Letters: Model nations

Published on Saturday 11 February 2012 00:00

A PRECEDENCE set by the United Nations enables us simultaneously to avoid any hint of institutional bias inherent in the operations of the UK Electoral Commission in supervising the proposed independence referendum and the possibility of a value-loaded question.

The UN General Assembly resolution 47/114, passed in December 1992, set up the UN observer mission to verify the referendum in Eritrea (Unover).

The observer mission also set the question which seems to have avoided the value-loaded terms such as “do you agree” and the alternative suggested by Graeme G Crawford (Letters, 9 February) “should leave the United Kingdom and become a separate country?” The Unover question for Eritrea was: “Do you want Eritrea to be an independent and sovereign country?”

I grew up in Eritrea and have found the parallels with Scotland to be uncanny.

Eritrea did not, however, have the complications of EU membership to consider; but the questions of the details of what independent sovereignty would bring were also unclear for them. The question was a matter of principle, as I believe it should also be for us.

(Dr) Francis Roberts

Greenbank Avenue Edinburgh

IT IS interesting to note which countries Ewan Crawford chose to cite in the opening sentence of his separation/independence article (Perspective, 7 February).

The first is the world’s newest country, South Sudan, born after a gestation of genocide and civil war. I confess I do not see any similarity with Scotland.

Nor is there any apparent affinity between the oppression by the Soviet regimes of the peoples in former Communist countries, such as Estonia, Croatia and Slovakia, and the treatment of Scots by the English.

I do note, however, that having thrown off totalitarian rule, East Germany chose to reunite with the West, rather than remain independent/separate.

The second is the United States of America, composed of 50 states, some of which were formerly independent, or part of other countries, each with the power to make many of its own laws, though defence and foreign affairs are reserved to Washington, a system sounding rather like the Liberal Democrats’ century-old Home Rule policy for Scotland.

Jane Ann Liston

Whitehill Terrace

St Andrews

Fife

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samcoldstream

Saturday, February 11, 2012 at 12:56 PM

The author only highlights the solution to this interminable Neverendum: a Federal or Con-Federal form of government in the UK which the Liberal-Democrat Party dare not speak? The UK is already slowly moving towards a Federal State in everything but constitutional name. It didn't begin in 1997? It began in 1921 after Partition when the, albeit, undemocratic Northern Ireland Parliament and Upper House, The Senate, was created introducing a devolved form of government there.. This gerrymandered Statelet was eventually brought down by the Civil Rights movement and IRA insurgency and the Good Friday and St. Andrews Agreements set in place a truly democratic, power-sharing Assembly in Northern Ireland. Direct Rule no longer has a writ in the Province, and the centralised, 20th century, British State, is also Gone With The Wind.

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Beachdair

Saturday, February 11, 2012 at 01:12 AM

All very interesting, Ms Liston, but totally irrelevant. Scotland has very good reasons for becoming independent and has no intention of modelling itself on any of your carefully-selected countries or long-dead Liberal Democrats.

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