Letters / Good at making promises, poor at delivering
I attended the BBC Radio Shetland hustings last week and was quite taken by how confident the SNP and Ms Goodlad were about delivering real change for Shetland. History, unfortunately, tells us otherwise.
Shetland voters should be wary of believing the promises the Shetland SNP and their candidate are making about what she could achieve were she elected. At elections, the SNP is very good at making promises. In government, they are quite good at making announcements of action to deliver them. But they are very poor at actually delivering.
Teachers and pupils have been let down badly. So have NHS staff and patients. And on transport, island residents and businesses all the way up the west of Scotland have been left with a chaotic ferry service.
And then there is the dualling of the A9. In 2011 they promised that this would be upgraded to dual carriageway all the way to Inverness by 2025. They have not even got halfway towards delivering on that commitment.
The failure is so bad that Fergus Ewing, son of Winnie and an SNP MSP since 1999, has left the party and is standing as an independent candidate in his former constituency.
If one of the Ewing clan has so little faith in the SNP’s delivery of its promises, the rest of us should be equally sceptical about their 2026 promises.
Theo Smith
Whiteness
