Readers' Letters: Who will pay back the countries debt after the money tree is shaken?

Is it a concern, should us ordinary people worry our little heads about things that government employ an army of really intelligent people who ensure that the country doesn’t land itself in such hock that we have to ask the IMF for a hand out to pay the rent!

I only ask because it seems that at present the UK apparently spends more on servicing the current debt than on Education, Defence and other vital national interests. As a none entity, I struggle to understand national debt. I understand it at a personal level I.e. if I don’t have sufficient cash in my pocket I can’t buy a loaf of bread in the local shop but national debt, that’s what we elect governments to handle for us and expect them to have our and the countries best interest at the heart of all of the policies they manage.

So, when we hear that they plan to load another fifty billion pounds onto a debt pile that is already threatening to fall over I have real concerns. Does this mean yet more cuts to my pension entitlements that I spent my working life to achieve?

I await the budget not with interest as such but with trepidation.

T Lewis, Coylton, Ayrshire

Bus beats tram

Mary Douglas (Letters, September 28) is quite right to use her free bus pass rather than the tram to Edinburgh airport. Coming from the Borders, Ms Douglas can hop on the 100 bus outside Waverley station and be at the airport terminal inside 30 minutes with services every 15 minutes. By tram she would not get there inside 45 minutes with walks of over 5 minutes at either end, according to a well used search engine.

Edinburgh residents realise this too and the airport bus is generally very busy, and relatively cheap at £5.50 single versus £7.50 by the slower tram. It brings into question why we ever needed the tram at all. In addition to existing airport bus services, a shuttle bus to Edinburgh Gateway station, with its rail links to the city centre and to Fife and beyond would have saved taxpayers £1 billion. Now that the tram route has been extended to Newhaven, people living in North Edinburgh can use it to the airport too but it’s still much slower than the 200 skylink bus. Extending the tram to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, as Ms Douglas suggests, would also, for most, be much slower than using local bus services.

The tram money would have been better spent on the city bypass, by building three lanes and a hard shoulder each way, a route first proposed in the 1930s but not built until over 50 years later, and now in urgent need of upgrading to motorway status. Given it‘s only dualled and has to carry traffic to and from across Eastern and Northern Scotland to England via the busy A1, A68 and A702, congestion is now the worst in Scotland.

Neil Anderson, Edinburgh

Deserving poor

Asked by the BBC last week if virtually no-one should claim benefits without trying to get back to work Keir Starmer replied “the basic proposition that you should look for work is right,” thereby invoking the “deserving vs undeserving poor” conundrum that's dogged legislators since the 1834 Poor Law.

It defined the former as “those who through no fault of their own—disability, age, sickness—cannot provide for themselves”, the latter brutally as “the feckless and work-shy, a burden on their communities, undeserving of any but the harshest of treatment from good hardworking people and instruments of the state”.

The decisions won't be just be between pensioners, work-shy and fraudsters. How will the growing number of graduates who go straight onto benefits react, or the depressed or “long Covid” sufferers and those whose lifestyle and diet makes them too unfit and depressed to work, who are sent for more stringent medical and means tests?

How will the media react? Another flurry of nicknames like “bedroom tax”, “Alzheimers tax” and “Rape clause”? The last outrage was only rarely clarified by the fact that the two child benefit limit only applies to families who chose to have a third child after April 2017, while those with, say, six children under sixteen born before that date still receive the payments.

Or how about well off people who won’t mind losing some benefits or being taxed more if it goes to the truly “deserving poor”, better public services or, for example giving our local 27 year old lollipop man back the job he lost after a life in care and 7 foster families, sacked, and now idle and rejected, to save £6,000?

I certainly mind paying any tax or losing any benefit just to keep Angus Robertson’s £331 million Culture and External affairs spending spree going, or Michael Mathieson’s wages and mobile bill.

Tough choices Prime Minister, but, after the donations scandals, if you bottle out it could be you that’s on benefits.

Allan Sutherland, Stonehaven

Universalism

Johann Lamont (Opinion, September 28) highlights for me a key issue. In the 1970s, fresh out of college I remember the fervent debate - universalism good, selectivism bad. But that debate has to move on. Arguments about the possible stigma of a selective approach may still be relevant in some respects but those about the costs of selectivity - in the age of computerisation etc., - are surely less convincing. And why, when the retirement age has now gone beyond 65, are we still issuing free bus passes to the over 60s working population? So is the targeting of the winter fuel allowance such a heinous crime?

Richard Perry, Burntisland, Fife