Letters: The Scottish Government is failing in the redistribution of wealth

Mr MacAskill conveniently forgets he was in an SNP cabinet that froze council tax, which benefited the richest households in our country.

He bemoans the failure of the UK Government to raise taxes on the rich but ignores his own party's manifesto pledge to introduce a 50p tax rate that has been dropped.

Finally, he fails to mention the recent SNP Growth Commission paper that vows to keep corporation tax the same or lower than England.

Time after time, columnists in Scotland turn their ire on Westminster when there is a government much closer to home that is failing to redistribute wealth.

Michelle Wallis,

Riccarton Mains Road, Currie, Edinburgh.

THE ways of the Scottish Government are labyrinthine. It announces that it will withdraw the charitable status enjoyed by private schools, thus making them liable to pay business rates. This is because the SNP is doctrinally opposed to private schools. Then the head of a private school lobbies his MSP, John Swinney, who happens to be Education Secretary in the Scottish Government, asking for mitigation.

Mr Swinney obligingly lobbies his colleague Derek Mackay, the Finance Secretary, who tells him that councils are empowered to give rates relief locally under the Community Empowerment Act (Scotland) 2015 92 ("‘Total confusion’ over plan to charge private schools business rates", The Herald, August 17). Thus councils are made responsible for upholding or reversing a decision made and trumpeted by the Scottish Government, which can continue to claim that it is implementing its stated policy, that it remains doctrinally pure.

Jill Stephenson,

Glenlockhart Valley, Edinburgh.

READERS of the Letters Pages on August 16, in particular that headed “This SNP government is letting us down on health and education”, can decide whether that from Keith Howell or from Allan Sutherland represents the more significant contribution.

With Mr Howell continuing his well-worn path of gratuitous invective against the SNP, and Mr Sutherland's more realistic approach, the latter wins hands down.

We need no reminding of the disaster that was health and education prior to 2010 when Labour had 13 years at Westminster, and, concurrently, eight years at Holyrood to sort everything out: Scottish university students, having passed the entrance qualifications, had to be put through numeracy and literacy classes, by principals, to enable them to proceed to the degree course. Failure rates were excessive. There were also recruitment problems in the NHS – the case of a theatre sister being engaged from an agency at the, then, huge cost of £800 per day. Perhaps she had bailed out of the unsocial hours to which she had been directed, and could dictate when she was available with the agency.

The question that faces the vast army of gratuitous critics of the public services in the so-called “loyal” opposition parties, and among letter-writers, is would they offer themselves for a career that was so bad as they themselves had described?

What destroys Mr Howell’s case is that the condition of health and education south of the Border replicates his allegations for Scotland – no wonder: despite devolution, Scotland remains thirled to events there. As a self-admitted recent incomer to Scotland, it is surprising that he does not recognise the connection.

Furthermore, a Radio Scotland Morning Call phone-in last autumn sought adverse examples of personal experience of the NHS in Scotland only to be inundated by callers praising to the rooftops the exemplary attention they had received. More recently, they ran a programme seeking examples of individual public service employees who deserved special mention – again, there were names aplenty.

Douglas R Mayer,

76 Thomson Crescent, Currie, Midlothian.

ROSEMARY Goring's column ("The campaign against tests in Primary 1 does not add up", The Herald, August 17) was a breath of fresh air. Yet again education has become a political football. The very same politicians who berated the Scottish Government for failing to close the attainment gap are now berating them for bringing in the necessary tools to measure the said gap before attempting to bridge it.

You can't solve a problem without measuring it. You can't measure anything without using a standard measure. It can't be left up to individual teachers in separate schools who will themselves have developed different standards and expectations.

However, any teacher should be able to present a 45-minute flexible assessment to a child as if it is a game.

Get it in proportion. It's better to have to sit down for two or three 45-minute sessions in the course of a seven-year primary schooling than have to suffer a lifetime's inconvenience and stigma as a functionally illiterate adult.

Mary McCabe,

25 Circus Drive, Glasgow.

AS the SNP struggles on, with education being in a particularly bad state, we find, yet again, healthcare is not far behind ("Medics: No deal Brexit would be a disaster for healthcare", The Herald, August 17). Health and education are crucially important areas of government responsibility. The SNP has shown itself unable to cope with these admittedly onerous tasks.

With its preferred goal, independence, very much in mind the SNP has done all it can to derail Brexit. The true consequences of a "no deal" Brexit will quite possibly leave us all poorer in the short term. It really needs some genuine diplomacy from the SNP to put the needs of the whole country first, given that Brexit is not going away, rather than its petty party political points-scoring game where the bigger picture is simply ignored. Brexit is a reality, independence simply a possibility. A united front will undoubtedly get the UK a better deal. Help, not hindrance, is required even at this late stage.

We are still all UK citizens at this moment in time, something the SNP seems to forget.

Dr Gerald Edwards,

Broom Road, Glasgow.