Readers' letters: John Swinney has become an embarrassment

Swinney’s headline promise of every Scot being £10,000 better off is an utter scam. Just because other countries have different financial positions from Scotland doesn’t mean that the ‘abracadabra, hey presto!’ magician’s slogan of secession would change a jot.

It always comes back to the same old thing: what is his plan? What would he do to raise the extra funds an independent Scotland would need? How would he generate wealth? What would be his strategy for encouraging investment and initiative? How would he get from where he is to where he wants to be? Not by magic.

The £10,000 fake news promise is the normal SNP carrot. Vote for secession because you would be richer without having to lift a finger or move a muscle. To call it pie in the sky is an undeserved compliment.

Jill Stephenson, Edinburgh

It doesn’t add up

I wonder what John Swinney’s best subject was at school Methinks arithmetic was not high on the score board.

In his so-called ‘A Fresh Start with Independence’ he alleges that Scots households will be more than £10,000 better off per annum.

Has he notified the Chancellor of the requirement for substantial increases in Scotland’s Barnett Formula subsidies to meet his generosity? Or has the SNP struck gold in the Highlands? I await his explanation with much interest.

Robert I G Scott, Ceres, Fife

Dead parrot

John Swinnney is an intelligent man, yet he seems not to realise that Independence, like the Monty Python parrot, is dead – bereft of life. It now needs to be buried so that he can spend his time enjoying redundancy at the next election and drift off into retirement.

Brian Barbour, Haddington, East Lothian

Papers trail

A decade of papers published by the SNP government at great public expense have not convinced Scotland that it makes sense to leave the UK (“Independence paper is just tick-box party management”, Scotsman, 9 October). The 2014 referendum result and the majority of opinion polling since, show most of us do not agree with the case made for independence. Yet still the SNP leadership assumes we have not properly understood, and need it explained again and again, all paid for of course out of public funds.

The first was a manifesto for independence published ahead of the 2014 independence referendum. The White Paper’s 670 pages did not convince us, and 55 per cent of us voted ‘No’.

Next the SNP decided to explain independence in bite-sized chunks under the ‘Building a New Scotland’ banner, presumably hoping we would better understand. Between June 2022 and April 2024, 13 papers were issued, once again paid for out of public funds.

Securing Lib Dem approval for his last budget, John Swinney agreed to stop spending public money on this sequence of papers. Yet they are already back, just simply with new titles. Last month we had ‘Your Right To Decide’ and now we have ‘A Fresh Start with Independence’.

In case any doubt these latest papers are about the coming election, page 6 of the latest paper has a classic election bribe, using smoke and mirrors to produce the preposterous claim that independence would make us all over £10,000 a year better off. No one can accuse John Swinney of being troubled by the difference between fact and fantasy.

Keith Howell, West Linton, Scottish Borders

Cultural cringe

Brian Bannatyne-Scott (Letters, 8 October) suggests the solution to stopping Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Europe is through “dialogue and cultural exchange to promote understanding”. Perhaps if the RSNO went to Russia and the Russian National Orchestra came here then Putin, who has pledged to take back the old Soviet Union, will simply roll back his army? Unfortunately Putin responds to military pressure not culture or dialogue. To wish away his “despotism” isn’t sensible either.

Putting weapons in the hands of young people is what happened during National Service for nearly 20 years until 1963. There’s no evidence that the UK then or Denmark, Finland or Switzerland, that have forms of conscription now, are more dangerous. Instead young people are more confident and skilled. Many of the one million young people not in education, employment or training, would stand to benefit most by giving them a purpose.

Mr Bannatyne-Scott should be aware that the Government has claimed that Russia is behind recent cyberattacks such as Jaguar Land-Rover and malware attacks on UK intelligence to steal vital information. Military experts also point to Russia cutting the communication cable between Shetland and the Faroes in 2022. Either way, Russia is rapidly becoming more hostile towards Nato.

Should we respond through dialogue, singing Putin’s praises perhaps, as “we cannot hope to fight Russia or China”, or by defending our interests? The former really would be outrageous pacifism akin to appeasement in 1939.

Neil Anderson, Edinburgh

Russophobes

I could not agree more with Brian Bannantyne-Scott when he writes that Russia has no intention of invading Western Europe. Russophobes like Lord Robertson are scaremongering when they say the UK is at risk of an attack by Russia and we must go hell for leather to prepare for that.

It's Russia which fears invasion from the West and not the other way round. In 1812 Napoleon burned Moscow. In 1854 Britain and France invaded Crimea. In 1918 Germany invaded Russia and Russia lost one million square miles of territory at the subsequent Treaty of Brest Litovsk. Britain, Canada and the United States invaded Russia between 1918 and 1925. In 1941 German forces were at the gates of Moscow and on their retreat destroyed virtually everything. President Eisenhower, then Supreme Commander Allied Forces in Europe, wrote: “When we flew into Russia, in 1945, I did not see a house standing between the western borders of the country and the area around Moscow.”

Declassified official documents record that in February 1997 the then Prime Minister John Major said: “If I were Russian I would too be concerned that Nato might move up to Russia' borders.” Since then Nato has expanded to 32 countries. Russia warned repeatedly from 2008 that Ukraine’s admission to Nato was a red line. The coup of 2014 which brought a nationalist government hostile to Russia to power resulted in a civil war between the eastern Russian-speaking provinces and the Kiev regime, which bombed and shelled them for eight years. Russia invaded in their support, and to prevent Nato forces on a border which geographically is difficult to defend, and to try to bring about Ukraine’s neutrality.

William Loneskie, Lauder, Scottish Borders

Paint job

The real question that needs to be asked about the man who ransacked a Farrow & Ball shop in Hove, throwing paint everywhere... is it art?

Mark Boyle, Johnstone, Renfrewshire

Rose-tinted specs

Henry McLeish (Scotsman, 9 October) tells us that “Holyrood is a source of great pride for our nation”. Well, we obviously move in different circles, as this is a view I have seldom heard!

William Ballantine, Bo’ness, West Lothian

Energy prices

Martin O’Gorman (Letters, 8 October) refuses to accept that Scotland should be paying much less for our electricity even as part of the UK. It's not my own opinion that this is the case, but that of industry experts.

The GB energy market pricing structure includes a hugely unfair policy called “marginal pricing", which allows providers to use gas prices to drive up all our electricity prices, even when in Scotland all of our generation needs are being met from low-cost renewables.

The latest figures show that Scotland generated 113 per cent of its energy needs from renewables. In an independent Scotland, we would pay the lowest price possible for energy, switching Scotland from one of the most expensive nations in the world for energy to one of the cheapest.

As I said in my original letter – the heads of Octopus Energy have stated that, with zonal electricity pricing across GB, Scotland could already have “the lowest prices in Europe” even as part of the UK. As that is not going to be allowed by the Westminster government, then the only way we can hope to achieve that will be by independence.

I’m not a member of the SNP as Mr O'Gorman seems to think; and nothing I’ve been saying has come from SNP policies (that I know of).

Any future Scottish Government in our PR-elected parliament won’t be just SNP but will, collaboratively, set rules for energy providers that will (unlike the current UK system) be fair to Scotland’s consumers.

Ian Waugh, Dumfries

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