Fight goes on for Scotland’s liberty

Sir, – It requires no great insight to recognise the truth of John Ferry’s argument (Opinion, April 25) that the case for Scottish independence and the case for an end to Israel’s atrocities (no other word will serve) in Gaza are two wholly different issues.

I doubt whether anybody is seriously trying to “conflate” them, and I doubt still more whether debating the theoretical relationship between the two causes will have much effect on the level of support for either of them.

The recovery of Scottish independence (and incidentally, Mr Ferry should discontinue his use of negatively-loaded terms like “separatism” and “the break-up of Britain”) has been a live issue since 1707, though more in the foreground at some points in this long period than at others.

What has made it such a burning issue in our time is not “decolonisation ideology”.

I would risk a bet that most of the people who marched in Glasgow on Saturday, and at the many similar independence rallies we have seen, had never heard the phrase and would not be particularly interested in having it explained to them.

Support for independence is not fuelled by academic theories but by the simple and obvious fact that the present political set-up works to Scotland’s disadvantage.

Most Scottish voters did not want a succession of Tory governments, but we got it and are suffering the consequences of the party’s criminal incompetence.

Most Scottish voters did not want to leave the EU, but we were forced out of it all the same, and the damage is plain for all to see.

I can’t detect much enthusiasm in Scotland for the red-washed Toryism represented by Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, but we will probably get landed with that too.

The dreadful war in Gaza is an immediate crisis requiring urgent resolution; the recovery of Scottish independence is obviously not as desperate a necessity as that.

But the independence cause will still be there when the Gaza crisis is over and it will succeed even if we have to wait a bit longer.