DOESN’T it beggar belief that Scottish councils are pleading poverty claiming a massive funding shortage when citizens have had forced on them many expensive traffic restrictions, long desired by councils, and which they’ve used Covid-19 as the excuse to implement against our will?

And surely, as with many commercial business, wouldn’t a considerable number of its workers have been furloughed and financed by the government? So what happened to money freed up by that?

Isn’t the economic truth that under the current local government regime it wouldn’t matter how much money is given to councils, they will squander it on pet schemes and leave the real requirements of council taxpayers to wither on the vine?

READ MORE: Coronavirus has hit Scottish councils with £350 million shortfall, MSPs told

Edinburgh is surely typical of council excesses. So where our council spent huge sums erecting bollards for the demarcation of existing cycling lanes, unnecessarily closed roads, closed public toilets and a whole host of other measures, Edinburgh remains a city with third-world standard roads, broken pavements, poor road markings, decrepit street furniture, uncleared drains we know will flood in winter, weed-strewn streets, poor waste management – the list is endless.

Scotland is a small country of just 5.5 million people. We have an archaic structure of 32 councils all uneconomically and expensively replicating processes, which we can’t afford to allow to continue. There are larger cities in the world with a leaner local government structure than we have.

Don’t we urgently need a root and branch review of local government structures to break the obstructive hold Cosla has long had on them?

Jim Taylor
Edinburgh

I READ with interest the article from Douglas Chapman MP on Malta, which this week celebrated its Independence Day, marking 56 years of independence from the UK (How a small nation with big ideas is forging its own path, September 23).

READ MORE: How Malta is forging its own path as 56 year independence anniversary passes

It reminded me of an editorial spotted in The Times from 1959, which noted: “Malta cannot live on its own ... the island could pay for only one-fifth of her food and essential imports; well over one-quarter of the present labour force would be out of work, and the economy would collapse without British Treasury subventions. Talk of full independence for Malta is therefore hopelessly impractical.”

It struck me, dear reader, as feeling rather familiar.

Alex Orr
Edinburgh

MICHAEL Fry gives the game away in his article on Tuesday (An independent Scotland will without doubt be a capitalist nation, September 22). We should value the money. The more people earn, the better they are and the greater respect we should show them. You may be clever and hard-working, qualified and long-serving, but it is as nothing if for whatever reason you don’t have the money. Without my company pension I could be in trouble, as the lowest pension in Europe, if not further afield, will not get me very far.

READ MORE: Michael Fry: An independent Scotland will without doubt be a capitalist nation

One item over the weekend gladdened my heart. A runner in a marathon allowed his rival to win because he believed he was the true winner. To me that is humanity at work. In the same way, people such as Oscar Schindler and Nicholas Winton saved many lives, particularly children, during World War Two. Today we have refugees fighting to stay in Scotland because they don’t have the finances of a Evgeny Lebedev to smooth their path to the House of Lords.

Robert Mitchell
Dunblane

MAY I just make a brief answer to Iain WD Forde of Scotlandwell (Letters, September 22)?

Yes. You would need a passport to visit and return to Belfast, inconvenient as it might be. Even dafter than that is that you will probably have to stand in the “other countries” queue.

However, once we get independence and re-join the EU, you will no longer need to use it to visit Belfast – although you will probably have to carry it with you, just as you are supposed to carry it when you cross borders within the EU, even though you will not need to show it unless demanded. But it will be needed if you happen to have friends or relatives living in England and you go to visit them.

By the way, I can’t see Westminster allowing us to have our border at Hadrian’s Wall, although I could see it being at the Tweed at Berwick as, I believe they have already held a local referendum in which they stated a desire to become part of Scotland when we become independent.

Charlie Kerr
Glenrothes

HOW did we get here?

What is self-evident is that when you open up society too soon, the virus loves it. Across the USA the counties that opened their schools/universities/hospitality facilities and political rallies are where the virus is taking the greatest toll.

Somehow, one can’t help getting the feeling that too many people imagine that the virus in USA and South America is a different virus to our UK virus. One also has to wonder if some politicians and their masters are secretly, foolishly, hoping for “herd” immunity.

Well, I understand from medical and scientific experts that to achieve herd immunity we are talking about circa 75% infection, and recovery...

What next?

Graham Noble
Drumsallie