Constitutional navel-gazing will not protect us from the coming threats

With all that is going on at the moment in the world, to think that there are still people in Scotland talking about independence, for or against, is just pathetic, and shows how shallow our politics can really be. Some people cannot seem to be able to see the world through any other prism.

It is a fact that this current crisis is being fought at a UK level, with overall strategy being devised and implemented from there with input from devolved administrations, and the whole thing being funded by the UK Treasury. We will face all sorts of problems going forwards for the next decade or more, and independence is not the answer to any of that. The issues will simply be too large.

The important issue is that this is not the only time over the last ten-12 years that we have had huge worldwide shocks which we have had to try and endure. The oil price crash in 2014 was devastating for the Scottish economy, but the UK economy was strong enough to pull us through it. The 2008 financial crisis was an order of magnitude worse, and ten years later, we are still dealing with the consequences, but we survived. During this time, there were threefour diseases that arose that could have become pandemics, but mercifully did not.

The reality that we all have to face is that we live on a planet with 7.7 billion people on it, and this is projected to rise to ten billion by 2050, and most of those people are demanding a higher standard of living that consumes more resources. We are living at the very edge of being able to maintain a sustainable existence, and that inevitably means that we are going to be facing more of these big worldwide disruptions in the future when things go wrong, perhaps up to twothree per decade.

We all need to get our heads around this and work out how to deal with it so that we can be resilient to these shocks. Our constitutional navelgazing has no place to play in this. That issue should now be dead, and it doesn’t say much about us as a nation if we try to keep it alive.

My hope for the future is that once this immediate crisis has been contained, the political parties go out and recruit a huge swathe of NHS nurses and farmers to stand as parliamentary candidates, and they can change our outlook and our future in the way that a previous generation did when theyreturnedfromworldwar II. If they can forge an alternative and credible agenda, then others will have to react to that, and we will all be in a better place.

The world has changed now, and so must we.

VICTOR CLEMENTS

Aberfeldy, Perthshire

When we emerge from this hellish coronavirus experience, the true financial cost to Scotland of coping must be revealed. I have no doubt the figure will confirm that had Scotland been independent, an SNP government would have been totally financially incapable, in addition to the existing dire state of the economy, to manage without massive financial aid.

No matter what the final cost will be, supporters of separation will never admit the inability to cope financially, preferring Scots to exist in penury for decades just to prove a point and to achieve some sort of misguided “freedom”. I have no doubt that the cost will make even the most staunch nationalist agree that separation is as dead as Monty Python’s parrot.

DOUGLAS COWE

Alexander Avenue, Kingseat,

Newmachar