UNDER Tory austerity there’s no money for schools, no money for social services, and no money for the environment. There is lots of money for speculators, however. A tsunami of money. Money that is measured in the trillions.

The central banks of the US, the UK, the Eurozone and Japan have so far spent US$6.57 trillion (or €6.06 trillion if you prefer) on “quantitative easing” programmes. And, for that entire incomprehensibly gigantic sum of money, what mostly has been accomplished is a stock market bubble. And, as a secondary effect, a boost to real estate prices, making real estate speculation pay off a bit more than usual.

The world’s advanced capitalist countries are mired in stagnation, structural unemployment and widening inequality, with public investment starved and personal debt a monumental problem. The £375 billion given by the Bank of England to the banks could have been put to better use.

"Quantitative easing" is the technical name for central banks buying their own government’s debt in massive amounts. The supposed purpose of quantitative-easing programmes is to stimulate the economy by encouraging investment. Under this theory, a reduction in long-term interest rates would encourage working people to buy or refinance homes; encourage businesses to invest because they could borrow cheaply; and push down the value of the currency, thereby boosting exports by making locally made products more competitive.

In actuality, quantitative-easing programmes cause the interest rates on bonds to fall because a central bank buying bonds in bulk significantly increases demand for them, enabling bond sellers to offer lower interest rates. Seeking assets with a better potential pay-off, speculators buy stock instead, driving up stock prices and inflating a stock-market bubble. Money not used in speculation ends up parked in bank coffers, boosting bank profits, or is borrowed by businesses to buy back more of their stock, another method of driving up stock prices without making any investments.

Given that banks are more profitable than ever, shovelling still more money to those with far more than can be spent or invested in any rational way is irrational, no matter how many reports tell them otherwise. Policy Exchange estimates Britain’s needs for investment in transportation, communication and water infrastructure to be a minimum of £170bn. That is less than half of what the Bank of England spent on its quantitative-easing scheme, and dwarfs an estimated £2.5bn deficit in the National Health Service. Instead of spending this on programmes to put people to work and enable them to get on their feet financially, those with more get more. European non-financial companies are estimated to be sitting on $1.1 trillion in cash; more than 40 per cent higher than in 2008. This is what class warfare looks like, when only one side is waging it.

Alan Hinnrichs
Dundee

FOLLOWING several years of austerity the latest report on Britain’s wealth from the Office for National Statistics concludes the gap between rich and poor is getting bigger and that the greatest wealth is concentrated in the south-east of England. According to a prominent property website more than 75,000 new property millionaires have been created this year alone. In London one in eight properties are now worth more that £1 million. The grasping city state of London, grown fat on the North Sea oil bonanza, is proud to keep the UK at the top table of world powers by renewing the obsolete Trident, at an obscene cost, along with the futile bombing of Iraq and Syria.

Grant Frazer
Cruachan, Newtonmore

Rather than a historian of crime, William McIlvanney was a crime writer

I THINK the original letter from Mr Stuart (Letters, December 18) is too harsh on the late writer William McIlvanney and disrespectful to his memory.

I agree with Meg Henderson (Letters, December 19) that the lionisation of Mr McIlvanneyhas been media-generated and that he would have frowned upon it and been angered by it. There is only one things in Mr Stuart’s letter I could agree with and it is the quote from someone who said that if he wanted to learn about Glasgow hard men he wouldn’t ask a Kilmarnock teacher. Well, neither would I. Mr McIlvanney was a very excellent writer of crime fiction, not a compiler of factual criminology or crime history.

I was born and bred in the east end of Glasgow (Dennistoun) and, though my district was not a hotbed of hard men, gangs and crime, nevertheless, I had many pals, friends and girlfriends who lived in other so-called ‘tough areas’ such as Bridgeton, Calton, Gorbals etc.

I ran about (to use the terminology) dancehalls such as the Palais, Locarno, Barrowlands, and of course pubs.

I was well familiar with hard men, fly men, gang members and very skilled conmen. At at talk Mr McIlvanney gave at Waterstones,

I said to him that his Laidlaw stories reflected to me some aspects of the life I knew in Glasgow in the 1950s and 60s (I am 73). Although I am not a great fan of crime fiction (with a couple of exceptions) I enjoyed very much his writings, especially his use of words and the comparisons he made. I always thought his works contained great humanity and ethics.

I have not read any of George MacKay Brown’s writings but I will make this point as to one of William McIlvanney’s books. Reading it I got a sense of similarity in terms of dialogue and atmosphere with Dostoyevsky’s great novel The Brothers Karamazov.

Bobby Brennan
Castlemilk

I HAVE a higher opinion of William McIlvanney’s novels than has Colin Stuart; but rather than continuing the discussion of Willie’s merits, may I take Mr Stuart up on an incidental point in his letter.

There is absolutely no sense in attempting to use the number of translations that have been made of a writer’s works as a measure of their actual quality or importance. As one example, The National Library’s Bibliography of Scottish Literature in Translation (BOSLIT) lists well over 3000 translations for Burns; for Fergusson, his “elder brother in the Muse”, about ten. Burns is a greater poet than Fergusson, but not three hundred times greater.

McIlvanney is far from the only major Scottish writer whose renown among readers of other languages deserves to be much greater than it is at present.

Derrick McClure
Aberdeen

MOST people would be under the mistaken belief that David Mundell was a dry stick, a man so lacking in imagination and wit that he made snooker’s Steve Davis sound "interesting". However he has emerged this pantomime season as the natural successor to the Rev I M Jolly with his catalogue of one-liners on Scottish politics.

With his hilarious quip that "Westminster has no effect on Scottish finances" and his side-splitting "the SNP are creating a one-party state in Scotland" he has edged out Ruth Davidson as the funniest thing in the Scottish Tory Party, eclipsing her much feted appearance as the Laughing Policeman on Have I Got News For You.

He surpassed himself this week with his comment that the Scottish Government is arrogant and reluctant to devolve power to councils (SNP hit out as Tories change tune on local government, The National, December 21). This tongue-in-cheek statement was made by the man who opposed every line of the Scotland Bill and was surreal to the point of being comic genius.

His po-faced delivery is as much part of his charm as his seeming ignorance of his comedic qualities and will no doubt endear him to audiences in his next round Scotland tour – provisionally titled the ‘Tories to replace Labour as the biggest laugh in Scottish politics’ tour.

James Mills
Johnstone

IT’S depressing to see news of further Tory blocking of renewable energy development.Westminster seems incorrigibly wedded to dirty energy. What (apart from cost) is to stop Holyrood from setting up a parallel Scottish grid, focused on energy storage, both for local use and sale to England or Europe?

Derek Ball
Bearsden


Letters: Fiscal ‘bomb’ is based on current UK settlement