‘New, positive and exciting future’

Having a national research system

SIR, – Against the continuing miserable, negative and backward-looking Better Together utterances, it was a pleasure to hear inspirational speeches from the SNP conference as the Yes campaign grows in strength, leading Scotland forward into a new, positive and exciting future.

Comfortable people who purport to “like Scotland the way it is” should know that, in many parts of this rich and favoured land, poverty is endemic and food banks have now become a necessity.

While the obscenity of child poverty increases in Scotland, the UK Government is committed to spending billions of pounds upgrading, and thus increasing, nuclear weapons.

Independence is the only way to change Scotland for the SIR, – You reported (April 14) Professor Bryan MacGregor, a vice-principal at Aberdeen University, saying at a fringe event at the SNP conference in Aberdeen that the recent report of the Scottish affairs committee on higher education, research and tuition fees strayed into “hyperbole and complete fiction” and was “not backed up” by the evidence submitted.

As one of the five witnesses who gave oral evidence to the committee, I disagree wholeheartedly. Its report was fully evidence-based. It was even critical of current Westminster immigration policies.

For more than 300 years, Scotland has been at the centre of the British research system, punching far above its

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