Readers' letters: Pressure is on hapless chancellor Sunak

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak alongside his wife Akshata Murthy

Another day, another Tory government scandal and not for the first time involving the hapless Rishi Sunak and his wife’s status as a non-dom in the UK.

The flimsy smokescreen put up by their spokespeople claim that as she’s an Indian national, she is not eligible to pay tax on her foreign income in the UK.

This, of course, is utter rubbish as being a non-UK national does not mean a person cannot be resident in the UK and pay UK taxes on all earnings like the rest of us.

Mrs Sunak has made a conscious choice to apply for non-dom status and pays, in her terms, a meagre £30,000 a year for the privilege rather than the millions she would be due in fair taxation.They are quick to emphasise she is doing nothing illegal here, which is true, but in a week when Sunak imposed the largest fiscal burden on ordinary people since the 40s, his extremely rich wife is avoiding taxation through some archaic law going back to 1799.

And the fact she has lived here for nine years, is married to a government minister, lives in the most well known address in the UK (at taxpayers’ expense), has children at school here, owns at least three multi-million pound properties here, owns or has shares in a range of UK businesses and even claimed over £1 million in furlough payments during lockdown (which was not paid back due to the business going bust) suggests to me that this person is a long-term resident in the UK.Once more they’re taking us for a ride and as usual with this corrupt government, it’s one rule for us and a different one for them.

D Mitchell, Edinburgh.

We can’t afford the Tories – or Labour

Ian Murray (News, 7 April) is right to say we can’t afford the Tories, with high taxes and attacks on the less well-off, but in Scotland we can’t afford Labour either.

Scottish Labour’s big message for the local elections is about introducing a windfall tax on oil companies and the SNP wants this extended to the likes of Amazon etc.