Readers' letters: Labour must start to bat for Scotland

Edinburgh Sketcher - Where Art I? 8 August 2022

Ian Murray (August 4) says Labour “knows and understands the struggles of real people.” Really?

Is that why Sir Keir Starmer fired shadow transport minister Sam Tarry for the crime of standing with RMT workers on the picket line and saying “it was not acceptable to offer below-inflation pay rises” to workers because, duh, that means a pay cut?

Starmer’s inept reason for firing Tarry was he was “making up policy on the hoof.” If advocating for workers, especially during an economic meltdown, is something Labour politicians shouldn’t be doing, then what’s their purpose?

Starmer has completely neutered Labour. He whipped his party to vote for Johnson’s hard Brexit deal that is tanking the economy. He has broken every Labour manifesto pledge, most notably to take water, mail, rail and energy back into public ownership. He won’t ditch the first past the post voting system, used by just one other European nation – Belorus, that disenfranchises the majority and entrenches minority rule.

Murray reverts to his default mode of criticising the Scottish Government, this time for not being able to raise the additional money to help struggling families, omitting the fact he didn’t support a bill that would have given Holyrood the fiscal powers to make this possible.

Give it a rest, Ian. Labour’s northern branch will never wield power in Scotland again unless it breaks from London and decides to bat for Scotland.

Leah Gunn Barrett, Edinburgh.

Drug death rates are still shocking

Elizabeth Scott (letters 30 July) in the face of the announcement there were 1330 drug misuse deaths in Scotland for 2021 wants to know "why blame Holyrood".

Lest Ms Scott forgets, Nicola Sturgeon, SNP leader of the Scottish Government said after the publication of the 2020 record, "we took our eye off the ball" - there you have it in black and white, simple.

Labour's drugs spokeswoman in Holyrood, meanwhile, does have her eye on the ball and said “Every single one of these deaths is a personal tragedy and a political scandal. Year after year we hear the same apologies and promises, but platitudes don’t save lives"

No wonder the SNP want a single issue election, but they could run and not hide from the fact 1330 people lost their lives to drug misuse in Scotland in 2021.

It means Scotland retains the title of Europe's drug death capital, with a rate almost four times higher than the next, Norway, a country Sturgeon and co say we should aspire to.

Douglas McBean, Edinburgh.

Will voting Truss bring back Boris?

The show of hands from the Conservative Party members who made up the audience at the Sky leadership debate overwhelmingly favoured Rishi Sunak.

A post-debate Telegraph poll showed he had edged it by 54 per cent to 46 per cent and the Times's online poll currently shows 89 per cent favouring Sunak.

The debate also gave us a new term, Truss-splaining, which will need no "mansplaining" for anyone witnessing the Foreign Secretary's rambling, evasive, often patronising answers to audience and moderator questions on her astounding public sector pay and other U-turns and ropey grasp of economics.

But despite all this she is still apparently a dead cert to become Prime Minister, which makes me wonder if the conspiracy theory that a fifth column of members want her to be leader because she will crash and burn and they can get Boris back is true.

Allan Sutherland, Stonehaven.

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