This is, of course, a time of reflection.

Yesterday one of our correspondents looked back on what has been a traumatic year for the SNP (read that letter here), but today a reader casts his mind back beyond 2023, and gives a damning verdict on the Tories’ austerity problems.

Fraser McAllister of Musselburgh writes:

“My local food bank is now issuing blankets to users who can eat or heat but not both. The Scottish Ambulance Service says it is rescuing people with hypothermia - not from mountain tops but from their living rooms. These facts make the latest stats from the NRS (National Records of Scotland) easier to grasp: more people died last winter than in the previous 33.

"People are not coping and are mistakenly blaming themselves for their poverty, their distress, debt and inability to pay for life’s essentials. East Lothian piloted Universal Credit, the harshest UK social security system ever devised. Officers reported advising residents who were hungry or getting into rent arrears for the first time. In 2018 BBC TV interviewed a quiet, respectable, disabled man in the Highlands about the changes. He softly explained that when he had no money and no food by the fourth week he drank gallons of water and went to bed to keep warm. Really?

"This year a Glasgow University research team proved the austerity programme of David Cameron (net wealth £40 million) caused 335,000 excess deaths across the UK between 2012 and 2019. The UN called Personal Independence Payments (PIP) to disabled people a violation of human rights, branding them "cruel, inhuman and ideological). It has yet to comment on Rishi Sunak (net wealth £730m) and his "Back to Work" plan which cuts benefits for the long-term sick and disabled until they become productive. Inequality is a political choice. For our weak and "undeserving" the decision is destitution and early death.

"Anyone unconvinced of the natural cruelty of this smiling, plutocratic mob maybe missed the remarks caught by the Covid Inquiry: 'just let people die' and 'let the bodies pile up'. Scotland had the chance to escape their sadism in 2014. Yes posters spelt it out in capital letters: 'END TORY RULE - FOREVER' .We blew it."

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