Murray’s muddled over what leadership means - your views

Murray’s muddled over leadership

Ian Murray obviously doesn’t understand what leadership means (News, December 10), as Nicola Sturgeon is taking hard and unpopular decisions to keep coronavirus at bay.

Edinburgh is unfortun-ately still in level three as the number of positive cases has risen in recent days, with a much slower reduction in cases for Edinburgh over the last two weeks than for Scotland as a whole.

World Health Organ-isation analysis clearly demonstrates that Covid spreads much more easily in crowded situations such as Christmas shopping and in bars and restaurants, which have been closed down in most other countries.

In Labour-run Wales, all hospitality businesses were completely closed for a second time in late October then, when the regulations were recently relaxed, Covid rates increased dramatically.

Murray is also wrong on contact tracing, which is working better in Scotland than in England or Wales.

It is also outrageous for the Edinburgh Airport chief executive to claim that the travel business has been singled out, when international travel brought Covid to the UK in the first place and the travel ban demonstrates the success the spring lockdown in Scotland had in driving out original strains of the Covid-19 virus.

Once travel restrictions were relaxed, holiday makers from Spain brought back a different strain and Covid numbers rose again.

Fraser Grant, Warrender Park Road, Edinburgh.

Hate crime reports can’t be anonymous

The police in England and Wales have a website for reporting hate crimes and so far have received over 100,000 complaints.

The site says that verbal attacks on disability, race, religion, sexual orientation, transgender and other issues are hate crimes. They should be challenged, but 100,000 complaints in so short a period?

There must be some control over malicious complaints and that persons making them will be punished. While confidentiality will be respected for those who leave their details, it should be made clear that the police will not investigate anonymous complaints.

Will the proposed controversial hate crime bill in Scotland cover this?

Clark Cross, Springfield Road, Linlithgow.

A Scottish economy would cope just fine

It is Jill Stephenson, not Nicola Sturgeon who is confused as to how countries run their econ-omies (letters, December 7).

In the UK, HM Treasury can instruct the Bank of England to print money, known as quantitative easing, or to buy government debt and issue bonds. This debt doesn’t need to be repaid and austerity is a Tory political choice under which Scottish taxpayers will pay their share.

Boris Johnson’s disastrous handling of Covid has hit the UK harder than any other developed economy. Of the 37 OECD members, only Argentina is expected to fare worse.

HM Treasury figures show that the consequences of no deal Brexit in Scotland is a reduction of nine percent of our wealth and even with a free trade deal it’s six per cent of our GDP. Yet the Tories press on with Brexit in the middle of a global pandemic.

As for repaying the UK’s historic debt, why should anyone agree to that if not getting a population share of the UK’s total assets and currency reserves?

Scotland is charged interest on the UK national debt with no allowance for when we were transferring surpluses annually with £250 billion of Scotland’s oil revenues going to London.

Mary Thomas, Watson Crescent, Edinburgh.