SNP's Good Week Compared to Labour's (Herald)

WENDY Alexander started her letter to The Herald on Saturday with the statement "The SNP have had a bad week". As she is obviously in no position to benefit from such a state of affairs and is an unimpeachable barker of truth, I will be gracious enough to believe her.

However, I must let her know that, in common with the rest of the electorate, I failed to notice, as we discovered the Labour Prime Minister had been questioned by police investigating the grubby commercialisation of the honours system. At the same time we learned he had spiked the Serious Fraud Office's investigation into allegations that a major British contract to secure the sale of weapons of mass destruction to a country, a number of whose citizens were largely responsible for the 9/11 atrocities, involved bribery and corruption on a scale running into hundreds of millions of pounds.

In the same week, the war the Labour leader largely initiated saw a death toll between Sunday and Friday of at least 443, with many more kidnapped, missing and injured.

At a Holyrood level, we heard that the Liberal Democrats would not tolerate the prospect of a minority Labour administration, following the Deputy FM's long-held wish to lower Scottish business rates to below those of our competitors being scuppered by the Finance Minister's pledge to retain parity until 2012. I also read a poll which suggested that Scottish Labour were performing so badly that they would continue to control only one solitary local council after May 2007, perhaps as a result of an electorate tired of having a massive deficit and anaemic growth being waved around as a barometer of success. Then again, it may have something to do with the publication of a Culture Bill about which, despite careful scouring of newspapers, websites and broadcast media, I have yet to find a kind word.

If the SNP happened to have had a bad week, as Wendy established, is the fact Labour had an infinitely worse one a result of simple bad luck or fiendish manipulation of the news cycle by Nationalist spin doctors? Perhaps the people should be told. Perhaps not, though.

Alex Cox, Whistlefield Court, Bearsden

WENDY Alexander starts her partisan pro-Labour letter on Saturday with the assertion that it has been a bad week for the SNP. Where has she been all week when the rest of us have heard of Tony Blair's interview with the Met, the surrender of the UK government to Saudi blackmail and that a majority of Scottish MPs would appear to be against the renewal of Trident? These are matters of morality and amount to a far worse week for Labour than the politicking of which she accuses the SNP.

She boasts that she lived through the transformation of Labour (not, I note, New Labour) to an organisation that answers tough questions convincingly (not, I note again, truthfully). Such a pity they lost their moral compass in the process of that change.

Fred Allardice, Hillside, Grange of Lindores, Cupar

WHAT on earth political cloud-cuckoo land does Wendy Alexander occupy? In a week which has seen a Labour Prime Minister and a Labour government almost overwhelmed by sleaze and corruption, she suggests it was the SNP that has had the bad week. It takes a particularly virulent intellectual myopia to be able to write something like that.

Alan Clayton, Westfield, Letters Way, Strathlachlan

I SEE that senior Labour opinion-formers are advising that to beat David Cameron a slightly shop-soiled Gordon Brown may have to be skipped in favour of someone from the younger generation to lead them into the next election. At this interesting moment in the music-hall of politics, who could fail to be amused by the contributions of the Alexander Twins as ambitious Wendy presses an accordion on eager Douglas, crying, "Play, brother, play!" until the strains of Land of Hope and Glory echo around the manse.

Frederic Lindsay, 28 The Green, Pencaitland, Tranent