Scotland would be held back by the incompetence of its political leaders

IF ever I needed proof that SNP support is based on fantasy, then letters from Ruth Marr and Fraser Grant (June 12) provided that.ms Marr tells me that Scotland thinks itself lucky to have Nicola Sturgeon. We do? Ms Sturgeon’s approval rating on one website this morning is 21 per cent, somewhat less than the SNP’S overall support. Just how does that equate to Scotland?

Mr Grant says that there is every reason to believe that an independent Scotland would have the expertise to match Denmark and other smaller European states. I sincerely hope he isn’t referring to the fiction of political expertise.

Rocky though the independence road may be initially, Scotland could assert its place as one of the best wee countries in the world alongside Ireland and the Baltic countries. But what would hold Scotland back is that the quality of our ruling political class is so abysmally poor.

The SNP Government is largely economically illiterate, many of its ministers functionally inarticulate, and only able to respond to problems by contrived grievance.

All politicians can ever do is to make the economic environment more difficult or less difficult in which to thrive. Scotland’s success will rest on those who take the personal risk to run businesses creating taxable wealth, creating markets for their taxable goods and services, creating taxable employment and those citizens willing to work for their taxable livings. Business employment and wealth creation, on which the political class and the public sector rely, would occur not because of the SNP but despite them.

I have never adhered to the view so often mischievously ascribed by the SNP and its fellow travellers to Unionists that Scotland is “too small, too stupid, and too poor” to be independent – but I fear we being driven that way by the incompetents we presently have in power.

Alasdair Sampson,

The Pines, 7A Loudon Street, Stewarton. ONCE again, your columnist Pinstripe goes to his keyboard to scrabble around looking for a non-existent status quo to rubbish any attempt to gain independence (“Three key reasons why growth report fails to add up”, Herald Business, June 12).He starts off by attacking the 2014 White Paper Scotland’s Future and then damns the Growth Commission with faint praise before drawing all sorts of wrong conclusions. He called the former “absurd”, ignoring that one of the failures of the White Paper was because of the drop in oil revenue; the figures the SNP used were more modest than those produced by the oil and gas industry.

The currency issue was blocked then by the Treasury – who can forget George Osborne, the Chancellor, flying up to Edinburgh, stating categorically that Scotland would not be allowed to use the pound, then leaving right away without taking any questions?. In the book The End of Alchemy Lord Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England, said there would have been no problem with Scotland continuing to use the pound. This time around, the current Governor, Mark Carney, has already said there would be no problem with us using the pound.

As far as the division of debt is concerned, we could do a trade-off, letting RUK retain Trident. Division of debts also means division of assets; we would give them the House of Lords. One proposal that really appeals to me is the creation of an oil fund; Pinstripe ignores that

Norway’s oil fund is £1 trillion. Norway discovered the same amount of oil at the same time the UK did.

With independence we will make some mistakes, but not many as catastrophic as Westminster is doing, and we will fix them; at present we are at the mercy of an incompetent UK government, who are aimlessly creating chaos all round.

Jim Lynch,

42 Corstorphine Hill Crescent, Edinburgh.