May could be heading for her very own Darien disaster with Brexit negotiations

Jonathan Brown (Letters, 4 March) is using the history of the Darien scheme to create propaganda which won’t wash with serious students of history.

Instead of the Spanish and English waiting in the wings as they were back then to snipe at Scotland for trying to make our way in the colonial world of the 1690s, we have Germany and France showing sympathetic support for a Scotland that voted by 60 per cent to stay in Europe.

It may well suit Germany to utilise the Scottish situation to get considerable leverage with the UK in the forthcoming negotiation.

Yes, there is a Darien scheme today – it is called Brexit, and if Theresa May continues to insist that she won’t meet any of the usual criteria for having a trade deal with Europe she may not get one.

In recent weeks we learned that Scotland’s Fintech needs passporting rights to Europe. Many British bank operations also need this. But passporting rights are definitely under threat.

We heard that the car industry in Wales is planning major job cutbacks – partly due to Brexit. Liam Fox sent a memo to the effect that he couldn’t find any trade deals which don’t involve accepting immigrants, and we learned that Donald Trump’s idea of a trade deal was one he could scrap at a month’s notice.

Mrs May picks unreliable friends and gets herself into unnecessary conflict while arrogantly claiming that she is doing better at managing the health and education services in England than the SNP are doing in Scotland.

ANDREW VASS Corbiehill Place, Edinburgh Jonathan Brown repeats the myth that Scottish incompetence bankrupted the country and tries to draw parallels with the current SNP Government.

In fact, the Darien scheme was enthusiastically supported by only a few hundred wealthy aristocrats (the government of the day) who foolishly invested heavily in this “get-rich-quick” scheme. The average Scot could take no part in it.

When it failed, (and the English actually did do everything in their power to achieve that end), the aristocrats who had lost their fortunes fell over themselves to accept a compensation payment, from England, in gold, called The Equivalent, in return for their votes to extinguish Scotland’s parliament. A bribe, no less.

The Equivalent documents still exist, showing, for example, that the Duke of Hamilton received £30,000 while some minor aristocrats settled for £20.

Robert Burns, born about 50 years after these events, wrote bitterly about the “parcel of rogues” who were “bought and sold for English gold”.

JAMES DUNCAN Rattray Grove, Edinburgh