JEREMY Corbyn has ruled out forming an alliance government with the SNP should the Tories not have their predicted overall majority in Westminster after the General Election (Nicola Sturgeon: Tory attempt to block indyref2 will ‘crumble to dust’ if SNP win election, The National, Thursday April 20).
Scots intending to vote Labour should study the UK Tory manifesto carefully as Labour have just agreed that the Tories no longer need to win to remain in power, a minority Tory Government would be acceptable to Labour.
Why would Jeremy Corbyn be willing to sacrifice the opportunity of becoming Prime Minister in favour of Theresa May’s return to Downing Street for, at least, the next five years?
The only sensible conclusion is that the Labour hierarchy believes that real Labour policy has more in common with the Tories than the SNP.
The Unionist parties have made it clear that Scotland is welcome in their precious Union only as long as long as it knows its place, which is not at the top table.
Maggie Jamieson
South Queensferry
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The anti-SNP vote should be careful what it wishes for
IF Clark Cross is so virulently anti-SNP that he’d rather see anybody else at all succeed come June, then presumably he’s perfectly happy with the bedroom tax, the rape clause, benefits sanctions (and the consequent food banks, clothing banks and homelessness); with cuts to support for young learners and trainees; with threats to our already-meagre old-age pensions; and with threats to human rights and workplace regulation (Letters, The National, April 20).
Or, he might be equally happy to find himself under a Labour Party which has yet to even begin to find a way out of the neo-liberal maze into which Blair and Brown led it, and rediscover its social principles and conscience.
As for the SNP MPs, I’ve been, if anything, rather disappointed by the relatively low level of noise, uproar and general “misbehaviour” since most of them were elected – I was rather looking forward to them becoming much more of a thorn in the side of an ossified, complacent and essentially rigged institution which barely manages to pay lip service to its supposed purpose – to govern in the best interests of all.
As the most immediate case, the General Election shows the government isn’t even acting in government interests; this is all about the internal power balance of the Tory Party. We can only hope that May makes as big a mess of this as she has of everything else she’s done in the last seven years.
Colin Stuart
Saline, Fife
I SEE Clark Cross is, using his own word, “stridently” trolling the people of Scotland again with unsubstantiated allegations against the elected Scottish Government and its representatives at Westminster, and accusing our SNP representatives of “embarrassing behaviour” at Westminster.
I have to conclude that he never watches BBC Parliament coverage of debates, where the representatives of Scotland almost invariably outperform their Unionist opponents with strong debate and behaviour, that makes the braying asses opposite look like a bunch of wealthy, uninformed, spoiled kids determined to hold on to their “privileges” as long as possible!
Mr Cross appeals to voters to “vote for anyone other than the SNP candidate”. This is appalling anti-democratic nonsense such as is available daily in the Unionist press! Scotland has seen through this type of propaganda and, I am confident, will return another majority of SNP MPs to Westminster in the election that Mrs May assured us was never to be! The list of achievements of SNP Government in Scotland is long, and outperforms previous Unionist governments.
The Scottish Government’s record is good and it has maintained, with ever-diminishing resources, a better health service, education service and transport system than is available where Westminster’s writ runs.
Mr Cross should try living in England, where he will pay vast fees for his children’s university education, pay for prescriptions in an NHS that is in “crisis” and heading for privatisation, pay higher council tax if he can find a house he can afford, be unable to get to work because of the failing transport system and face other problems that the Scottish Government has mitigated here. And, of course, face the impending disaster when Scotland withdraws her subsidy to Westminster!
Bill McLean
Dunfermline
CLARK Cross’s depiction of the behaviour of 56 of the MPs who represent Scottish constituencies at Westminster is not one I recognise from listening to live reports from the UK Parliament.
My impression has been one of disrespect and contempt shown to these MPs by MPs from other UK constituencies, and therefore a disrespect and contempt shown to the people who live in Scotland. It is possible that standards of behaviour in the House of Commons are at complete variance with standard of behaviour expected in any other workplace.
The way the Prime Minister speaks to the leader of the opposition would surely be regarded as a form of bullying anywhere but in the Commons.
Can this be a good example to set the country at large? But then, Mr Cross does not see the Commons as the real world, in which case we should all be very concerned indeed.
Angela Howkins
Broughty Ferry
IN the late 1960s I was chairman of Peterhead Branch SNP, and at that time the Scots Independent newspaper was published weekly. We arranged with a local newsagent, James Davidson, for a copy of the paper to be delivered to every barber, hairdresser, doctor and dentist surgeries, every place we could think of that had people waiting looking for something to read. The branch paid for this.
The SNP came from nowhere to 29.8 per cent at the 1970 General Election and, apart from two terms, 1979 and 1983, the SNP has seen this as its heartland – very much a tall oak grown from a little acorn.
Yesterday I was in a local barber’s shop in Edinburgh where copies of tabloid newspapers were available for reading. We now have The National which is published every day, so how about a campaign to make The National more available? The time is now!
I am 82 and a bit incapacitated, so cannot do much about it myself.
Jim Lynch
Edinburgh
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Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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