Heather Stewart is correct that in Simon Wren-Lewis’s article for the New Statesman he argues that the purpose of government policy should be “to increase the welfare of the public” (“Let us applaud Sturgeon and Bennett – but not vote for them”, Business).
However, she failed to point out that Wren-Lewis also gave lie to the argument that the government can run out of money to do what is necessary and thereby perpetuates the myth started by Liam Byrne, the former Treasury chief secretary who left a note for his successor, David Laws, saying: “I’m afraid to tell you there’s no money left.”
As Wren-Lewis says: “Outside the eurozone, governments [have] no problem funding their deficits.” And: “If the markets [refuse] to fund their governments they [can]… ask their own central bank to do so instead”, as they did when they needed the money to bail out the banks after the financial crash.
What Sturgeon and Bennett have been doing is debating what type of country we want to live in. This should be the focus of any election and the elected government should then be about bringing that about, not indulging in arguments about accounting based on the false premise that governments are like households that have a limited amount of money.
Dr Graham Hunter
London W4
Truly a “grande dame”, Jessye Norman, featured in the Observer profile , speaks eloquently of the “American apartheid” she experienced routinely as a child and as an adult noted in her diary “instances of casual racism”. She gave up when this became too depressing and realised, as she says: “I wasn’t serving any purpose except to make myself sad.”
This is so similar to the way people process everyday racialism, so that in Scottish society those who have an English background, or perhaps just an English accent, learn to embrace not just Scotland and Scots but the covert and overt sneers and threatening behaviour they may encounter.
In her speech in support of Hillary Clinton she was able to describe her friend as “this enormous brain, this incredibly generous heart, this amazing woman”. So very different from what has recently been said about Nicola Sturgeon, where even those impressed by her hard graft and stamina were unconvinced by her recent makeover and selfies with children.
Her completely unfunded manifesto claims were rejected in their entirety by the IFS and, as Heather Stewart says, her “anti-austerity rhetoric is little more than a pose”.
She lacks both warmth and authenticity but the fans should see this. Just as Jessye Norman rails against plotting and racist attacks against Obama we must all listen to her words: “We should be better than that, we should be bigger than that.”
Carolyn Kirton
Aberdeen
I am an unrepentant Keynesian and one of the idealists, dreamers and hankerers for a sunny kind of British politics belittled by Heather Stewart, who thinks deficit reduction is a grim necessity. I do not share her faith in the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ prediction of a £7.6bn deficit for a Scotland with full fiscal autonomy, a number that Stewart’s fellow columnist Kevin McKenna (“To balance the books, tax cyclists and joggers”, Comment) points out was embraced by the predictable massed ranks of online quackery and the Labour party in Scotland.
John Swinney has pointed out the errors and the limitations of that forecast. He is the one who has been balancing Scotland’s books since 2007, a far more reassuring performance than George Osborne’s over the last five years. Osborne is the one who has consistently deceived the electorate and is still trying to do so, not the SNP as Stewart would have it.
William Wood
Glasgow
