Readers' Letters: Public won't want an inquiry into Murrell affair

It has also been made manifest in the course of these inquiries that internal checks on the SNP’s finances may have been basically inadequate and carried out in a negligent fashion.

I suspect with the plethora of parties we have nowadays this might apply to other parties as well, in varying degrees.

What I would suggest is required is not party-political muckraking but consideration by the appropriate committee of the financial checks that should be enforced on all political parties and other bodies which are not registered charities but which solicit money from the public.

S Beck, Edinburgh

Uncurious Swinney

The Murrell saga just keeps giving. John Swinney, who appointed Murrell, is not prepared to open a Holyrood inquiry into how he stole. Surely he wants to to find out? It is still strange to my mind that anyone could get away with what Murrell did, and to refuse to allow those who were supposed to deal with the accounts he controlled to scrutinise them. Surely that must have sounded alarm bells?

Any other entity of which I am aware would have its books examined annually at the very least. Don't the SNP have auditors? If they do, why did they not insist upon seeing the SNP's accounts? Why did Nicola Sturgeon insist that “the party has never been in a stronger financial position than it is right now” in 2021? Does Mr Swinney not want to know what prompted his predecessor to make such a declaration. If Murrell's thefts strayed into public funds from Westminster, surely any first minister would be very, very interested to know just what was going on and who was involved? Why does he not want to know?

I don't understand.

Peter Hopkins, Edinburgh

Running rings

It looks like the Murrell scandal and calls for a UK Parliament inquiry are disappearing into the long grass. The World Cup is about to start, the First Minister will be there and incommunicado, three huge Parliamentary by-elections will be hogging the news channels, and there's a good chance the SNP will win the two Scottish by-elections courtesy of the split pro-UK vote.

Somewhere in the middle of all that Peter Murrell will be jailed, then the UK and Scottish Parliaments will close for the summer. And I suspect the issue is barely visible on Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage's radar.

If, after all their huffing and puffing, our Scottish politicians can't identify and pull the levers available to get to the truth of Murrell we may as well all throw our lot in with the SNP because they are, incredibly, running rings around them.

Allan Sutherland, Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire

Trust is gone

Gerald Edwards requests the Holyrood election be rerun (Letters, 5 June). I disagree and suggest that the general public, like Humza Yousaf, suspected Peter Murrell was guilty back in 2023 after the search of SNP HQ. Furthermore, political commentators expect the saga will soon be forgotten. The public have turned off politicians and another election would see a minority turnout.

A good example of why trust has fallen so low is Nicola Sturgeon’s recent defence of what she knew about the lack of scrutiny of party finances in 2021. She claimed they were in good shape despite a deficit of £750,000 and members of the Finance Committee and the Treasurer resigning over a lack of financial transparency. When asked about this she hid behind the police investigation and despite her claiming funds were in “good shape”, why then was a £107,000 loan by Murrell required to ease party cash flow difficulties?

Sturgeon shook off claims that she must have seen the motorhome, saying if she had she would have assumed it belonged to a neighbour and added she only found out about her husband’s crimes in recent weeks. Her successor, Humza Yousaf, claimed on Friday that after the search of SNP headquarters in 2023 “it was pretty obvious that Peter Murrell was guilty”. Polling shows that not even SNP voters believe Sturgeon.

At her height no other politician came close to Sturgeon’s popularity but her halo has slipped and her shaky defence does more damage to trust in politics. If she’s “serving a sentence” for Murrell’s crimes she’s brought that on herself.

Meanwhile John Swinney soldiers on as if nothing has happened. He remains the least most unpopular leader in Scotland but cracks are emerging given the continued independence impasse.

Neil Anderson, Edinburgh

Slow road

Brian Bannatyne-Scott urges us to admire the efforts of the SNP to dual the A9, which he describes from his recent journey to Inverness and back (Letters, 6 June). I also travel the A9 to Inverness every year. Indeed, I have been doing so for decades and I remember passing-places about 60 years ago, so things have moved on.

However, they have not moved on in the way the SNP foretold many, many years ago. It is not that “nothing has been happening”. However, the predictions as to when these works will be finished do keep getting put back.

In that, it's a bit like global warming. Like the melting Arctic which never seems to happen and the doubling of the polar bear population which, we are told is “endangered”, we are always told that everything is in hand with the SNP. It just never seems to get there. The A9 will be dualled by 2035, they now tell us, but how many of us will still be around by then? I expect that, by 2035, if Ed Miliband gets his way, personal travel (except on foot) beyond ten miles will probably be illegal. Maybe Inverness along with Aberdeen and Shetland will have declared independence from Scotland by 2030 to create a wealthy oil and gas sheikdom, free from SNP anti-oil rhetoric?

Oh well. At least there should be a sizeable mobile home (original price £125,000) available for private hire from Glasgow to take us north on trips up to wealthy “Inverstan”. It even has a TV!

Andrew HN Gray, Edinburgh

Forget fusion

Malcolm Parkin (Letters, 6 June) claims that nuclear energy could power the world for free. If that really was the case why wouldn’t we all be already doing that?

The answer is that a) if things go wrong (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island) we could destroy our planet; and b) that the costs of safely guarding nuclear wastes for the necessary thousands of years makes nuclear electricity far too expensive to use. That it doesn’t seem so is because we who get the benefit only do so by piling the costs of care onto endless generations of our children.

I see no good reason why my descendants should have to pay for my, or Malcolm’s, careless profligacy.

I will pay £100 of my pension into Mr Parkin’s charity of choice if he can prove even one nuclear power plant that meets all of its present and future costs. There are dozens of safer and cheaper in the long run ways of making all the electricity the planet needs. Far better to demand action on those fronts.

Tim Flinn, Edinburgh

Wonder years

An interesting article from Jenny Lindsay (Perspective, 8 June) in which she wonders when those who believe the only way for a better politics is through independence will see the light of day. There are those who think the last 20 or so years in Scotland, arguing about the constitution, have been a waste of time!

William Ballantine, Bo'ness, West Lothian

Brexit tax

The recent claim by former foreign secretary David Miliband that Brexit was an act of “sabotage” that has made Britain up to £30 billion a year worse off can hardly be disputed.

Indeed, as polling indicates, most of the British public now recognises that leaving the EU was a gross mistake.

We are suffering a punishing Brexit tax every day, and estimates put the cost of being outside the customs union at 0.5 to 1 per cent of GDP, so of the order of £15bn to 30bn a year.

In December, research from King’s College London, Stanford University, the Bank of England and the University of Nottingham found that business investment is estimated to be between 12 and 18 per cent lower than it would have been if Brexit had not occurred.

The study also found that employment and productivity were each down by 3 to 4 per cent compared with where they would have been without Brexit.

At a time when we have a government committed to boosting economic growth, this is akin to trying to do this, but with one hand firmly tied behind its back.

We simply cannot afford to stand still on these matters, and by not rejoining the EU – or at the least, the single market and customs union – we will pay an even heavier economic price.

Additionally, in an increasingly unstable world run by self-declared “strong men”, we need the stability of being part of a much bigger entity, and that comes in the form of EU membership.

The inevitable Labour leadership contest, however, shows that there is light at the end of the tunnel, with both Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting expressing a desire for the UK to rejoin the EU. Let's hope and pray that these fine claims become a reality.

Alex Orr, Edinburgh

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