The interests of the wealthy seem to be top priority of Budget

While there is no doubt that balancing a national budget in the face of rising costs within the limitations of devolved powers is a very complex and nuanced task, looking in detail at what is being sacrificed and what is being saved paints an alarming picture of the current administration’s priorities.

Some of the items that have been declared “non-essential” include the flat-rate rail fares scheme; free bus travel for asylum seekers; local council flood defence schemes and green travel initiatives. This comes hot on the heels of the announced scrappage of the universal Winter Heating Payment.

All of these schemes help reduce the ever-rising burden on the many individuals and families struggling to get by on low income.

A bike is a lot more affordable than a car but it would be too high a risk for many without safe cycling spaces.

How will asylum seekers not allowed to work access necessary services such as shops and healthcare without a bus pass?

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The huge costs and suffering associated with flood damage are predicted to rise and affect more and more residents as climate chaos increases the extreme weather events we endure every year.

Storm Babet alone was estimated to have cost the Scottish economy more than £500 million.

The average heating bill is predicted to go up to £1717 a year from October, while oil companies rake in record profits. Without the Winter Fuel Payment, many elderly citizens will be facing the very real risk of being unable to heat their homes this winter.

Yet the Government plans to keep providing £700m in tax breaks for businesses.

As part of this, the Scottish Government has chosen to protect significant tax breaks for grouse moors – so that a tiny number of the very wealthy can continue to indulge their lust for blood sports at the expense of huge swathes of our countryside.

Intensively managed grouse moors cover more than 12,000km2 of Scottish land and continue to carry out highly damaging practices to keep grouse numbers artificially high. This includes destruction of living peat bogs – our most valuable national carbon sink – and intentional widespread killing of other wildlife, causing grouse moors to be some of the least biodiverse landscapes in the country.

Around 80% of Scotland’s peatlands are degraded, pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

And Scotland is already shamefully one of the worst countries in the world in terms of its remaining biodiversity – ranking 212th out of 240 countries. More than 25% of Scottish wildlife has been killed off by human activity, and 11% of our species are facing extinction.

Grouse moors are owned by a tiny number of some of the wealthiest people in the country, yet receive millions of pounds worth of subsidies and tax breaks.

The current actions of the Scottish Government show that it has decided that allowing the rich to continue to play at any cost is one of its top priorities.

Finance Secretary Shona Robison has also expressed concerns that increasing taxation on the very wealthy could lead them to move out of the country altogether. This is despite evidence from Spain indicating that taxing the super-rich does not cause this feared exodus, and has the potential to generate trillions a year if pursued globally.

The logical extension of the Scottish Government’s thoughts on these tax breaks, alongside the planned cuts to public services, seems to suggests that as a nation, we should prioritise the comfort and fun of those who already have far more wealth than they could ever need over the very real needs of those who have little or nothing.

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Over the people who simply cannot decide to move somewhere with a tax system they prefer.

Over families for whom the cost of living, heating their homes, travelling to work and school is moving further and further away from what they can possibly afford.

Is this what the majority of citizens in Scotland really want? Almost certainly not. In fact, just in terms of planned cuts to climate projects, a survey in May found that 95% of SNP voters are concerned about climate change, with nearly three-quarters of them (71%) believing climate action should remain a government priority.

This view is shared by two-thirds (61%) of all Scottish voters.

The Government’s own research shows almost two-thirds (57%) of Scots feel the Government should redistribute wealth from the wealthy to those less well off.

With nearly half the people in Scotland worried about their heating bills, decisions to scrap current support again seem to fly in the face of public opinion.

We at Parents for Future Scotland are supporting parents to ask their local representatives to back the Warm This Winter campaign (www.warmthiswinter.org.uk)

Finally, the Government continues to spout the mantra of “economic growth” as the cure for all our ills, yet we’ve had decades of almost constant GDP growth while levels of inequality have never been higher.

Given that the “trickle-down” economic model has been effectively debunked, how can the Government justify continuing to protect the interests of the wealthy at the expense of everyone else?

Victoria Rodger

Parents for Future Scotland

IT’S been 10 years since the referendum. I share with you some random thoughts:

1. The UK is statistically more fractured than at any time since 1922. Only 58% voted for the two main parties. Starmer/Labour are the most unpopular group ever to be elected (and on a landslide). It’s going to be a short honeymoon. It may already be over. See fuel allowance.

2. Labour’s rise. Only they didn’t. They polled terribly until quite recently. Even when the Tories were selling the ventilator contracts to their pals, the numbers didn’t move. The start was when Boris Johnson failed to sack Owen Paterson. But without partygate, the Tories would still have been in power. Probably.

3. Liz Truss proved that no government can ever survive a financial crisis. By being so shit, she essentially killed any chance of a hung parliament that would have given the SNP the leverage to force a second plebiscite. So the revival of Scottish Labour is everything to do with Johnson and Truss – and absolutely nothing to do with Anas Sarwar.

