Then again...

Alasdair Searle (Letters, 31 December) says the SNP are not moving forward because

they only won 47 Westminster seats. He doesn’t mention that the SNP won 13 seats from the two main Unionist parties.

He says they gathered 1.2 million votes. Actually 1,242,380m people voted for the SNP, but the increase from 977,561 votes from 2017 goes unmentioned. He says the electorate in Scotland is 4.2m and the percentage of people who voted SNP was 28 per cent. The latest figure for the electorate in Scotland was

3,925,800m. In the latest election, 30.5 percent of the electorate were SNP voters. When the Greens’ vote is added, the percentage of the electorate supporting independence goes up to 32.5 per cent. The percentage of the turnout for independence including the Greens was 46 per cent.

The percentage of the electorate who voted for the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats was 37 per cent and their percentage of the turnout was 53 per cent and not the widely used figure of 55 per cent. A total of 16,546 people voted for the Brexit Party and UKIP.

So, on the face of it, Unionists can take comfort from these figures and should have little to fear from another referendum. The problem is that polls indicate that significant numbers of Labour voters and smaller numbers of Liberal Democrats and Conservatives actually support independence.

All this just proves that you can do lots of stuff with statistics, but the only thing that matters is the number who turn up on the day for an election or referendum.

GILL TURNER Derby Street, Edinburgh