Need to defend democracy

Sir, - If you are a small country like an independent Scotland as opposed to part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland then you are likely to make different choices.

An independent Scotland would not have chosen to squander billions of pounds of oil revenues whereas successive Labour and Conservative Governments at Westminster did so in order to thwart Scottish independence.

An independent Scotland would probably have had to settle for the Icelandic option of jailing the bankers rather than the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland option of bailing out private banks with money from the taxpayer.

It is also the case that an independent Scotland could not possibly fund nuclear weapons whereas the main political parties in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland seem to think we have countless billions to spend on nuclear weapons not forgetting the money we have spent trying to sort out Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Scottish parliamentary parties, with the exception of the Scottish Conservatives, rather ironically given that David Cameron was Conservative Prime Minister in 2014, deserve great credit for saying that it is about democratic choice for the Catalans and not independence that is the issue at stake on Sunday October 1 2017.

Peter Ovenstone. 6 Orchard Grove, Peterhead.