THE government has announced this week that only the estates of those who had spouses at the time of death will receive the interim compensation for the infected blood scandal. While the decision of the government to deny the parents and children defined as affected by the infected blood inquiry is cruel, the estates of the deceased victims who were unmarried due to youth, tragedy and infection will also receive nothing. The right to justice should surely not be based on a victim’s marital status?

Sir Robert Francis QC justified to the inquiry the exclusion of the dead from the interim payment on the basis, in paraphrase, that the dead have no rights in law. If it were legally true that the deceased victims have no legal rights, there would be no lawful basis for the dead to leave a last will and testament. Nor for them to appoint executors to manage the deceased’s estate and to determine beneficiaries. An executor’s status continues indefinitely, and an executor can also be a parent or a child of the deceased, not just a spouse.

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Many of the estates of the deceased are set up with the existing support schemes but receive no annual payments of grants that the survivors and widows can claim, which already has resulted in the segregation of suffering, It is no more complex to recognise ALL the estates of the deceased than it is the limited beneficiaries announced this week by the government in a flourish of rhetoric.

The relatively modest sums that could be paid to the estimated 1500 to 2000 excluded estates, to recognise all the “heart-breaking and unimaginable pain” stated by the government in awarding the interim compensation, must include the undeniable suffering of the excluded estates, who have paid the ultimate price of death.

What moral case is being answered by the government here to divvy up who is deserving and is not? All victims dead or alive should have been included in this interim compensation. There is now a risk of precedent for the government when it is enabled to deny justice to the victims of state-imposed tragedies to allow the bodies of the dead to pile up before they are forced to accept responsibility.

This is not just a danger of precedent to the estates of deceased victims of the infected blood scandal, nor the estates of unmarried survivors who will still have to wait potentially years for full compensation, it also has a broader social cost to the UK, if the government denies justice to those they harm. In principle this is causing death to save money.

The Estate of Randolph Peter Gordon-Smith
Edinburgh

WHILE I understand and admire the rightful advocacy of Marie Curie’s Ellie Wagstaff on behalf of terminally ill and other impoverished groups (Letters, August 21), I fear that like many others she may be looking at the problems surrounding the current energy pricing crisis from completely the wrong perspective.

Government higgledy piggledy handing out ad-hoc payments to individual needy groups will do little or nothing to fully address the fundamental fact that the energy market is broken, the vested-interest players are uninterested and incapable of repairing it, and government is unwilling to intervene on behalf of those who elect them to correct the problem at source.

We should remember how the French, confronted with the same market conditions, have restricted any rise to 4%, compared to the outrageous 400% we are facing. That’s the degree of this Tory government’s crass incompetence and lack of caring.

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Let’s not kid ourselves that these energy market price hikes are justified. If it were simply due to market forces then prices would rise with the markets, but profits would not – repeat not – rise exponentially as they are doing now.

Scotland is largely self-sufficient in electricity produced locally, much of it from renewables, yet we are being fleeced because of some spurious claim of global energy market pricing. Why? Where have the production costs increased to justify any rise? Similarly, we produce most of our gas and a substantial amount of oil from the North Sea. They’re our resources, yet our government is allowing us to be fleeced by the profiteering producers who are stuffing the excessive profits into the bank accounts of shareholders, and holding consumers to ransom in the process.

What this demonstrates is that this market is broken and government needs to take full control of it at source, control of producers by limiting profits to pre-crisis levels.

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Only by controlling supply, and pricing at point of use, can we properly hope to serve and protect the vulnerable groups Ms Wagstaff and her ilk advocate for. What we need is a government run by a party that doesn’t place the need for party donations from commercial businesses before the needs of consumers, and to protect consumers from greedy and corrupt companies increasing prices that feed excessive profits at the expense of the hard-pressed consumers they’re ripping off.

Perhaps the equally important failure of this Tory government is that allowing this economic theft by energy producers on such a huge and disproportionate scale is trashing the whole economy. It has deliberately fuelled the highest inflation most will remember and which is dampening the economy across a wide range of sectors, potentially leading to lower job security/higher unemployment, extended recesion and human stress which will impact living standards for many years to come.

And all that is before the salient truth that many will die this year prematurely because of this Tory government’s inaction, incompetence and leadership election navel-gazing.

The Tory party are unfit for government and in the grip of a race to elect a new leader from a pair of candidates vying to be the most extreme right-wing reactionary Prime Minister in British history. Enough is enough – we need a General Election for people to have their say, and for Scots to record their verdict about being denied their referendum on independence from the contemporary British political madness.

Jim Taylor
Edinburgh