Hebrides  News

Contact newsdesk on:  info@hebridesnews.co.uk

Classified adverts   I   Jobs                               

 Local Services     

Hysterical campaign               2/9/14

 

Sir,


The Yes campaign is becoming more and more hysterical in its assertions about a separate Scotland.

These assertions become more and more absurd and perhaps the most absurd claim is the calumny that a future separate Scotland will be socialist.

 

This SNP government shows little sign of preparing for a socialist future. Their record on assisting those in poverty is lamentable. The number of children living in poverty in Scotland has risen under the SNP government. The flagship policies of the SNP were to abolish prescription charges and to freeze the council tax. Neither policy helped those in poverty since people in poverty do not pay council tax nor did they pay prescription charges.

 

The SNP refused to take the chance to pass a law to introduce the Living Wage which would have made a significant difference to those in poverty. Measures to support those in fuel poverty have been inadequate, so bad indeed that fuel poverty in the Outer Hebrides has grown from 60% to 70% under the SNP.


It is not the mark of socialism, except the national variety, to seek to take control to the centre, yet that is precisely what this SNP administration has done. Police and Fire Services are now centrally controlled. Local authority budgets have been emasculated and the health service merely kept ticking over, with £400 million spent on private health care in order to try and meet targets that the SNP set themselves.


All of the major social-democratic positive changes that have taken place in the last 300 years have been carried out by Labour or Liberal governments who cared about all the citizens of the UK not just the peoples of part of the UK. It is always important to take a long view of social change. I am in no doubt that the SNP are desperate to retain power in a future Scotland and that thus we might expect more obsessive centralised control. That is not what I wish for the future. I will be voting No Thanks.

Angus McCormack

North Street

Sandwick

Lewis

Letters @hebrides.biz

Letters should be sent within the body of an e-mail - no attachments, please - and require the writer’s full name, full address and phone number before publication.