More SNP rhetoric

The SNP is beyond parody. Only Nicola Sturgeon could turn Tony Blair’s call for the UK to unite against “hard” Brexit into yet another call for a second divisive referendum. Have our workplaces, families and communities not been damaged enough by her obsession?

Nicola Sturgeon may feel that the case for independence is “even more compelling” now than it was in 2014, but what was unknown then is still unknown today. The SNP still have no ideas on currency, how we’d reduce our deficit or what terms Scotland would be offered on applying to join the EU. Or perhaps they do know, but won’t say!

Whilst the known unknowns are still, erm, unknown, some of the known facts are quite alarming. Scotland has the worst deficit in the EU, oil revenue is actually now below zero due to subsidies and unemployment in Scotland is now higher than the rest of the UK.

This is the reality Scotland faces. The SNP Government should be dealing with it instead of pumping out endless post-truth nationalist rhetoric.

It looks to me like Scotland is at a tipping-point. Nicola Sturgeon can choose to focus her energy and political capital on fixing the real problems she created in health and education. Alternatively, a second divisive referendum, failing schools and understaffed hospitals will be her legacy.

DR SCOTT ARTHUR Buckstone Crescent, Edinburgh

Nicola Sturgeon used to tell us: “If opinion stays as it was in the [2014] referendum, there won’t be another referendum.” She is twice on film saying this.

Apart from a small blip after the EU referendum, there has been no change since September 2014 in Scots’ voting intentions. What with that and her “once in a generation/lifetime” statements during the 2014 referendum campaign, her undertakings have been clear.

Yet now she dangles the possibility of a new referendum. She had better beware: she has marched her troops to the top of the hill. How will they react when she marches them back down again?

An SNP supporter recently told me that “we’ll have a referendum when we are ready”. The idea that one side should unilaterally choose the conditions of any referendum flies in the face of impartiality and justice.

Of course, David Cameron sold the pass last time by letting Salmond choose all the conditions of the 2014 referendum.

This cannot be allowed to happen again. If we have another referendum – in the face of Ms Sturgeon’s undertakings to the contrary – then the decision on its conditions (question, date, electorate, etc) must be taken by the Electoral Commission.

Or is fair play one of the characteristics of Britishness that the SNP rejects?

JILL STEPHENSON Glenlockhart Valley, Edinburgh