to home, be that in relation to Scottish independence or Brexit. Mr Salmond, through his Russia Today show, sailed too close to the sun and, when he split from the SNP, he discovered that his former party was, perhaps, bigger than its ex-leader.

Dave Anderson, Aberdeen

Our Cassandra

Interesting article from John Curtice (14 October) in which he says devolution definitely helped Alex Salmond in his quest for independence, although he was ultimately unsuccessful. People like Tam Dalyell, all those years ago, did have a point in saying that devolution could lead to greater things. Sadly, we didn't listen.

William Ballantine, Bo'ness, West Lothian

Fat chance

You couldn't make it up! On the same news bulletin yesterday, we heard the UK Government has made two proposals, one being that National Insurance contributions from companies be increased. The result of that, of course, would be that those companies would tend to employ fewer people.

On the same bulletin, the Government declares that it is intending to get more fat people back to work by giving them suitable medicines to get them to lose weight.

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What's the point of that if employers are likely to be reducing the number of workers due to increases in the cost of their National Insurance payments?

They seem to want it both ways!

Archibald A Lawrie, Kingskettle, Fife

Sanctions for all

The Scotsman reports (15 October) that foreign secretary David Lammy has ordered sanctions on members of the Iranian military in relation to the 1 October missile attack on Israel which resulted in two deaths indirectly from intercepted missile debris.

Perhaps Mr Lammy and Keir Starmer could consider similar sanctions on Benjamin Netanyahu and his generals who have now killed 42,000 people in Gaza and hundreds more in Lebanon, who have attacked schools and medical infrastructure and UN peacekeepers, and who are now, according to latest reports, once again using starvation as a weapon of war in northern Gaza.

Robert Cairns, Ceres, Fife

CO2 facts settled

I find it hard to understand why Peter Hopkins (Letters, 11 October) rejects the conclusion that global warming is mainly man-made.

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Scientists agree that global warming is mainly anthropogenic. Specifically, the evidence shows that certain heat-trapping gases, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), are warming the world. CO2 is the heat-trapping gas in our atmosphere responsible for most of the warming measured over the past several decades. It’s released during cement manufacturing and when coal, gas, and oil are burned—something we started doing during the Industrial Revolution.

The concentration of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere has increased dramatically over the last 150 years, from a pre-industrial era concentration of approximately 280 parts per million (ppm) to more than 410ppm currently. Measurements from ancient ice cores show that CO2 is now at its highest levels in over 800,000 years. Does Mr Hopkins think such an increase can have no effect on the atmosphere?

As for “the next ice age”, we have been in an ice age (defined as having ice at the poles) for about 34 million years. Any tendency for the ice sheets to increase now will be thwarted by man-made global warming.

Steuart Campbell, Edinburgh

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