Isles have good reason to revolt against SNP rule

THE news that Shetland and Orkney are looking to gain independence from SNP-run Scotland should come as no surprise.

Apart from some excellent local councillors, the SNP seems to be content to let anything outside the Central Belt lapse into a state of managed decline.

A trip through the conurbations of the West Coast will attest to this: lack of opportunity, lack of hope, lack of steady employment.

It seems the only resource the SNP has left in this part of Scotland are the clients, patients and ‘partners’ who keep employees of social services, charities and the third sector in precarious low-paid work. Years of centralisation have led to this as well as nearly a decade of unnecessary constitutional wrangling over independence that has kept the supposedly ‘local’ Edinburgh-based Scottish Government even less focused on its ‘provinces’.

It seems the end-point of Scottish secession from the UK, may well be the fracturing of Scotland itself. Perhaps the SNP should never have opened the Pandora’s box of divisive nationalism, but it can still choose to close it.

DAVID BONE, Girvan, Ayrshire SHETLAND Council isn’t alone in seeking ways to remain in the UK (Mail). Orkney and the Western Isles have confirmed they are looking at it, and there’s similar talk in the Borders too. The SNP has even considered leasing the Faslane Trident base on the Clyde to the UK for £2billion a year.

An Indyref ‘vow’ that any region voting Remain by 60 per cent could not to be dragged out of the UK against its will would transform the debate. Especially if Edinburgh, East Lothian, Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire – Scotland’s most prosperous regions – voted 60 per cent No again. ALLAN SUTHERLAND, Stonehaven, Kincardineshire.