Letters: There is not one thing Boris Johnson can be proud of

While the rest of the country was mourning and obeying the rules, the Prime Minister was lying to Parliament about whether parties took place, whether he was at them and then finally when he had nowhere else to go, he said no one told him that the rules were being broken. This was not one isolated misjudgment, it was multiple parties at the heart of government attended by the lawmakers.

It’s not the parties per se, it’s the way that some Tories seem to think they are above the law and can do what they like with impunity.

Have we also to just ignore and move on with regard to Wallpapergate, cash for honours, illegally proroguing Parliament, cash for questions and the Tories' – including the PM's – relationships with key Russian figures? Boris Johnson was at a fundraising dinner attended by prominent Russians the night before the invasion.

Then there is the £900k paint job on the Government aeroplane, major cash overruns on HS2, Parliament renovations and Crossrail. We still await the the Covid inquiry and I’m sure there will be more damaging revelations over PPE scandals and VIP procurement lanes. I haven’t even mentioned the failed track and trace system costing £37 billion. Pause for a moment and think what could have been achieved with that eye-watering amount. What about the manifesto pledges that the triple lock would be honoured and there would be no tax increases?

Why pat ourselves on the back over the invasion? Almost on a daily basis we’re told sanctions are being increased to “their most severe ever". It’s not stopped Putin or even slowed him down.

The UK numbers in respect of homing Ukrainians are absolutely pathetic and those in the Home Office who are responsible should be ashamed. Many of us have applied to provide accommodation and feel so frustrated. Every other country is welcoming tens of thousands with open arms whilst we are still trying to sort out the bureaucracy. It’s a shambles.

I cannot think of one single thing this Prime Minister can be proud of.

Stewart Falconer, Alyth.

* TEDDY Jamieson ("There’s no need to rise to the Culture Wars", The Herald, April 7) and other correspondents frequently suggest that the Johnson Government is incompetent. This view appears to be based on the delusion that the job of governments is to protect the interests of all their citizens, to keep them safe and allow them to achieve and maintain a reasonable standard of living. On these criteria, the current Government is indeed incompetent, but what we must recognise is that its aims and objectives are nothing like these.

The current Tory Party is solely concerned to protect the interests of the obscenely wealthy, their oligarchic backers and fossil-fuelled dinosaurs, and to appease the xenophobia of their core support base in order to retain power. From this viewpoint, they have been supremely competent. They have presided over the biggest-ever rise in inequality and in the cost of living for the majority, while destroying workplace protection, trading relationships and any attempt to control climate change.

Until the majority recognise this, I fear that by, in effect giving this cabal the benefit of the doubt, we are condemned to more years of the same.

Dr RM Morris, Ellon.

WE HAVE TO PAY OUR DEBTS

TIMES are certainly difficult financially and many are worried about the future. Today my hairdresser told me of a threat of a four-day week to save on bills; many customers have found alternative services nearer home during the pandemic. However, as well as all the increased expenditure we are experiencing, four facts remain inescapable:

* Many of us enjoyed the safety net of the furlough scheme;

* Many saved money though working from home and no transport costs and savings on holidays and weekends out;

* Despite many sad losses, all of us benefited from the wonderful work of our NHS, increased protective uniforms and new life-saving treatments and a superb vaccination programme;

* Most of us approve of our Government's support of Ukraine, which must surely be costing considerable expenditure.

I would hope that most of us would want to see the NHS try to catch up with postponed operations and would recognise the need to improve our care in the community. However, we don't seem to want to recognise that all this requires to be paid for.

We accepted the need to borrow, sometimes vast sums, but forget the interest that has to be paid on our government borrowings – in our name. We surely can't just borrow more and more and leave our grandchildren and great-grandchildren to pick up the bill. They, like us with Covid, are not responsible for the position in which we find ourselves, so they should not be left with the debt mountain. None of us wants to have less to spend or reduced living standards but the alternative is to avoid the cost now and further increase the debt on our children and children's children.

James Watson, Dunbar.

GIVE US A POSITIVE CASE FOR THE UNION

I HAVE written before that unionist parties would be better served trying to understand the electorate, rather than slandering them, but Jill Stephenson (Letters, April 6) returns again to this mode of electioneering.

Let’s assume for now though, that Ms Stephenson is right in her claims about pot-holed roads, an utterly inefficient A&E, and so on, and that there is little or nothing to be said in defence of the Scottish Government, or local government in its control. What does that say about the insight, or even the intelligence of the electorate? Does she consider the electorate to be a bunch of simpletons who have been fooled repeatedly for the last 15 years?

Such tactics have been typical since at least the 2014 referendum. Better Together’s negativity was described by The Herald (“Yes camp needs vision to dispel scare stories”, April 28, 2013) as “tedious, piecemeal, relentlessly negative, and a factory for an endless supply of scare stores”. Yet, as the report commented “there are some signs that they are effective”, which proved true the following year, but at what cost? Support for independence, it is believed, stood at 28 per cent at the start of the campaign, but by the time we voted it was almost 45%.

Such methods are at best of limited effect. The electorate has been regaled by them for more than eight years, during which time the outcome of the referendum vote was much closer than expected and independence supporters were then supposed to disappear. Since 2015 the SNP has had a majority of MPs sitting for Scottish seats – almost sweeping the board in 2015 – and been elected twice more as the largest party at Holyrood. Does your use of “effective” stretch that far? Certainly, negativity did “little to make a positive case for the Union”, as you pointed out.

Would a better direction for unionist parties not be to put forward a positive case for the Union, and campaign for reforms within that framework, rather than find fault at every turn? This would create a more positive mood in Scottish politics, which in turn would require the SNP to work harder to bring out and clarify the advantages of independence over the continuing Union.

Alasdair Galloway, Dumbarton.

SCOTLAND COULD DO SO MUCH BETTER

I NOTE another shocking Herald headline ("Delays see cancer patients suffer severe complications", April 7). Add in the loss of life due to A&E queues which have been well documented recently and which speak volumes for the current Government's approach that it can allow this situation to happen whilst its focus is concentrating on another independence referendum.

The SNP claim of Scotland being the 14th-richest country in the world and set for future glory looks threadbare when it cannot close the attainment gap nor stop so many families living in poverty nor even run the health service efficiently after almost 15 years in power. It has enough current powers to make a difference if it was able to. Scotland could and must do so much better but it can't under the fantasy politics of our present Government.

Dr Gerald Edwards, Glasgow.

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