Independence must come second

IT IS extraordinary in the strange world of politics that as we approach the Scottish elections, we have a party, the SNP, which the polls tell us will win a working majority. Yet all past experience and historic evidence tells us a political party that is so riven with division and infighting rarely seen in the public domain and which has a diabolical domestic policy record would take a beating at an election.

Add in the extraordinary spectacle of a man who has spent his whole life in the political world fighting for his sole aim of gaining “independence” for his country, putting to one side this lifelong ambition to bring down his successor and consequently inflict serious damage to his party. This aspect of proceedings is definitively the most damning and as people approach the ballot box to cast their vote, they must pause for a moment, use their heads not their hearts and ask whether, like with Alex Salmond, independence must take second place to electing a government that will improve their daily lives by looking outwards and not focussing on their own narrowminded parochialism.

Richard Allison,

Edinburgh.

IT’S hard to believe, but even after the huge help which the Treasury has given the Scottish Government to fight the coronavirus crisis, nationalists are still working hard to break up Britain. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has transferred £9.7 billion in furlough money to Scotland and in addition £3.5bn in further Barnett Formula consequentials.

An independent Scotland without a central bank, no currency reserves, zero credibility on the international money markets and burdened with a huge deficit would be in the same mire as Scotland was in 1707 when it formed the Union with England to save it from economic disaster.

Nicola Sturgeon’s instruction that the EU flag be flown daily over all Scottish government buildings is a reminder of how parlous our vaccine roll-out would have been had we been trapped in the EU vaccination programme. While the UK has vaccinated 28 per cent of its population, Germany has managed only seven per cent and France six per cent. The SNP’S acolytes may delete the word “Oxford” from “Oxford Astra Zeneca vaccine” but the fact remains that our membership of the UK is the reason why vaccination has been so successful.

Leaving the world’s fifth-largest economy, out of the UK single market, out of the EU, and ruled by an incompetent administration, an independent Scotland would indeed be in a dangerous place.

William Loneskie,

Lauder.