ONCE again I am having to read about Nicola Sturgeon having to speak out against this continuous bashing of SNP Scottish Government being a one-party state, and I find Scottish Labour the biggest hypocrites of all.

I was 40 years a Labour voter. If anyone were sheep, it was Labour voters and no one questioned why the vast majority of Scots were Labour voters when Labour were in power in Holyrood. One of the many reasons I finally left Labour was precisely because of feeling like we’d been brainwashed for years to vote Labour because all we heard from Scottish Labour was #badSNP.

Most of us were lazy voters – bad habit – especially long-term voters. We knew deep down for years this was not our grassroots Labour, the real Labour that stood up for Scotland, who were seen as an honest, decent and grassroots working-class party. Since Blair, Labour have been a split party of voters. I grew up with Labour, the working-class party where we were all left-wing. Blair and Brown changed that and we became a party of left-wing voters and centre-left voters. I was sickened to see so many voters who showed right-wing leanings and hence the name of Red Tories.

These later voters for Labour made us left-wing voters feel we were the outsiders in the party. They hid under the flag of this supposed working-class party but in truth they and the MPs/MSPs had more or less taken Labour to the centre and we grassroots left-wing voters had to like it or lump it.

We lumped it for far too long, we sheep, we brainwashed fools who knew deep down the party had been letting the working class down for so long. We knew the party had more self-serving careerist MPs/MSPs in both London and Scotland yet we continued to read the lies and distortions and allowed Scottish Labour to continue to bash SNP and tell us that Labour were the only party to trust and SNP were bad.

It was only when the indy campaign took off we were forced to actually look at Scottish Labour in their true light, especially when they happily sided with Tories. The Union was far more important to them than the failings of Westminster both with Tories and Labour in power, and how much Scotland was being ripped off and conned.

We finally found ourselves starting to read information backed with proof to see the massive benefits of an independent Scotland. We also painfully read the truth of the messes of Labour, like Brown and what he did to the pensions and his introducing that crippling PFI, the betrayals, how little London Labour thought of Scotland and how little power Scottish Labour had in Scotland.

It was a massive wake-up call for thousands of us and much of the reason we left the party: we’d opened our eyes, taken heads out of sand and seen for ourselves that the SNP were NOT the enemy but in fact a hard-working, decent party that truly was the voice of Scotland, and unlike Scottish Labour/Labour, they listened to us.

The SNP are not a one-party state that the opposition parties and British media bleat on about. It is indeed very insulting to the members of SNP who I got to know when I finally cancelled my Labour membership Labour in late 2011 when I’d had enough of their lies and distortions.

Scottish Labour are all but finished, finished by their own hand and being seen as a nasty, obsessive, bitter opposition who seem to think it’s their God-given right to rule Scotland because they gave us Holyrood.

They gave us Holyrood as a way to silence the many Scots who fought for devolution for years after being tricked and conned by the Tories.

E Skinner

Fife

Independence is the only way to protect the disabled from the Tories

THE devolved welfare powers to Scotland are only a fraction of what the Scottish Government asked for. The money used to protect the vulnerable will only cover the bedroom tax.

The brutal assault on disabled people will continue and Nicola Sturgeon can only stand by and watch. Disabled children with life-long disabilities who were awarded DLA [Disability Living Allowance] for life are now being re assessed for PIP [Personal Independence Payment] in order to strip them of their motability vehicles, and at the other end of the line we have disabled people, many now 67+, who were also awarded DLA for life waiting to be forced into Atos’s so-called “Assessment Centres” simply because they failed to turn 65 before Iain Duncan Smith’s 2013 deadline?

I have voted SNP for more years than I can remember and voted for independence also but today I ask myself why? If Scotland enters the next General Election with 52 or more SNP MPs then Cameron will use the same scare tactics of a Corbyn/Sturgeon coalition governing England and he will be re-elected as PM.

The only light at the end of the tunnel for Scottish disabled people is either independence or Labour (not New Labour) winning a majority of seats both sides of the Border in order to get rid of this hated Tory Government.

There is no other way. Independence is my preferred choice but I know, and most other readers know, that this will not happen in the lifetime of any Scot living in Scotland today. Our country is unlike any other, we are a divided nation where sectarianism and Unionism walk hand in hand.

This was evident in the BBC, the tabloids and on the streets of Edinburgh 24 hours before the referendum and in George Square Glasgow 24 hours after, which saw Nationalists attacked as police looked on. Nothing will change in Scotland. We live in a cess pit of our own making and choose to live under the Tory jackboot so we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Louise McArdle

Lanarkshire

SURELY it is time to re-allocate UK Government money to addressing the effects of global warming, not on subsidising renewable energy. The average annual UK household fuel bill is £1,267, of which nine per cent – £110 – goes to “green taxes” and in the next five years the UK will give £5.8 billion to the International Climate Fund

Britain’s share of global carbon emissions is 1.5 per cent (Scotland’s is 0.15 per cent. China and the US produce 40 per cent between them.

At a local level, the developers of the Meikle Carew windfarm donate £20,000 to Kincardine and Mearns, equating to £1.30 per each of 15,000 households. So I pay £110 in subsidies and get £1.30 back. These subsidies should be diverted into improving flood defences, a huge U-turn in policy but surely warranted.

Sepa estimates that 108,000 Scottish homes are at risk of flooding. The UK Environment Agency’s estimate of 5.2m across the country would equate to roughly 500,000 in Scotland, which seems high compared to Sepa’s figures.

By contrast Holland, with a bigger flood consideration but a quarter of the UK population, spends £1.19bn per annum on flood defences, six times the UK amount.

In a Scottish context, Dutch-scale flood spending would be £500m, not £70m (one tenth of the UK spend). Diverting energy taxes from two million Scottish households to flood prevention would raise £220m, almost half that number and three times the current spend.

Allan Sutherland

Stonehaven

WHAT is not to like about universal benefits? They are efficient and effective in that they reach those who need them and minimise administration costs.

They do not stigmatise.

They also maximise freedom of choice for those who claim they don’t need the benefit, in that they can put it back in the kitty. And if we are still concerned about tax dodgers we could introduce a land tax – guaranteed 100 per cent collection at minimal cost allowing income tax to be reduced – thereby increasing the incentive to work for all.

Catherine Gilchrist

Islay

IT NEVER seems to occur to members of the British National Party seeking to spread their disgusting racist ideas in Scotland that if there is any group that is seeking to introduce alien concepts into Scottish culture it is they.

Dot Jessiman (ex-convener New Scots for Independence)

Turriff



Letters to The National, January 6, Part 1: Bomb fan Benn deserves demotion by Corbyn