I CONFESS to a touch of Schadenfreude at reading of Nicola Sturgeon avoiding answering a question about the £600,000 donated to the SNP to fund a second referendum campaign (“SNP rejects claim donations may have been spent on HQ refurbishment" , The Herald, July 26).

She say she is “not concerned with the party’s finances", by which I assume she means she is not concerned in the sense of worried by them, because as party leader she must have been concerned in the sense of involved with them. She then spins away from answering the serious question as to what has happened to the £600,000 by telling us instead that the SNP finances are “independently audited" and that “there’s full scrutiny around that". Of course all that that means is that the party’s finances are simply subject to the normal requirements of auditing them, which would not involve detailing where all or any of the £600,000 has gone .

What the audit has revealed, which is why she is being questioned, is that the SNP had just £97,000 in the bank out of total net assets of only £272,000. Simple arithmetic shows that some or all of the £600,000 has vanished, presumably spent, but on what? Ms Sturgeon’s attempt at obfuscation rather than clarification illustrates a contempt for both the donors and the transparency under which the SNP claims to operate. It is high time for her to own up and tell the donors where their money has gone. What has she got to hide.

Alan Fitzpatrick, Dunlop?

THE UNTRUTHS FROM WESTMINSTER

TODAY’S missive from Guy Stenhouse takes the SNP Government to task for presenting half-truths as facts ("Truth is out there and it is time to rip up guide book", The Herald, July 26). There is a certain irony in this, inasmuch as he is happy to ignore complete untruths from his friends at Westminster.

I seem to remember that there was a solution to the social security funding crisis ready to leap into action as soon as the 2019 election was won. Two years on, we know that there never was a plan. We were to enrol 50,000 extra nurses, although the small print stated that many of them were already in post and were to be encouraged not to leave the NHS. Burn-out and an initial insulting one per cent pay offer will ensure that the current nursing shortage continues or worsens.

Don’t get me started on the 2019 manifesto commitment to give 0.7% of GDP as foreign aid. As long as the readers of the tabloids think that charity begins at home, such commitments can be binned.

Sam Craig, Glasgow.

SNP MUST BE MORE PROACTIVE

IT is now two long years since Boris Johnson came to power. During this time, with the disaster of Brexit and the grave mismanagement of Covid, he and his toxic Government have been embroiled in scandals, sleaze and cronyism. As Prime Minister Mr Johnson has been an utter failure and is perhaps best described as a man of cheerful deceit.

It is now time for the cautious, career-structured SNP to be more proactive about independence as well as containing Covid. Unionist politicians continually talk up the Union. Let us remember that Brexit was done during the height of the pandemic.

With Tory grand designs of British national power separate from Europe as in the days of Rule Britannia, Scotland must look to the happy and successful Nordic nations and become a fully independent country again, working and trading with the British Isles, Europe and the world.

Grant Frazer, Newtonmore.

JAVID WAS WRONG TO APOLOGISE

I FIND it so disappointing that the UK Health Secretary felt that he had to apologise for offending society’s politically correct faction (“Javid apologises after backlash over ‘cower’ coronavirus tweet”, The Herald, July 26).

While I can agree with Sajid Javid’s critics that many people may be shielding from possibly contracting Covid for perfectly sensible reasons such as underlying health conditions, still, I strongly suspect that a nationwide survey would return the finding that lots of people are indeed cowering in fear from the possibility of contracting Covid 19 – and lots aren’t.

Mr Javid actually said in his tweet: “Please, if you haven’t yet, get your jab, as we learn to live with, rather than cower from this virus.”

Perfectly legitimate, realistic and fair comment; but as usual, the politically correct read into this whatever notions will feed their emotionally-influenced false outrage at straight thinking.

Philip Adams, Crosslee.

SCOTLAND DOING BETTER ON COVID

REGINA Erich (Letters, July 26) should know that the reason Scotland has a more efficient and cheaper Protect Scotland app is because the UK Government spent £10 billion on a useless system that was abandoned in June 2020 and a further £25 billion on a new contract tracing app that lost track of 550 million Covid tests and failed to reach 100,000 people who had tested positive.

The National Audit Office spending watchdog concluded that the system, run by Tory peer Dido Harding, was still failing to “deliver value for taxpayers”, with a lack of any targets for self-isolation by the public and a continued reliance on private consultants.

Thanks to Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership, and our much better-performing NHS, Scotland has achieved more vaccinations per head of population than in England or Wales. We also have a proportionately lower number of Covid cases and deaths than in England, despite being hampered by the poor decision-making of Boris Johnson that has allowed Covid to run riot throughout the UK and destroyed thousands of lives and businesses.

Mary Thomas, Edinburgh.

DISMAL FAILURE ON VACCINATIONS

NICOLA Sturgeon's continued spin surely can't continue to hide the dismal failure of her Covid performance on vaccinations and track and trace. The SNP approach to almost everything it touches is to ignore the stats and spin everything using its army of PR people to ensure that everything is made to look as if it is doing a good job.

A year ago my own track and trace experience was a shambles and achieved nothing, and it is still a shambles with no discernible improvement in meeting targets. My vaccination was way behind my age group in England and my second jabpushed out to the latest limit of 12 weeks despite having half a million jabs in reserve; the programme it is still stalling today.

It costs twice as much to get tested in Scotland if you return from abroad with no discernible benefit from the extra cost. Spin and rhetoric just don't cut it, Scotland needs politicians whose prime priority is the benefit of its citizens, not a delusional obsession with constitutional change.

Bill Adair, Renfrewshire.

NHS IS NOT BEING PRIVATISED

GAVIN Tait (Letters, July 26) is correct when he says that the opening of the Titanium “surgical factory”, by leasing an empty commercial building by BMI at Braehead, is good news. However, much of the rest of his analysis is questionable, to say the least.

First, he claims that this initiative “shows what can be done with some imagination, quite contrary to the slow pace and high costs of the long-delayed NHS elective centres”, but this is not an accurate comparison. Had the elective centres been open in March last year, what does Mr Tait imagine they might have been used for, if not the treatment of Covid patients? Does he think that doctors and surgeons would have left hospitals under the most tremendous strain to undertake private work? I know of at least one surgeon who suspended his private practice during the pandemic, and I am sure there were a great many others. In short, the elective centres would not have been doing much elective surgery even if open last year.

However, let’s consider motivation. Why has BMI decided to spend £20 million leasing additional space, as well as incurring the additional cost of fitting it out, if not because it sees the possibility of profit? Yes, BMI’s initiative will have a positive impact on health in Scotland, but it can't be expected to, and is not doing it for nothing. Eventually lists will decline to a manageable level, and what will happen to the Titanium “surgical factory” then? Perhaps the same thing as happened to the Louisa Jordan – once the NHS is no longer sending it patients, it will be closed.

To suggest that a private sector facility, created to contribute to reducing waiting lists that have grown enormously during a pandemic, represents the “privatisation of the NHS” is a considerable exaggeration. Were we talking about the sort of changes Andrew Lansley introduced in England, which are now being undone, he might be on to something. He is right that the “Scottish NHS as structured will never clear the Covid surgical backlog” on its own, and therefore a private sector provider having identified a business opportunity will come in to relieve the strain. However, as demands decline to more normal levels, we can expect the private sector to substitute the “surgical factory” for a more profitable venture. It’s what they do.

Alasdair Galloway, Dumbarton.

Read more: It is now clear that the NHS as we know it will cease to exist