THE news that BMI Ross Hall is opening what is essentially a surgical factory at Braehead ("£20m private hospital to be opened by Ross Hall owner on outskirts of Glasgow", The Herald, July 22) is to be welcomed. Any effort to reduce the enormous NHS waiting lists for elective surgery such as hip and knee replacements is worthwhile. The cost of £20m, leasing a commercial building, shows what can be done with some imagination, quite contrary to the slow pace and high costs of the long-delayed NHS elective centres.

Given, as I suspect, the majority of customers will be NHS waiting list initiative patients, it demonstrates the hypocrisy of the SNP Government, which decries and denies “privatisation of the NHS”, but secretly outsources work to the private sector. It is likely the work will be done by NHS surgeons in their non-contracted time. Or maybe they will be seconded to the Titanium, as the new hospital will be called, as part of their NHS contracts, which would be much more sensible given for the foreseeable future elective surgical beds in NHS hospitals will be occupied by Covid and medical patients. For 18 months many surgeons have done no elective surgery of note.

Separating elective and surgical hospitals has been resisted by the SNP for years, yet is the only solution to increase elective surgical activity. Titanium is a clear example showing the private sector can respond. If the private sector can do this quickly and effectively, the Government must acknowledge the NHS in its present form cannot, and is no longer fit for purpose, particularly under the present political leadership. The Scottish NHS as structured will never clear the Covid surgical backlog and for many patients the NHS as we have known it has ceased to exist.

Gavin R Tait FRCSEd, East Kilbride.

WHY NOT AN ALL-UK APP?

PEOPLE registered with the NHS in England are already able to download the NHS app which gives them access to their Covid vaccination status and test results. Obviously, the technology for such an app exists. It begs the question why the Scotish Government is spending money on a separate Protect Scotland app to be developed by an Ireland-based company.

Wouldn't it be cheaper and more time-efficient to use the technology already available in England? That might avoid potential

compatibility issues, thus enabling people to use the same app throughout the UK as proof of their vaccination or Covid test. What's not to like?

Regina Erich, Stonehaven.

THE UK'S BIG OIL MISTAKES

DAVID Leask ("Scotland struck oil but got poorer. Really? Why some nationalists buy the myth", The Herald, July 23) seems not to grasp why Scotland hasn’t become wealthy from its oil and gas reserves as Norway has. It’s for two reasons. Even though Scottish oil and gas fields represent nearly all of UK oil and gas production, oil industry tax and business policy powers are reserved to Westminster. And second, Westminster has spectacularly mismanaged this crucial resource.

After the 2015 oil price collapse, Westminster slashed oil taxes from 50 per cent to 35% and then to 0% in 2016. In 2018 Shell got tax rebates of £105.5 million while Scotland showed an equivalent loss on its Tory-imposed GERS accounts. These tax rebates wiped out Scotland’s North Sea oil revenues. By contrast, the Norwegian government has collected £386 billion more in taxes than the UK government since the beginning of oil and gas production.

Because Westminster protected Big Oil and its shareholders at the expense of Aberdeen oil workers and Scottish-owned services companies, Shell and BP are more profitable after the oil price crash than they were before.

The privatisation of British Petroleum in 1979 and British Gas in 1986 has diverted revenues which should have been invested in the wider economy and in the development of renewable energy into the pockets of for-profit companies.

Norway’s Equinor, formerly Statoil and StatoilHydro, is largely state-owned, managed by the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy. Norway created a oil wealth fund for the benefit of the nation which is worth £923 billion, or £170k for each Norwegian citizen. If Scotland had been able to do the same, our wealth fund would be worth at least as much.

Independence is the only way to stop subsidising a Union that undermines us.

Leah Gunn Barrett, Edinburgh.

BRAIN DRAIN OVER THE BORDER

I WONDER if the Scottish Government is aware of the number of small houses and flats being snapped up just over the Border into England, by Scots residents disillusioned with the skulduggery and sleight of hand practised by the SNP?

One cannot blame these people for wanting a foothold in a country where transparency is more the norm and where reasonable standards are maintained. It is also worrying that this may be the beginnings of a "brain drain".

Val Simpson, Berwick-upon-Tweed.

NEW FUND IS TO BE WELCOMED

IT is interesting to read of the new UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) which is to replace the former European Structural Funds ("New UK Government fund to support the Union set to ‘backfire’ and damage it", The Herald, July 22). In particular, those of us with long memories will recall how the European funds were welcomed across Scotland precisely because were administered through local authorities and by-passed the dogmatic national government of the day.

In particular, the people of Strathclyde had much to thank Commissioner Bruce Millan and council leader Charlie Gray for, from roads and bridges in Argyll to training for new jobs and opportunities in Glasgow. So the evidence is that such funds, responding to local needs and administered locally and prised from the dead hand of centralised power, can be an important part of a mixed economy of funding and policy-making.

At the same time, it should also be remembered that when the EU was enlarged to admit former Communist countries in 2004 and 2007, a large portion of structural funding was quite rightly directed away from Scotland and towards those poorer new member states. As these had historically been corrupt Stalinist regimes, it was necessary to bring in more and more onerous monitoring and evaluation processes.

Unfortunately, these conditions were also applied to remaining EU-funded programmes in Scotland, with the result that it became less and less worthwhile for small organisations to apply for funding. The new UKSPF should therefore be an opportunity to streamline the application and monitoring process while creating a more locally responsive and heterogeneous policy and project community in Scotland (and elsewhere in the UK).

Peter A Russell, Glasgow.

RETURN ILLEGAL MIGRANTS TO FRANCE

THERE seems to be a general starry-eyed belief in some quarters that cross-Channel migrants should be welcomed here as genuine asylum seekers fleeing persecution or worse.

Despite being lambasted daily, to her credit the Home Secretary questions the motives of these migrants, believing them to be in reality economic migrants seeking the financial and other support and benefits they have been led to believe await them here. Apparently they pay traffickers substantial amounts to arrange the wherewithal to enable them to risk their lives crossing the busy Channel in flimsy overcrowded dinghies. Obviously they must have some compelling reason for doing this. Surely, if they were simply asylum seekers fleeing persecution, why would they pay to risk their lives to “flee" from France rather than simply seeking asylum there, or for that matter in any of the other countries they must have travelled through?

If it is accepted that they are illegal economic migrants the obvious solution would be to return them to France “pour décourager les autres". If for whatever reason that is considered impossible, the only admittedly-unhelpful suggestion that occurs to me is that perhaps some of the millions being paid to France hopefully for them to try to deter these migrants might be better spent financing visits to the migrant camps there by leading Remoaners. They could then lecture them on their perception of the devastating economic effects in the UK of Brexit, making staying in France a wiser choice ?

Alan Fitzpatrick, Dunlop.

MORE WEAR AND TEAR ON FERRIES

IN the last 20 or so years it has become normal for ferries to sail on Sundays to and from the Western Isles. Lots of these are short journeys which increases wear and tear on any engine.

In days gone by the ferries tied up on a Sunday, giving the ship’s engineers a chance to do some maintenance in the engine room and also on deck. This no longer happens. Could this as well as ageing be part of the ongoing problem facing CalMac ("Disruption as three more Calmac ferries are hit by technical issues", The Herald, July 23")?

J Morrison, Inchinnan.