ON Wednesday (December 18) North Ayrshire Council was presented with a report which showed the financial sustainability of the council was in question in the face of continued cuts from Westminster and Holyrood. According to the Scottish Parliament’s own statistics, the bulk of the cuts came from the SNP at Holyrood. You can be assured that similar concerns are being expressed in Council chambers across Scotland.

On Thursday Nicola Sturgeon made it clear that the cuts and the crisis in local service delivery were nowhere on her list of priorities. It seems it is not for the First Minister to worry about education or housing or social care or the state of our roads or bus or ferry services. Instead she returned, like the proverbial dog to its regurgitated breakfast, to the Nationalists obsession with independence.

Ms Surgeon is frequently photographed behind a podium proclaiming that her party is “Stronger for Scotland”. If only that were true. If only the people of Scotland could depend on a government that understood what they needed and fought for better education and health care instead of always obsessing on the constitution while mismanaging the economy and their own ministerial portfolios and continually blaming Westminster for their own incompetence. Meanwhile they are cutting Council allocations and denuding our council and social care budgets of the resources they so badly need. Ironically, the resources are needed at local level precisely because Holyrood is messing up so monumentally.

The SNP fought and won seats at the recent election on a platform of stopping Brexit and stopping Boris Johnson, neither of which it could ever achieve. Now it has flipped back to “independence”, which is the only thing it really cares about. Will the day ever come when SNP politicians do what they were elected for: fight for their constituencies and for the real life needs of the people of Scotland and, most urgently, ensure that local services on which we all depend are properly resourced and funded?

Alex Gallagher,

Labour Councillor, North Ayrshire Council, Largs.

BY voting with the Tories against the Scottish Parliament’s Referendum Bill (“Labour MSP warns of ‘oblivion’ if party sticks to Union line”, The Herald, December 20), Labour showed it has learned nothing from their election defeat. It should back calls to put Scotland’s future in Scotland’s hands by supporting the transfer of power from Westminster to Holyrood in order that any fresh independence referendum is put beyond legal challenge.

The reason Ian Murray is the sole Labour MP in Scotland can be traced back to Labour being enthusiastic bedfellows with the Tories to stop self-government in 2014. This week, Mr Murray told a London newspaper that Scottish Labour was right to destroy itself to help save the Union. That might go down well in garnering him Tory votes in Morningside but the prospect of at least another 10 years of Tory rule rather than Home Rule will do nothing for those living in more deprived areas of Scotland.

At Westminster, Labour opposed giving our Scottish Parliament more responsibility for the economy, taxation, over company law, employment laws, immigration, welfare or even broadcasting despite the fact that, when compared to the economic progress and human wellbeing in other small countries in western Europe, the Union has utterly failed Scotland over the past 65 years. Therefore, Labour needs to restore its distinctive Scottish identity when the original Scottish Labour Party had Home Rule for Scotland as one of its three main objectives.

Fraser Grant, Edinburgh EH9.

WHEN the Scottish Government introduced its devolved income tax system, I, like many others, assumed the extra revenue raised would be used to reduce the effects of austerity, impact on child poverty levels, improve educational standards and give a measure of life support to our NHS. On that basis many affected gave the changes their approval.

The 2019/20 Scottish budget forecasts show Scottish tax policy adding only £182 million to the Scottish budget. Disappointing therefore to learn that this sum has recently been squandered on the Calmac ferry fiasco, the “Pure Dead Brilliant” airport fiasco, the new Edinburgh Children’s Hospital fiasco and ongoing difficulties in the flagship Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, to name but a few.

Gordon McNeish, Milngavie.

BILL Brown (Letters, December 19) is missing the point re independence. If Scotland were independent, we would decide on which party in which to place our trust. The SNP is a means to an end, as the only party supporting independence.

It is not “fantasy” to believe that the Scottish people are well capable of electing a government which can deliver inclusive, progressive and internationalist policies for the future. That may be the SNP but it might well not be. Whatever, it will be our decision.

John McCallum, Glasgow G41.

NICOLA Sturgeon’s continual exhortation that Scotland did not vote for the Tories somehow paints over the fact that every fourth person walking into a polling station in Scotland did just that. I find her pretence that there are no Tory voters in Scotland worrying, what does she have planned for us should she ever get independence? She is stoking the fires of division and resentment in her single-issue campaigning.

Brian McMillan, Kilbarchan.

IF there is ever to be another referendum on Scottish independence, a decision in favour of independence should be by a two-thirds (67 per cent) majority. To break up an 300-year-plus association is a momentous decision and should not be determined by a first-past-the-post simple majority, when the narrowest of margins, even to a percentage decimal point, would leave the country deeply and bitterly divided. Supermajorities are required by many countries, whether to amend their constitutions or take crucial decisions. Even the impeachment of an American President needs a two-thirds majority, hardly as important and weighty a consideration compared to whether the UK should cease to exist.

Stefan Slater, Edinburgh EH4.

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