No guarantee of Scotland being accepted into EU fold

Sir, – The SNP and Greens would have us believe that the EU would welcome Scotland’s application to rejoin the family of Brussels with open arms.

The EU stated in 2014 that “the UK is a contracting party to the Treaties of the EU: Scotland is not”.

Since you can’t actually ‘rejoin’ something that you had never actually joined, Scotland would therefore be treated as a first-time applicant.

Our application wouldn’t comply with at least one of the major key criteria for membership (drafted under the European Council of Copenhagen 1993).

Our Implicit Budget Deficit was 8.6% of GDP in 2020, forecasted to rise to 26-28% by 2021 (GERS 2020).

That’s seven times greater than the UK as a whole.

The same criteria state that a country “must ensure financial stability and access to finance” and “give the EU full access to assessment of competence...”.

I’m not convinced that a heavily redacted report on how we would comply with this requirement would cut it with the EU. But all is not lost.

We have several assets to offer as collateral against our borrowing:

A river bridge that you can’t cross when it’s cold.

Two ferries that can’t carry anything because they haven’t been finished yet.

An airport that nobody wants and we can’t sell. A hospital with no patients. Ambulances with the word ‘Ambulance’ in Gaelic on the bonnet so they won’t be mistaken for ice cream vans.

Countless additional investments and guarantees from wind turbines to aluminium smelting.

With such a record of financial mismanagement, there is no way the EU would ‘leave the light on’ and fast track our application for new membership; assuming they accepted our application at all. Willie Robertson. Bingham Terrace, Dundee.