Write approach?

Andrew O’hagan has seen the light, and apparently it casts Scotland and Europe in a halo of moral certitude (“Brexit has ‘smashed’ Britain and leaves Scotland threatened says novelist O’hagan”, 17 August). As a leading writer, he spoke out at the Edinburgh International Book Festival with stirring and purposeful words, making his case against the UK and for Scottish independence in Europe.

Here was the recent separatist playbook expressed in eloquent and passionate prose. The only problem was that he chose the SNP approach to analysis, ignoring the inconvenient realities of continued deep and positive interdependence, choosing instead to focus his withering critique on the most negative of interpretations of UK Government motives and where Britain finds itself. He talks, for example, of the UK showing a “blundering attitude towards Scotland’s integrity as a political body”, in relation to Supreme Court hearings on Article 50.

While he is right that the UK Government has chosen not to give the Scottish Government a right of veto over Brexit, he omits to explain that this is in part because the SNP