4. On the question of independence, I’m not surprised by the polls holding up when the SNP vote has collapsed. Scotland has always made this distinction. It’s nothing new. What the independence parties – and the wider movement – have to do is to move away from the binary Yes/No of 2014 to asking what kind of Union people want to be part of. We have, I think, three main questions to ask:

1. Should Scotland be an independent country?

2. Who should be our head of state?

3. What should be our relationship with the EU?

No serious party can ignore these questions, but until they engage with them we cannot move forward. It falls on all of us to make sure that we do.

It’s weird, though. In 2014, I was at an event down south and I remember thinking, “wow, England are pretty cool about us leaving. This is entirely a question for Scotland”.

My hunch is that the anniversary of the first independence referendum won’t register much in a conference hall in Telford. And, in truth, it might not register much in Scotland either. But I remember thinking in 2014 that an awful lot of folk in Scotland don’t remember a time when we didn’t have a parliament. Today I’ll go you one further.

There’s now a generation of young people – my weans included – who can’t remember a time when the kind self-determination enjoyed by democratic countries around the world was a mainstream conversation.

That, more than anything, should give us hope.

Keep the faith, good people. I’ll meet you further on up the road.

Alec Ross

Lochans

THE winter temperature in Edinburgh is very noticeably lower than in London, by on average three degrees – yet this winter, the standing charge for electricity will be more than 50% higher in Edinburgh (70.16p per day compared with 46.20p) .

Renewable energy is the cheapest source of electricity and Scotland, with about one twelfth of the population, produces around a quarter of the UK’s total renewable energy generation and more than 100% of Scotland’s gross electricity consumption. Yet, disgracefully, domestic electricity bills in Edinburgh are still around 25% higher than in London.

The removal of the Winter Fuel Payment without any prior consultation with Holyrood or attempt to ameliorate the impact here emphasises the failings of Broken Brexit Britain.

While all in the UK are suffering from decades of economic mismanagement by successive governments at Westminster, statistics show that those suffering the harshest consequences are the people living in Scotland and Wales. It is no coincidence that while many pensioners in Scotland will struggle with the choice of heating or eating this winter, the people of Wales will endure the worst NHS waiting times in the UK and the lowest education standards (based on limited academic results and with Curriculum for Wales only introduced in September 2022).

Instead of fostering the prosperity and welfare of the people of Scotland and Wales, devolution has been manipulated by both Tory and Labour governments at Westminster to restrict – or even bypass – the elected representatives of those countries. Former British prime minister Gordon Brown is right about one thing – the UK will become a “failed state” unless it is “reformed”.

The onus, therefore, is on those who do not yet support independence for Scotland and Wales but are serious about the welfare and prosperity of all people currently governed from Westminster to present realistic proposals for a British federation or accept that self-determination is the only viable path forward for the nations of these islands.

Stan Grodynski

Longniddry

SUSAN Egelstaff in last Sunday’s National was waxing lyrical about the “big three” of tennis. Then she starts by describing Sir Andy Murray as an “interloper”! An atrocious statement that beggars belief!

Grand Slam titles and Olympic gold medals as well as arguably Scotland’s most outstanding sportsman and a Scottish “sports” writer can’t bring herself to recognise Scottish greatness and achievement! Andy, for many Scots, made us proud and will always be up there with the best of them.

Jan Ferrie

Ayrshire

STAN Grodynski made a good point in last Sunday’s National about England needing to stand on her own feet and depend less on other nations (notably on the brains and brawn of an Empire conquered/stolen, or – in the case of Scotland – tricked into joining, much against the will of its people).

A wise and good friend, sadly now deceased, put it succinctly in The National some years ago: “Within the UK state, the citizens [subjects, actually] of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will always be outvoted by their English counterparts. This is not because of English malice but because of English size. The UK state is the English state and always has been ... the BBC cannot help but reflect this.”

It’s very noticeable these days, when the BBC “national” news now lingers long on Scottish woes, barely suppressing its glee...

Peter went on to draw attention to the writer Jan Morris’s book Fifty Years Of Europe, published in 1997. In a short essay on Scotland, she has this to say: “How perfectly extraordinary ... that any citizen of this singular country would not wish it to control its own destinies. It contains two of the great cities of Europe and some of the most glorious landscapes. It is a highly educated society, full of able economists, technicians, industrialists and administrators. How could it fail?”

All that plus massive renewable energy resources, fishing, agriculture, whisky, tourism, etc, etc. We are indeed blessed.

Peter concluded: “Scotland is now more or less equally divided between those seeking independence and those content to remain in the UK/English state ... content to play second fiddle and be ruled by a Parliament with its own national – ie English – priorities.

“Jan Morris didn’t understand it then, and I do not understand it now.”

Me neither.

David Roche

Blairgowrie