FINANCE Secretary Derek Mackay was less than happy to have been given almost £1 billion by his Westminster counterpart, Philip Hammond ("Tory Westminster policies have robbed Scotland of £2bn and kept the country in austerity, say SMP", The Herald, October 30). He claimed that it was not enough and Scotland had been short-changed. He also alluded to his current policy of making 30 per cent of Scots pay more tax than their English cousins being not only his crowning glory but a policy he wishes to continue.

This policy is divisive, unfair and counter-productive. Only a socialist party thinks that this is the correct way to run an economy. Now Mr Mackay has been handed an even bigger disparity, yet he is not for turning. He has been trapped by his party's own narrow focus on closing attainment gaps simply by taking from a smaller percentage of Scots and giving it to a larger one on the proviso that most of the 30 per cent who lose out don't vote for the SNP anyway and that obviously 70 per cent is a much bigger number than 30 per cent.

The SNP need to see past these mere numbers and calculate just how much the 30 per cent actually contribute to Scottish society. Alienating this important section of the population by unfairly targeting them is simply not a very sensible option. If the SNP is ever to persuade Scotland it should be independent, it will never get there if this is the method it subscribes to. Best to leave the draconian tax regimes to the experts, Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party.

Dr Gerald Edwards,

Broom Road, Glasgow.

THE Westminster budget brings almost another billion pounds next year to Scotland in public sector cash. Yet will Nicola Sturgeon somehow contrive to twist this into an anti-UK grievance? Of course. It's what she does.

Martin Redfern,

Woodcroft Road, Edinburgh.

THE Budget did bring with it some surprises and disappointments. One of the surprises was the Westminster Government’s proposed abolition of PFI and PFI2 projects for future public projects. What a pity it has taken 10 years after the SNP Scottish Government did similar, on recognising PFI is exploitation of our public services for private wealth. Dividends alone paid to PFI investors in the last decade in Scotland have exceeded £500m, that is deals signed and agreed by the previous Labour/LibDem administration in Holyrood, deals that are still costing Scotland dearly.

The disappointments of this Budget were numerous – one of which was the issue of women and state pensions and in particular women born in the 1950s. The public gallery had members of the Waspi (Women against state pension inequality) campaign present during the Budget, as you reported ("Pensions campaign women jeer from Commons gallery as the Chancellor ignores their protest", The Herald, October 30), yet their plight was overlooked once again by the Chancellor. Then we had the Chancellor trying to appease his own benches as he threw money at the shambles of Universal Credit instead of ordering a complete review and a halt to the roll-out with immediate effect. By not halting the roll-out immediately, many claimants will spend Christmas cold and hungry, a public disgrace. Despite calls from local authorities in Scotland the Chancellor made no mention of compensating councils who have been at the forefront of putting in place mitigating measurers for those suffering the shambles of Universal Credit, costing millions, but ultimately the only safety net available for so many vulnerable and sick, shame on the (comfy) Conservatives. But Mr Hammond finally added salt to the wounds of the poor and needy by giving tax breaks to higher earners, not only an outrage, but morally repugnant.

Catriona C Clark,

52 Hawthorn Drive,

Banknock, Falkirk.

I SUPPOSE it is flattering that such lengthy responses (Letters, October 30) have been generated by my quite reasonable observation (Letters, October 27) that if people are unhappy with the effects of government policy – in this case regarding families and poverty – they should blame the Tory Government at Westminster for the reserved issues and the SNP at Holyrood for the devolved ones.

However, there a few observations which I would like to make about the responses of Messrs GR Weir and Alasdair Galloway.

Mr Weir takes the opportunity to lay the blame for all of the problems of Ayrshire and (it seems) the entire industrial decline of the area on the Labour Party. If this was indeed the case, it would be expected that the voters of Ayrshire would have punished Labour much earlier than actually happened: the miners' strike was in 1984-85, but according to Mr Weir, the voters waited 30 years (until 2015) to notice. And when they did so, they elected as their MSP Jeane Freeman – who had been at the heart of Labour policy making before turning her coat. (For what it is worth, I blame the decline of Labour in Scotland on a catastrophic failure in its politics surrounding the 2014 independence referendum, rather than its local and UK polices.)

Mr Galloway is even more fanciful: he suggests that the Yes vote in the 2014 referendum would have banished poverty from Scotland forever.

Here is some news to him from the real world. A Yes vote would have meant Scotland leaving the EU as well as the UK in March 2016 (evidence: the letter from Viviane Reding, Vice-President of the European Commission to the Scottish Parliament of March 2014); there would have been no currency union with the remainder UK (evidence: repeated statements of UK Government); Scotland's revenues would not have benefited from oil at the fictional price of $113 per barrel (evidence: today's price $76); and Scottish public services would be worse off by an annual sum of more than £10 billion redistributed from the rest of the UK (evidence: the SNP Scottish Government's GERS publications). All of these factors would have had a disastrous effect on the economy, and made poverty in Scotland both much more acute and much more widespread.

In contrast, Mr Galloway (and Mr Weir and the rest of the SNP and its dupes) offer the fairy dust of independence, underpinned by wishful thinking and best-case scenarios. We have had to put up with too much magical thinking from the the Nationalists, and it is time that they were brought to account for their failings at Holyrood as much as the Tories at Westminster.

Peter A Russell,

87 Munro Road, Jordanhill, Glasgow.