I HAVE to beg the question: why is Ruth Marr is so concerned with the views of English voters (Letters, October 28?). Her assertion that Conservative voters have been “cynically duped and betrayed again” by Boris Johnson over the subject of free school meals for children is arrant bilge and to actually state in a national newspaper you can never trust a Tory is a new low.

Ms Marr fails to grasp the case that the UK Government has injected more than £2 billion and rising into the economy in order to support jobs, the economy and people’s livelihoods during the current pandemic. This includes £63 million for local councils in order to support their additional spending requirements including providing free meals for vulnerable children during school holidays. Unfortunately, it is true that many councils are failing to use the funds in this way, but it is not the Government which is at fault here.

As far as the Westminster Government “lurching from one crisis to another” is concerned, it is reassuring to know that we have a Government behind us that is capable of containing issues as they arise and not failing to acknowledge or even accept responsibility for them like the administration at Holyrood. Ms Marr should be more concerned with addressing many of the failings of the SNP Government, which she supports, most notably the NHS Health Scotland report that one in three children in Scotland will be living in poverty by 2021.

Christopher H Jones, Giffnock.

YET again we have a Scottish Government response to a report where the Government lays out all of the financial support that it has given as a result of the pandemic ("Families ‘face return to financial misery of 1980s’", The Herald, October 28). Absolutely no mention from the Scottish Government that the money it has spent has come from Westminster as a result of consequential spend and no challenge to the Scottish Government on this. It is little surprise, then, that a large proportion of the population thinks that a good job is being done in Scotland.

If the Scottish Government is interested in transparency and being honest with the Scottish people then let it publish details of how much it has received in consequential payments and how that has been spent, perhaps more interestingly how much is being held in a war chest for the next election. A question for one of the opposition parties to ask in the parliament perhaps.

Bill Eadie, Giffnock.

I FEEL Alan Fitzpatrick (Letters, October 28) is wrong on the subject of a referendum question. We simply do not know what Scotland’s status will be in any future UK: will we still have devolved powers; will these powers be compromised by the internal market bill; will we see a federal state, and, as we saw in 2014, we cannot believe the promises made to us by British nationalists. The question must therefore revolve around independence, or what is regarded as independence in modern parlance.

We had Yes/No, agreed by the Electoral Commission in 2014. It is simple; people understand its consequences and any taint of “bias” would be carried by any other question/answer. There are also reports that the Electoral Commission is threatened by being stripped of powers or shut down (a characteristic of this Tory Government), which does not give confidence in any decision it might make, regarding Scotland, if it is trying to please the powers that be in Westminster.

GR Weir, Ochiltree.

WITH all of the discussions about the bias of the indyref2 question next time around, can I, with tongue in cheek, suggest the following?

Wae a' the info ye huv noo, dis yis wan' a free Indy Sco'lan?

Tick wan o' the boxes unnerneath:

1). Mibbes Aye

2). Mibbes Naw

Couldn't be clearer, or mibbe not.

Ian Gray, Croftamie.

IT is a sure thing when one begins to personally attack an individual in a degrading, ill-mannered and unpleasant manner the argument is lost and the worst of the attacker comes to the fore. Fidelma Cook’s attack on Michael Gove (“I fantasise about slapping his gerbil cheeks until they wibble wobble”, Herald Magazine, October 24) was an extremely distasteful piece of “journalism”. JB Drummond and R Oliver (Letters, October 27) are no better.

Douglas Cowe, Newmachar.