Liz Truss is just another joke PM to be foisted on us by the Tories

The acerbic James O’Brien, a LBC presenter, quoted Ms Truss as saying: “I never had the intention of changing the terms and conditions of teachers and nurses.” Despite that Truss was forced to do a U-turn, saying: “I will not be going ahead with regional payments, that is no longer my policy.” O’Brien commented that she can “announce a ridiculous policy then disown it in 10 minutes flat and then pretend she hadn’t done the thing she disowned. Epic incompetence, epic dishonesty, epic cowardice, and it doesn’t matter any more.”

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Remember, Liz Truss is the Foreign Secretary who thinks that the Baltic states are on the Black Sea. This doesn’t bode well – the clue is in the word Baltic, Liz.

Truss has been recorded as saying that British workers need to do, “more graft.” I would suggest that Liz Truss needs to do more graft on her brief and her geography.

When Boris Johnson became prime minister, his former boss Sir Max Hastings commented that “the Conservative party are about to foist a tasteless joke on the British public,” and that, “for many of us his elevation will signal Britain’s abandonment of any claim to be a serious country.”

It seems that the Conservative party, in all probability making Liz Truss prime minister, are about to foist another tasteless joke on the British public.

Sandy Gordon
Edinburgh

LIZ Truss’s statement that our catastrophic times are caused by a lack of “graft” is not just the attitude of the Tories, but rather just a crass way of stating a broader prejudice.

The fetishisation of “hard work” across the political spectrum, with all parties reflexively using such thought-terminating cliches as “hard-working people” and “hard-working families” reduces people to commodities. Why should work be hard? Why should we make life harder than it has to be? Rather than praise hard work, we should use our resources and skills to make work, and life, easier. Hard work should be seen as a problem to be solved.

Greum Maol Stevenson
Glasgow

SO now the gloves are off. Patronising criticism from the media is supplemented by Lord Frost telling the bumpkins to get back to tartan weaving and whisky making. Know your place, or else!

I am reminded of Carry on up the Khyber’s chaotic scene, where Steve James as the governor at his dinner table hears shots and yells, “The peasants are revolting!” “I know, dear,” soothes Joan Sims. “They do smell awful but they so seldom wash, you know.” Then with a giggle as the roof falls in, “Ooh, I do seem to be getting a little plastered!”

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It was like that at the Yes for Indy stalls in the Meadows last Saturday. Folk paused to tell you they were with you, others stopped to tell you why you needed your head examined. One such, from Glasgow, who had worked in London all his life, kindly told me that the Barnet Formula gave every Scot far more than the average Englishman. His newspapers had told him so. He explained that the moment we went independent we would become a poverty-stricken Balkan look-alike. “Look at Ireland” he said. “Their prices are dreadful and they must wish they had never left the Union.”

“But their GDP is far above ours,” I started to mutter. He ignored me. “Only Northern Ireland has some sense,” was his attitude. I didn’t even try to remind him that Sinn Fein has a majority there. He knew what he said was right. It was what London and its newspapers had told him.

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There are a few like him still living in Scotland and they will never change. However, many more were silently clapping us or saying “I’m with you” than I had experienced before. I just hope they make sure they are on the voters roll.

Then we, Lord Frost’s peasants, will at long last have our own country again. We will be able to make our own decisions on the kind of society in which we want to live and its relationship with Europe, leaving the windbags in the House of Lords to their own petty concerns.

Elizabeth Scott
Edinburgh

FOLLOWING the tour by Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, the Unionists have reportedly decided to drum up Union support with a second Unionist twosome, Lady Ruth Davidson and Dame Arlene Foster. Could they be planning to continue the theme with a tour by Lord David Frost and Lord George Foulkes nearer the date of referendum for maximum effect?

John Jamieson
South Queensferry

I’M not sure anyone in the Scottish independence movement will be concerned about the Unionist “Fran and Anna” combination of Ruth Davidson and Arlene Foster – one a failed Tory who ran to the House of Lords to escape Scottish politics, while the other has never been involved in Scottish politics at all. If this is the best the BritNats can do then they would be as well giving up now!

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Of course, they won’t though. They are too desperate squeezing every penny out of Scotland – not content with taking our oil, they now plan to pipe all our water down south to keep English farms watered. The real face of the Tory attitude to Scotland has been highlighted in the Tory leadership campaign – we’re to shut up and take whatever they dole out. They even have the cheek to say our government needs greater scrutiny when it was Johnson – aided and abetted by Truss, Sunak and others – who committed wholesale fraud on the public purse. What happened to the £37 billion wasted on England’s Track & Trace, who in Cabinet benefitted from the dodgy fast tracking of contracts to Tory members and supporters – and why is this information being held back?

There is no way to reform UK politics – it is as big a cesspit as the beaches on the south coast of England, thanks to letting failed water companies dump human waste on beaches. The ONLY solution is independence. We need it NOW.

Cllr Kenny MacLaren
Paisley