Herald on Sunday letters: what readers are talking about this week

The price of just one of those cruise missiles would buy thousands of intensive care beds, ventilators and medical PPE kits. On current estimates the three subs still being built will cost circa £1.8 billion each. Equivalent to three new NHS hospitals.

For decades, governments have neglected the NHS while funding hugely expensive luxuries including weapons of mass destruction and high-speed rail links. Will Covid-19 create a change of priorities?

My son works in a supermarket. He has a letter to show the police as he walks to work. It says he is an essential worker. How many barristers, bankers, estate agents, lawyers, politicians or stockbrokers have one of those letters?

As his partner uses an inhaler and my son is in close proximity to hundreds of potentially infected people every day, they should be following Government advice to self-isolate within the home. How can you do that when, even with the public handouts which subsidise our poverty wage culture, you can only afford to rent a tiny flat?

When this pandemic subsides, there should be a quiet revolution to put people before profits. To give nurses, cleaners, shop workers and many more at least that £2,500 a month included in current emergency measures.

It is more likely that those now relying on the lowest-paid to provide food or nurse them back to health will come out of comfortable isolation and capitalise on the financial recovery. Despite the deaths of thousands of pensioners, survivors will be made to wait until they are 70 or 71 to get the state pension. Taxpayers will face higher bills to cover Covid-19 costs and continued payments for lethal luxuries like Audacious and her sisters.

Those who take such decisions should not be surprised if we throw them out of office.

John F Robins Dumbarton

Practise what you preach, Iain

I AM a great admirer of Iain Macwhirter’s well-reasoned articles in The Herald on Sunday. I was therefore very disappointed with his “Testing times …” column (Voices, April 5). Herd immunity is a well-established immunological principle, not a policy of this or any other government. The fact that Dominic Cummings may see it as a form of social engineering is totally different from the basic principle of the immunology.

Iain states that journalists spend too much time following politicians on Twitter. Perhaps he should take this to heart, sign off Twitter, and look at some reliable medical information such as the World Health Organisation or The Lancet. In both, he would find opinions which differ considerably from those on herd immunity and face masks expounded in his column.

A week earlier in the same publication (March 29), he stated “… it really doesn’t help when journalists start contradicting medical experts without good reason”. Perhaps Iain should spend a little less time writing and a little more reading his own columns.

David McAllister Tain

Hypocrisy is always there

When Prince Charles and Camilla came up from Clarence House to their royal residence at Balmoral, they breached Government guidelines to stay at home during this pandemic.

None of the acceptable reasons for travelling applied to Prince Charles. His sense of entitlement was laid bare. It was hardly necessary travel.

One day earlier, BBC News had highlighted affluent Londoners moving to their cottages in Cornwall and threatening vulnerable areas. Indeed, in the Queen’s broadcast, she paid tribute to our resilience in staying at home.

At a time when key NHS staff had not been tested, and when thousands may needlessly be self-isolating at home, Prince Charles, and those around him, were tested at home. He had mild symptoms, yet the NHS Scotland website warned “only patients with a serious illness, which required hospital admission, would be tested at home”.

At the time, I thought Chief Medical Officer Dr Catherine Calderwood had performed contortions as she pointed out he was in a vulnerable group so needed a test. I put it down to her desire to ensure the MBE.

Now we know she shared his sense of entitlement and feeling she was above the rest of us – a hypocrite indeed.

John V Lloyd Inverkeithing

The world must protect the poorest

In David Pratt’s article last week (World View, April 5), he wrote “how deeply interconnected the world’s populations are” and of “the moral imperative that exists to assist those most in need in overcoming the onslaught they now face”.

Though hard times will be faced by many in the UK during this pandemic we are fortunate enough to have many safety nets to protect even the most vulnerable.

This is not the case in Sub-Saharan Africa. Already living a hand-to-mouth existence, surviving by working to pay for food for that day, if governments close any means of generating that income there is an immediate impact on survival.

Some African governments have not taken early isolation action, possibly recognising the effect it would have on the survival of the very poorest, yet we know from countries like Italy and the USA that delay is deadly.

African governments do have an obligation to help the poorest in this difficult time, and, as Rwanda is doing, offer free food and water as a minimum. They should also rigidly stick to science-based decision making – this pandemic has no respect for religious establishments.

We have a moral duty to support those most in need across the world. Sanctions affecting health provision should be temporarily lifted. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund should postpone, even eliminate, debt payments. Funding should be reserved by them to supply vital health support services and equipment.

We’re all in this together, and history must show that in the end mankind rose above selfish nationalistic interest.

Paul Shaw Dunblane

Pensions – the last word

Douglas Morton writes again on pensions (Letters, April 5). I may not have made it clear that according to the Office for National Statistics, just 1.5 million (11%) of those working in the private sector who are paying into a pension scheme are in a generous final salary scheme while in the public sector the figure is 5.2 million workers (92%).

Businesses could not afford the cost of final salary schemes and introduced defined contribution schemes with lower costs to the employer.

Mr Morton asks if my definition of a gold-plated pension is one which is larger than I get. I note he has a company pension. Gold plated? Final salary, or defined benefit, pensions are considered gold plated because they promise to pay a secure, index-linked income for life.

Contrast this, which most public-sector employees get, with the private sector now where most workers get defined contribution pensions, where there is far less certainty over what income they will receive in retirement.

Clark Cross Linlithgow

Douglas Morton insists not all public-sector pensions are taxpayer-funded. Er ... what? All outgoings (including wages and employer pension contributions) of public-sector organisations come out of the public purse.

So, when a public-sector employee pays 6% of their salary into their pension, and their employer pays sometimes upwards of 20% into said pension, who ultimately funds that employer contribution? Yes, you’ve got it. You and me ... the taxpayer.

In essence, every single last one of us shelves out from our own taxes to fund contributions that the majority of us could never hope to receive ourselves, into the pensions of a lucky minority who go on to receive relative sums in retirement that the majority of us could never dream of. Gold plated? You bet.

This is nothing to do with me having less than someone else – it’s simply a matter of fundamental unfairness. Imagine if the minority we’re talking about were business fat cats, and the taxpayer was expected to fund these levels of pension contributions for them, while knowing they would never receive the same contributions themselves. I wonder if in that case Mr Morton would still be so keen to leap to their defence.

Let’s stop trying to pretend that everything is fine and come together to call for reform of an obviously broken and institutionally unfair system.

Dave Anderson Dundee

So annoying, so Pointless

If your correspondent (Letters, April 5) wants to get really apoplectic about the misuse of the conjunction “so”, he should watch an edition of the BBC’s Pointless programme where it can be guaranteed that at least one contestant announces along the lines of “So I am Keith a bricklayer from Halifax” and other cringe-making utterances.

John Love Glasgow