Twisted tales

I believe it was George Orwell who said “we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show we were right”.

Nicola Sturgeon is clearly a fan of Orwell with her insistence that the SNP has a mandate for a second referendum. This is apparently based on the number of Scottish votes for the SNP in the recent UK elections.

Approximately four million Scots are registered to vote. Of these 1.2m voted for the SNP – 30 per cent of the electorate, 22 per cent of the population. Many votes were from disaffected Labour supporters and those who wished to remain in Europe, so these figures are even more revealing and destroy the myth about Sturgeon having a mandate. WILLIAM GRAHAM

Fochabers, Moray

The SNP asked for (or demanded) a referendum on independence to be held in 2014, which they lost. They gave a signed guarantee that they would respect the outcome. They then proceeded to ignore that guarantee following the result.

They make much of democracy and Ian Blackford and Nicola Sturgeon have both demanded (again) that Scotland’s voice be heard and that it is a “democratic outrage” that it is not. Of course, they mean that the SNP’S voice is being ignored because it does not pay heed to democratic decisions like the referendum on independence. Now, they demand a second referendum after stating on many occasions that the last was “once in a generation”, confirming that in their White Paper.

Most recently, they and their Green sidekicks have voted to overrule the management group of the Scottish Parliament’s decision that the EU flag should not fly after tonight, despite the UK leaving after 11pm.

Perhaps I am being oversensitive, but any party that behaves so badly when it is a devolved government within the UK would scare the living daylights out of me if they ever got independence and had no one to control them.

PETER MCGLASHAN

Perth Road, Dundee