IT absolutely beggars belief but in early 2020, just as coronavirus deaths were ramping up in a number of European countries, the UK Government, in the full knowledge that its own stocks were dangerously low and largely sub-standard, sent hundreds of thousands of items of PPE to China!

We learn this in a new book, Failures of State, which is a scathing indictment of the UK Government’s handling of the Covid pandemic. The authors are highly critical of Boris Johnson, stating: “After missing key Cobra meetings, embracing then abandoning herd immunity, and dithering over lockdowns, Johnson left the NHS facing an unmanageable deluge of patients. His inaction resulted in the deaths of many thousands of British people. Further reckless decisions allowed a deadly second wave to sweep across the country, causing another disaster in the winter months that left the economy on the brink of collapse.”

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In 2019, a pandemic virus was regarded as the number one threat to the UK for purposes of emergency planning, but training to prepare key workers for one had been put on hold for two years while contingency planning was diverted to deal with a possible no-deal Brexit.

It is perhaps indicative of confused priorities on the part of politicians and the media that Scotland’s First Minister has been subjected to an eight-hour grilling over whether she misled the Scottish Parliament but no attempt has been made to hold the Prime Minister to account in similar fashion for the many tragic and avoidable pandemic deaths which have occurred on his watch!

Alan Woodcock
Dundee

HAVE we run out of things to care about? Our health, Covid, our family, our financial state, climate change – the list goes on and on. As a result, do we have room to care about nuclear weapons?

Last week our government in London announced that we just didn’t have enough mass killing capacity as a country. We had been reducing our nuclear missiles to 160 (each one capable of annihilating all life in any major city on earth). Now we apparently need 260.

Apart from factors like the huge cost per missile, the transportation of them to the Clyde on roads through Dumfries and Galloway and the focus on the Trident base as a terrorist target, just why do we need all these new weapons of mass destruction?

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Scotland of course has no say in all of this but it would seem that the current UK Government feels Britannia can still rule the waves by an “I’ve got a bigger nuclear arsenal than you” approach. The Trident submarine replacements are costing you and me and all of us at least £200 billion – that’s billion, not million. Of course, that’s before we add in the missile costs.

The bottom line is: we have these weapons of mass destruction in our country, they are costing us huge amounts of money which could be better spent on the NHS or green climate change initiatives, for instance, and they are dumped on us by a gung-ho government in London. How do we feel about this and have we room to care?

My answer is that we can’t afford not to care.

Jennifer Rhind
Moffat

FURTHER to your correspondent’s letter “A deficit limit of 3% is a recipe for austerity in an independent Scotland” (March 15), the idea that you would actually write fiscal restraint and put a limit on how much any elected future government of an independent Scotland should borrow in a constitution, is, of course, completely barmy. Imposing a single fiscal model on all future governments is NOT what a constitution is for.

Not only is it a recipe for permanent austerity, it would be profoundly undemocratic.

It is for the people of an independent Scotland to elect governments based on their manifesto promises, and it is perfectly normal for governments to borrow to invest socially and in new technology and in developing the economy.

READ MORE: A deficit limit of 3% is a recipe for austerity in an independent Scotland

Tying an independent Scotland to permanently low borrowing is to hobble the chances of our independent Scotland being a transformative Scotland. Indeed, it ties us in to the permanently limited public expenditure beloved of the very Tories whose clutches – as part of the UK – we are trying to escape.

The 3% figure is no coincidence, of course. It’s a requirement for joining the euro. The Blairite EU-phile faction of the SNP and their fellow travellers need to stop trying to shoehorn their vision of independence in Europe – and the euro – onto the wider vision of independence.

Let’s get independence first.

Then the Scottish people can decide for themselves further down the line whether they want those things or not.

Meanwhile, any proposed constitution should be about constitutional matters, and rights in law, not matters properly left to elected governments of our future independent Scotland, and ultimately, therefore, the people of Scotland themselves.

Steve Arnott
Inverness