Cultureclubbed

A Mcleish is right to say that "All the SNP did was to occupy the ideological space abandoned by the Labour Party." (Letters, 1 March).

Before the pandemic, I was unlucky enough to attend a theatre workshop where the course leader decided to harangue those attending with her political views.

She lectured at some length on how the once in a generation 2014 referendum brought forth "a flowering renaissance of Scottish culture and an awakening national consciousness" which had been growing for many years.

What a shame so many of us totally missed this seismic event. The reasons for the SNP morphing from fringe party to the scary beastie of today are, as A Mcleish suggests, more prosaic.

In the 1980s, the Chinese Communist Party started to abandon unworkable Marxist/maoist economic policies. In the 1990s, Tony Blair's Labour Party did likewise with socialist ones.

They forgot, however, that there remained a big market for traditional left-wing dogma in Scotland, where an entrenched entitlement and dependency culture persists in many places.

All the separatists had to do was steal Labour's old clothes, hop on every "progressive" bandwagon rolling into town and keep up a steady antibritish rhetoric to excite the minority who hate England far more than they love Scotland.

The FM writing a preface for Sunset Song and putting Gaelic signage everywhere does not add up to the "cultural renaissance and awakening nationalconsciousness"imagined by the lady who hijacked our drama session.

Not that an independent Scotland would have much money to spend on culture, Scottish or otherwise. Or on social welfare and public services either, for that matter.

MARTIN O’GORMAN Littlejohn Road, Edinburgh