Letters: How can Starmer, Rayner and the rest sleep at night?

The breathtaking mercenary “mind thyself” behaviour of the previous inner sanctum at Westminster is being matched by the current nest of vipers.

We are being drip-fed tales of multi-thousand-pound clothing gifts, Taylor Swift concert tickets, Cornish and Manhattan holidays and horrendously expensive elite boxes at football matches. There are several snouts in this particular trough vainly trying to justify this totally unacceptable behaviour.

Sharp-nosed business people, those seeking to be ennobled and those with a specific business interest are clearly seeking to pursue a particular agenda and to receive something in return for the “gifts”. It seems to be blatantly obvious to all but those in receipt of such goods who surely cannot be that naive.

How can these millionaires sleep at night when they take multi-thousand-pound “gifts” and claim over £1,000 for second home heating allowances at a time when they have cynically removed a £300 winter heating allowance from the most vulnerable and defenceless in our society?

Whatever your political persuasion, take a moment and consider the public outcry if this was occurring with Holyrood ministers.

The sooner Scotland extricates itself from this mess, the better.

Stewart Falconer, Alyth.

We must tax the freebies

AS you report ("Rayner promised ‘nothing in return’ to wealthy donor who paid for holiday", The Herald, September 23), Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has confirmed what I would call the bleeding obvious, if not the scale and variety, namely that “MPs have been accepting donations for years", “donations for gifts and hospitality and monetary donations have been a feature of our politics for a very long time" and “all MPs do it". So that’s all right then? No it isn’t if it is not processed correctly.

Ms Rayner made no mention of any personal tax liability arising calculated on the value of these freebies which the MPs have received quite obviously only because of their employment. Surely that means the freebies fall squarely into the category of “benefits in kind", requiring the recipients to declare them to HMRC in their annual tax return and pay whatever tax liability that creates? If not, why not, as failure to do so would appear to me to amount to deliberate tax evasion for which ignorance can be no excuse to the hard-hearted HMRC?

Perhaps a charted accountant among your readership would care to comment?

Alan Fitzpatrick, Dunlop.

Read more letters

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What happened to democracy?

BACK on this day five years ago, you carried a letter from me with these observations on the state of the global distribution of wealth: “The wealthy have $32 trillion stashed away in tax havens, a fraction of which would eradicate world poverty... it would appear that the “Global Elite” have hidden away from taxation the equivalent of roughly half the annual global GDP. Approximately 100,000 millionaires own these accounts with somewhat less than 100 multi-billionaires holding the lion’s share. If one bears in mind the UK national debt is roughly £1.8 trillion and the country pays 8% of tax revenue, the equivalent of 4% of GDP, simply to service this debt one gets a sense of just how skewed global wealth is”.

Since 2019 the only change is that things have got worse. The quality of life for most UK citizens has deteriorated, the UK national debt is now £3 trillion. According to Oxfam, since 2020 the distribution of newly-created wealth has been so distorted that the top 1% of humanity has appropriated over 63% of all of it. During this period for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90 per cent, each billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million (£1.4m). Some suggest that one of the super-rich billionaires will soon become the world’s first trillionaire. The media laud them as they play at being spacemen while people starve.

Bearing these facts in mind, for anybody in Westminster to suggest that there are insufficient funds to give pensioners enough money to heat their homes is a disgrace. That they assert that the worst state pension in Europe is all we can afford, that the NHS has to be privatised to save it and we all have to suffer more austerity when there is and can be no shortage of money with a fiat currency and the rich are demonstrably getting richer, is an insult to the intelligence. Unfortunately a significant portion of the electorate seems to lack this gift.

To my mind the progressively distorted distribution of wealth in the UK clearly demonstrates the function that Westminster is programmed to follow irrespective of what colour of rosette the MP who is accepting the freebies decides to wear. Whatever happened to democracy?

David J Crawford, Glasgow.

They deceived the electorate

PEOPLE voted Labour in Scotland to get the Tories out. They did not vote for austerity or for privatisation of the NHS or for a Tory-lite Labour administration. There is also roughly 50% support for independence in Scotland. But Labour deceived the electorate by promising "change". Now it is presenting ongoing austerity as the future.

Labour's popularity is plummeting. Its austerity transfers wealth to the top and strips public services ready for privatisation. It is averse to wealth taxes and to investing in the economy and jobs. But it’s OK for Keir Starmer, a millionaire, to get gifts of clothes and trips. Labour Scottish Secretary Ian Murray, who stated that the last government could leave around 4,000 “pensioners freezing to death” by cutting back on the winter fuel payment, is now happy to support the cut.

The Scottish Government’s budget is being cut drastically by Westminster. It must balance the budget (unlike Westminster). But it has some leeway on how. The neoliberal way damages us and will also strengthen the extreme Reform UK. There needs to be an anti -austerity agenda in Scotland using tax powers, for example council tax and land, action on climate change for a stronger economy, and on housing, wherever possible. We need a campaign on the taking of Scottish renewables by Westminster, while those in Scotland face the highest energy bills in the UK.

But ministers’ actions require scrutiny: for example scrutiny of why Neil Gray buddies up to Wes Streeting, who wants the privatisation of the NHS, and of the economic decisions of Kate Forbes.

Pol Yates, Edinburgh.

Will Labour walk the walk?

SO we have “free” specs for Keir Starmer. Perhaps if Anas Sarwar had some and could see the performance of his party in government in Wales, he would not be so quick to complain about Scotland’s far-better-run NHS and education system. I would personally have run Scotland very differently from the SNP since 2014, but I cannot think of any fiscal allocation (wages, NHS, local government, education, roads, houses and more) made by the Scottish Government where Labour did not insist the SNP should have doled out even more.

So it will be interesting when Labour has to lay out its plans for government in 2026, what it will cut to fund its programme and who it can attract to partner it in a coalition (of four minority parties?). Of course Labour won’t have to wait till 2026 as it can, with its EU-separatist allies, bring down the Scottish Government over the budget. Will Labour walk the walk, or is it just empty talk?

GR Weir, Ochiltree.

Scottish Secretary Ian Murray (Image: PA)

Unwelcome diversion

I CONGRATULATE Duncan Sooman on his letter (September 21) in which he suggests that there is “more to life than independence”.

I refer specifically to what is happening in Ukraine, Gaza and the West Bank, not to mention the plight of those in other countries such as Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Haiti and Sudan, to name far too few out of many, many more countries in which suffering arising out of conflict and oppression exacerbated by climate change is apparently beyond our imagining.

The nationalists who write so frequently and repetitively to the Letters Pages ought to reflect on the extent to which they divert our disquiet away from issues of much more humanitarian concern.

John Milne, Uddingston.

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Where will it all end?

ONGOING conflict between countries just now reminds me of the old nursery rhyme:

There once were two cats of Kilkenny

Each thought there was one cat too many

So they bit and they tore

And they fought more and more

Till instead of two cats There weren’t any.

No, I don’t know how to solve it either.

Irene Burn, Glasgow.