Letters: May's SNP tax jibe an example of hypocrisy that is beyond belief

Prof Alston highlighted that 14 million people in the UK live in poverty, four million of these are more than 50 per cent below the poverty line, and 1.5 million are destitute and unable to afford basic essentials – figures he described as a disgrace.

The UN Special Rapporteur acknowledged that devolved administrations such as the SNP in Holyrood have tried to mitigate the worst aspects of austerity, despite experiencing significant reductions in block grant funding and limits on their ability to raise revenue. He found it outrageous that these administrations are having to spend resources to shield people from Tory policies.

What was particularly damning was Prof Alston’s conclusion, namely that poverty in the UK since 2010 has been a political choice. At the last budget, he said, resources were available to the Treasury that could have transformed the situation of millions of people living in poverty, but the political choice made by the Tory Government was to fund tax cuts for the wealthy instead. Utterly shameful.

David Williamson,

3 Rosebery Place, Dunbar.

SCOTLAND is certainly ill-prepared for the SNP dream of independence.

You report that the full transfer of welfare powers has been delayed yet again because the Scottish replacement for the DWP is still incomplete ("Devolved welfare delayed to 2024", The Herald, March 10. For how many more years must this sort of departmental incompetence continue? So much for the claim made in his day by former First Minister Alex Salmond that "he could set up an independent country within 18 months".

The proposed merger of the Scottish branch of the British Transport Police, and Police Scotland, has been abandoned in the meantime due to administrative problems, and safety fears.

So it seems that the SNP administration is good at criticising everyone else but is well off the mark in what it has been entrusted with to date. Of course, it is only by kowtowing to the largely-unelected Green Party that it can get legislation passed in any case.

It might help matters if political decisions were truly subjected to debate in the Scottish Parliament, but most of the time is taken up with statements from ministers, which have been prepared by spin doctors working for the administration.

And of course Nicola Sturgeon appears to think that she is a VIP on the international stage – she globe trots off as if the Scottish Government is a key member of the EU, United Nations or Nato. Scotland is still, thankfully, a integral part of the UK.

Robert IG Scott,

Northfield, Ceres, Fife.

Read more: Devolved benefits delayed

SPECULATION is growing about just what Nicola Sturgeon will call for when she eventually makes her feelings known on a second independence referendum. Perhaps she will demand both an article 30 order (which would give her the power to call a referendum), or failing that, an election to get a new mandate for independence, knowing in advance what the answer will be to both.

The main point would be to seek to get double the grievance by getting turned down twice. After all, arguably the last thing Nicola Sturgeon actually wants is to have that referendum and get a resounding No.

Keith Howell,

White Moss, West Linton, Peeblesshire.

I AGREE completely with Alan Morris’s comments (Letters, March 1) on Jill Stephenson’s letter (February 28). However, there is more to be said about Ms Stephenson’s claim that she “does not recall massive support for independence in the 1990s”.

The concealment of the McCrone report for 30 years was, as Mr Morris argues, “nothing short of wilful deception by Westminster and the Scottish Office”. He presents the voting history at the time succinctly and accurately but let’s suppose that somewhere in the Civil Service there had been a brave soul – a Clive Ponting for Scotland – who, so appalled that the Scottish electorate should be deceived in this way, leaked the report to a sympathetic journalist. Had this happened, I think that Ms Stephenson would have been unable to miss the “massive support for independence”, but 20 years earlier in the 1970s. The late Denis Healey suggested as much in a Holyrood magazine interview in 2013.

To take a few examples, McCrone advises in his report that a Scottish currency would be “the hardest in Europe with the possible exception of the Norwegian Kroner”. That within a couple of years, Scots could exchange their Scottish pounds for £1.20 sterling. That, after years of balance of payments deficit crisis in the UK, Scotland’s balance of payments would be in “substantial and chronic surplus”. That, oil revenues might be used for instance to fund a tax credit that would provide a negative tax to those on low incomes. Alternatively – or as well as – to support investment in manufacturing to create a high productivity, high wage economy for the future.

In 1978 when Labour defended the Garscadden constituency in a by-election, during the campaign SNP estimates of the value of North Sea oil were derided as not just wrong and exaggerated, but delusional and misleading to the point of being lies. However, McCrone notes in his report that really all that was wrong with the SNP estimate was “that it is far too low”. And Unionist activists continue this practice.

Two days ago, a well-known Unionist blogger claimed the McCrone report set out “in stark terms why Scottish independence would be bad for Scots”. That claim is of course not only wrong it is precisely wrong, the opposite of the truth, as McCrone’s own conclusion states unequivocally that “for the first time since the Act of Union was passed, it can now be credibly argued that Scotland’s economic advantage lies in its repeal”.

Whatever support for independence there was in the 1990s, it is hard to deny that had the McCrone report been in the public domain at the time it was written that there would have been the “massive support for independence” Ms Stephenson refers to, but 20 years earlier.

McCrone’s report gives us a very clear window into the degree that Westminster has lied to us already. What good reason do we have to believe that, having done so to this degree once, they have not done so again since, and don’t continue to do so?

Alasdair Galloway,

14 Silverton Avenue, Dumbarton.