Letters: Why can't the Tories see their cruelty makes no sense?

Now consider the recent dire predictions on the state of the NHS. Difficulties in getting GP appointments, excessive waiting times and the rest of that catalogue of massive staff shortages, worse, even, in England than in Scotland, and the prospect of years before new doctors, nurses and others are trained to fill the vacancies.

So now, having chosen to leave the EU and sent thousands of fully-trained workers back to Europe, they suddenly decide to start looking around the world for recruits to fill the gap. Yet they cannot join the dots and see the solution staring them in the face.

Amongst the thousands reaching our shores could well be a large enough number of fully-qualified doctors, nurses, care workers, teachers, and other trained professionals to fill all the vacancies fast. But because they are desperate enough to part with their life savings to criminals to reach safety by an unauthorised route, our new Home Secretary ignores this opportunity to benefit our own economy and services and is delighted to have the chance to make them suffer even more.

I myself know some Ukrainians who have been here for only about three months and are already working and helping to fill gaps in social work and the like.

Why is plain logic so foreign to these Tories and to what depths of cruelty – and international law-breaking – will they not be happy to sink?
L McGregor, Falkirk

• I HEAVED a real sigh of relief when Priti Patel resigned her post as Home Secretary. Thank goodness, I thought, that has to be a good thing. Now surely we will get someone with a modicum of human empathy and decency. How wrong I was.

Suella Braverman is every bit as ghastly as her predecessor. She also intends to jail and then deport desperate refugees to Rwanda. Do these children of immigrants themselves forget that their relatives were welcomed into the UK and given a home and a chance to make a life for themselves and their families? It would seem so. How absolutely tragic. Shame on her.
Celia Judge, Ayr

• IT is morally repugnant to asset-strip poorer countries of health staff both qualified and promising ("Overseas recruitment drive to save NHS this winter", The Herald October 5). The Scottish Government has sought to claim moral high ground, but this claim is flawed.
Dr William Durward, Bearsden

So different from the rest

IN her speech to the Tory conference yesterday, when the Prime Minister talked about opening her first pay packet, nothing for me highlighted more the difference between some Tories (like Liz Truss for example) and most of the rest of us. She said how annoyed she was to discover how much tax she had paid. My first payslip's bottom line said £9 12s 9d. I remember how delighted I was to be a 17-year-old wage earner, in 1967, just starting out on a new and exciting career. I remember that sum well, but I have no idea how much tax I paid.

I still have that payslip somewhere in the loft in a box of ephemera, but I won't be climbing the ladder to look for it.
John Jamieson, Ayr

They're fooling nobody

WHO do Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng think they are fooling with their "we have listened and changed our plan" lines?

The proper government conduct in a representative democracy is surely to consider the electorate prior to acting, not after. What we have in London is a power elite pushing the boundaries to see how big a glass they can serve up to the wealthy and how little needs to trickle down to the rest.

How far will they go before we all want to get Scotland out of this toxic Union?
Ni Holmes, St Andrews

Another lament

I OFFER a second verse to the ditty from John Boyle (Letters, October 5) and invite a third from a better-skilled wordsmith.

Up and spake young Michael Gove,

With knife clapsed in his knieve,

For the prime he had no love,

And lasting post did not conceive.
Michael Sheridan, Glasgow

SNP can only boast about freebies

READING the SNP's 100-point list of "achievements" over the last 15 years which it put out earlier this year we could be forgiven for believing that we are living in the land of milk and honey which it has delivered despite the "limited powers and budgets of devolution". Despite this, those who support devolution continue with their outpouring of discontent directed at the UK Government which they claim has reduced Scotland to the status of some benighted, down-trodden colony. How can it be that such apparent contradictions apply to the same country?

The realities lie in plain sight for those of us who are unshackled by nationalistic dogma. After 15 years at the helm, all Nicola Sturgeon's administration truly has to show for its devolved power are a paltry collection of people-pleasing freebie policies such as toll-free bridges, baby boxes, prescriptions, free bus travel for the young and old, tuition fees and sanitary products. The rest of its much-trumpeted "accomplishments" are in fact abject failures.

While poverty, drug abuse and deaths and homelessness have reached appallingly high levels, we have simultaneously seen education, health care and waiting lists and policing policies stagnate and decline. The nation's productivity has slumped so that our GDP is eight per cent lower than the UK's and there have been multiple spectacular investment failures. To cap all this we have even lost the freedom of speech thanks to its hate crime legislation. Scotland does however have the dubious distinction of having been the first country in the world to declare a climate emergency, even though it is responsible for just 0.15% of global emissions

The word "disgraceful" scarcely describes the SNP's lamentable litany of failures that diminish us in the eyes of the world.
Neil J Bryce, Kelso

Things are bad, and getting worse

THERE is little or nothing to get excited about in the news today (October 4). The Tories are in open revolt at their conference in Birmingham, 999 emergency call handlers are to strike with BT colleagues, the trains are on strike over the weekend, Calmac ferries continue to break down, gas and electricity prices are at an all-time high, teachers and university lecturers are threatening to strike, the Rest and be Thankful is still not safe to use after the millions spent on it, and we're told of a brain drain of senior officers in Police Scotland due to retirals.

Yes, things are bleak and with the onset of winter and an increase in Covid cases it can only get worse.
Neil Stewart, Balfron

Labour is committed to PR

ADAM Tomkins ("Be bold, Sir Keir: this is your chance to break the mould", The Herald, October 5) is of course absolutely correct that the radical change the UK constitution requires is the introduction of proportional representation for Scotland's UK Parliament. What he fails to mention in his recommendation that a Keir Starmer government should be responsible for that reform is that just a few weeks ago, the Labour Party's own conference agreed both that PR should be introduced and that this should be included in its next General Election manifesto. This means that it could not be opposed by its own backbenchers, or by the House of Lords and would not require a referendum.

Sounds good to me.
Peter A Russell, Glasgow

Read more letters: If you really want growth, give more money to the poor

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