Readers' Letters: What happened to Swinney 'first 100 days' promises?

Promises came thick and fast, many for implementation in the first 100 days. That time is now. People voted for the SNP on the basis of these vows, so have they been kept?

A draft Referendum Bill? Kicked into the long grass. Lots of GP “walk-in” clinics? Stalling. Price caps on essential goods? Vanished. £10,000 loans for first-time buyers (without mentioning the £650 charge that accompanies this loan)? None through yet. Extending capped bus fare throughout Scotland? No. Phone-free classrooms? The buck has been passed to local authorities.

The SNP isn't even running, it has ploughed into the ground. It has simply not delivered on multiple promises made to the voters. There is, however, one thing John Swinney has achieved in his first 100 days : Trust in politics? Completely gone.

Gerald Edwards, Glasgow

Wasted wealth

Norway has released the latest profit figures for their Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is now worth $2.3 trillion. The profit for the fund, which was created from oil and gas revenues, was $186 billion in the year 2025/26 Much more than the whole Scottish budget.

Compare this with the UK, which has produced slightly more oil and gas. We have no Wealth Fund. All the revenues went to the Westminster Treasury and every penny of oil and gas revenues has been wasted by successive UK governments, largely on tax cuts for higher income earners.

Most of our oil was produced over the last 50 years from Scots waters but Scotland was never allowed to spend a single penny of the revenues. Partly as a result of this economic incompetence the UK has a National Debt of £2.4 trillion

And yet the Unionists always say Scotland could not manage our economy.

James Duncan, Edinburgh

Widen context

This week's publication of the annual GERS figures has prompted the usual row between those advocating independence and those who feel the figures demonstrate how Scotland benefits from the Union. One side says the figures are misleading because they only measure the current situation (not how an independent Scotland would perform if it could make its own decisions) and the other side stresses the benefit the country currently gets from being a part of the UK (and what it would lose if we left).

What neither side tends to do is set the figures in a wider context. However, the Office of National Statistics publishes a regular “Country and regional public sector finances data” series which sets out expenditure and revenue for every part of the UK (a mini “GERS” for every country/region). This data is inevitably historic (and takes time to compile) but shows where Scotland lies in the wider context of the British countries and regions.

The ONS divides the UK into nine English regions and three countries. In the most recent figures (2023) only two English regions (London and SE England) are in fiscal surplus. London by £36.8 billion and SE England by £12.8bn. The remaining seven English regions, Scotland, Wales and NI are in fiscal deficit: E England (£2.8bn deficit); SW England (£14.3bn); N Ireland (£14.8bn); E Midlands (£14.9bn); NE England (£16.6bn); Yorks & Humber (£20.8); Wales (£21.6bn); Scotland (£23.7bn); W Midlands (£28.3bn) and NW England (£34.9bn). The figures, of course, vary year by year and Scotland is particularly volatile because of oil prices.

Many will say “Scotland is a nation, not a region”. However, many of the English regions are based on ancient kingdoms (Wessex, Mercia, Kent, Northumbria etc) that predate Alba. The fact that they merged in the 10th rather than the 9th century hardly seems relevant. Many also have bigger populations (and therefore more taxpayers) than Scotland. The figures are SE England (9.6m); London (9.1m); NW England (7.7m); E England (6.5m); W Midlands (6.2m); SW England (5.9m); Yorks & Humber (5.7m); Scotland (5.5m); E Midlands (5.0m); Wales (3.2m); NE England (2.7m); N Ireland (2.0m).

The debate might benefit by taking the wider context into account.

Peter Lewis, Edinburgh

Worth a laugh

When I started to read my Scotsman yesterday I wasn’t expecting to be amused quite so early in the day.

Your headline on page 10 calling for the MSP salary to be reduced to that of nurses must have also amused the news editor. Never in a month of Sundays will that ever happen. Last I heard, Hollywood wanted to increase the number of MSPs, I believe because they were getting lonely and want someone with whom to talk.

Charles Lowson, Fareham, Hants

EU ‘spying’

Do we really need to get closer to the EU?

With Andy Burnham coming to power the UK government has launched a broad political and economic “reset” involving closer cooperation with the EU. It's worth mentioning that along with the positive fallout for London, close ties with Brussels may bear significant risks for the British people.

Lately, the EU countries have been clamping down on freedom of speech and imposing control over the internet. A number of laws and legislative drafts, empowering European governments and intelligence agencies to get access to personal data, speak for themselves.

Thus, in July, under the pretext of blocking social media access for children under 15, France introduced mechanisms for government control over the media landscape. And though, at first glance, these efforts to protect children may seem quite reasonable, a closer study shows that the measures implemented are nothing but another attempt of the government to make spying against the population legal.

Another striking example where the country doesn't even try to cover its plans to spy against everyone and everything is the global reform of Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND), aimed at the legitimisation of hacking activities targeting any individual under the pretext of protection from hacker attacks.

But does the UK need to get closer to the countries that are forming a genuine information monopoly in Europe, where all measures allegedly aimed at the people's security work against them?

And won't we find ourselves in a situation where Brussels will force our government to follow the EU's lead and destroy the last remnants of our right to privacy in the name of further contingence with the bloc?

Edward Dunnet, Edinburgh

Mitigate risks

While not always agreeing with the Editor’s comments, it would be difficult for objective readers to disagree with the statement: “The UK government needs to show how it reached the conclusion that allowing Ming Yang [to manufacture wind turbines in Scotland] was too great a risk”.

It is certainly appreciated that “national security” is a primary concern of government, and that certain issues necessitate a high-level of secrecy, but to most the building of a new Chinese super embassy in the heart of London would pose more of a security risk, on a number of different levels, than a turbine manufacturing facility in the north of Scotland.

Should the turbines themselves be considered a security risk then surely this risk could be mitigated, whether via EMI shielding, manufacturing oversight or programming overrides. Presumably the purchaser of the turbines would have operational control of the turbines, which could be assured via independent security-assessed procedures, with such procedures required wherever new wind turbines were to be manufactured.

Active participation in all aspects of the growing renewable energy industry is of critical economic importance to Scotland, especially in attempting to smoothly transition from the exploitation of oil and gas resources (which some predicted would have already run out) through increasing, rather than reducing, job prospects across all sectors of the industry of the future. The Scottish public deserve more from the UK government than another relayed message of “nothing to see here”.

Stan Grodynski

Longniddry, East Lothian

Binface bombed

The people of Clacton have made a disastrous mistake. By not voting for Count Binface there now won't be even a single affordable house to be bought there.

Henryk Belda, Edinburgh

Beware Russia

Replying to P Yates on “Confused Burnham” (Letters, 13 August), our new Prime Minister had better have a “plan for crises”. Because before the winter, Russia could well be cyber-attacking the UK, with our energy infrastructure a particular target.

Former Royal Navy commodore Steve Jermy has even posited that Russian subs could blockade the UK, the mere threat of which would scare off shipping insurers, as in the Gulf and the Black Sea. Vladimir Putin's government is upping the ante, especially by blockading ports at Odesa.

For its own sake Russia has to capitalise on Donald Trump's self-inflicted Gulf woes, and they'll keep their “hybrid-warfare” on Nato below the threshold for any member to invoke Article 5.

Mind you, even invocation would probably not trigger a robust Nato response unless United States assets were damaged.

George Morton, Rosyth, Fife

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