What a way to run the UK. Our Prime Minister, holding office for weeks in a semi-retired state, will make way for Tweedledum or Tweedledee next week.

Energy prices continue to go up with gas and electricity bosses raking it in at taxpayers’ and consumers’ expense. No strategy has been forthcoming from all the Truss/Sunak electioneering. Strikes in various sectors of the economy are looming with labour shortages in other areas, not least the NHS.Brexit was supposed to give us more control over the economy yet more companies are in foreign hands, often making use of private equity interests financed by British banks.Politicians have lived up to expectations and have let down the British people and have simply no answer to the problems engulfing society. Help!

Jim Craigen, Edinburgh

Free-dom

Has Boris Johnson been doing enough for the UK since he was forced to step down as Tory leader? (Picture: Chris Radburn/Pool/Getty Images)

I hate to lock horns with another Clan member but Robert Scott seems to be not so much from Ceres as from a cloud cuckoo land of Conservative-owned, London-based tabloids.

Does he want to continue to get his prescriptions free, possibly travel on the bus free, get free eye tests? Does he like the idea of free education up to and including University? Does he believe that free personal and nursing care that costs his English counterparts up to £1,600 a week is a good thing? Does he realise that council tax and heating costs are minimised for Scotland’s poor? Or perhaps he does but does not care?

At present Scotland is self sufficient in oil, gas and renewable energy. We would not face an energy crisis if our power was not shared with the rest of the UK. That alone should galvanise my fellow Scott to want Independence.

Listen to Brexiteer propaganda by all means but believe in Scotland.

Elizabeth Scott, Edinburgh

Renewed row

Mary Thomas repeats the customary SNP canard about electricity and renewables, albeit it in forked tongue mode (Letters, 2 September). She tells us “Scotland generated over 97 per cent of its electricity from renewables in 2020” and that “with independence, all of our energy needs could be met by renewables”.

The truth, as exposed by the Full Fact website, is that Scotland exports some of its renewables’ energy and therefore itself uses a significant amount of non-renewables’ energy: “In 2020, 56 per cent of the electricity consumed in Scotland came from renewable sources.”

This may seem a small point, but it is a matter of accuracy and highlights the tendency Scottish separatists have to be cavalier – to be polite – with figures.

Jill Stephenson, Edinburgh

Apart from that...

The Director of this year’s Edinburgh Military Tattoo should hang his head in shame.

There was no narrator. There was no evening hymn. There was no Auld Lang Syne.

What is the world coming to?

Also, when we have an American Forces band in town why is it that we always have to listen to the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, which is excruciating. Is there nothing else that they can play ?

Iain Munro, Bebington, Wirral

Cost-of-living crisis: Greenpeace vows legal action to delay Liz Truss North Sea...

planning

Refugee minister Neil Gray boasts that Scotland is taking in more Ukrainian refugees per head of population than any other part of the UK. Were it the other way around Mr. Gray would not be so hasty blowing the SNP trumpet. The UK government was asked by the SNP to be allowed to throw the doors open to those unfortunate people without first having a credible plan.

It’s glaringly obvious by the length of housing waiting lists and the amount of people sleeping on the streets that Scotland does not have the necessary accommodation required. As usual, another back-of-a-fag-packet plan in an attempt to get one over on Westminster, and the Ukrainians end up in unsuitable floating hotels. By all means help what people you can but not to the detriment of all of them.

Ian Balloch, Grangemouth, Falkirk

Readers' Letters: Politicians have let down the British people