Democracy says all sides must accept result of 2014’s independence referendum

In answer to Lesley Riddoch’s question (“Does an SNP election win not matter, Mr Jack”, Perspective, 13 January), it depends on how you try to spin it.

The 12 December election was for the UK Westminster parliament – we can all see from the numbers of MPS sitting on the green benches that the Conservatives won by a considerable margin. Most people would say that they won the election and therefore have a mandate to deliver the manifesto promises they stood on. That includes not allowing Indyref2. Elections to Westminster are always about a greater array of issues than our constitutional position. Yes, there are other things going on in the world.

Most people accept that an Indyref mandate should be achieved via a Holyrood election, but even here there is a complication. We have already had a vote on this, in 2014. We spent the best part of three years debating it, going around in circles, looking at processes and issues over and over again. Nothing else got done while it was happening. People voted on it, and that should have been that.

There are two issues relating to this that are not raised, but should be. In the aftermath of the 2014 poll, all parties in the Scottish parliament got together to agree further devolved powers through the Smith Commission. A package was agreed, signed by all parties, so the current situation we have should be one that we can all live with. That package reserved international affairs to Westminster, so they did have a right to hold the EU vote. We agreed to that. That is democracy as well.

The other issue is that there are almost 1,000,000 first generation Scots living south of the Border. The UK parliament has to think of them as well, particularly as the 2014 vote disenfranchised them. They never had a say in their own country’s future. That is just wrong. The majority in Scotland needs to have our choices protected by someone, so we are not steamrollered by a minority, single-issue Scottish Government.

If the 2014 vote did not resolve anything, then having another one will not resolve anything either. Saying No is the right thing to do.

VICTOR CLEMENTS

Aberfeldy, Perthshire

Lesley Riddoch talked of “arrant nonsense” and “hypocrisy” in her tirade against the Scottish Secretary’s eminently reasonable assertion that a victory for the

SNP in next year’s Holyrood election would not be a mandate for another referendum on separation from the Union.

Perhaps Ms Riddoch could explain why, when all indicators of Scottish public opinion over the last five and a bit years have shown that the Union is favoured by a substantive majority of Scottish voters, such an assertion can be described in the way she does?

The truth of the matter is that, despite the demonising of the UK and its government by the SNP, Ms Riddoch and her like – who all appear to live in a pre-2014 bubble – are the ones who continue to peddle arrant nonsense and are guilty of the greatest hypocrisy, that of reneging on the “once in a generation” promise by continually whingeing on about the need to settle a constitutional question which was settled decisively in 2014.

Once and for all, Ms Riddoch, please accept that there is no such thing as a Yes (or a No) voter anymore. There is no mandate, justification or appetite for another independence referendum in Scotland and that the majority of “the Scottish people” believe it is arrant nonsense to claim otherwise.

GRAHAM AM HAMMOND

Hoghill Court , East Calder, West Lothian