Another nail

Tom Peterkin highlights the dilemma facing the SNP in their neverending search for a means of breaking up the Union (Perspective, 6 July) . Consistently, the SNP argued that, with the UK leaving the EU, if Scotland were to leave the UK and attempt to rejoin the EU, financial services companies would stream north to Edinburgh.

As he points out, despite Ireland already being a separate member nation of the EU, there is no sign of institutions fleeing “from London to Dublin as a result of Brexit” and that former Irish ambassador to Canada Ray Bassett is suggesting the precise opposite course for the Irish to the one Nicola Sturgeon is proposing for Scotland, namely to leave the EU. Perhaps his thinking is a realisation that, like satellites of a planet, the smaller states in the British Isles depend far more upon the rest of the UK than upon the EU, important though it is.

Indeed, even the common currency (and interest rates) of the EU act against Irish interests, as they would for a separate Scotland and, now that France’s President Emmanuel Macron is getting into his stride, he is suggesting that tax “harmonisation” should apply right across the EU and that all EU nations must join the euro. Low corporate tax Ireland has protested, but, if the big boys want it, they will get it and the small nations will just do as they are told. This is yet another nail in the coffin of the SNP’S pro-eu policy.

ANDREW HN GRAY Craiglea Drive, Edinburgh