The bigger picture on independence

Published on 19/08/2012 00:00

AS A veteran SNP member, I welcome ex-Labour MP Maria Fyfe’s assurance that her opposition to Scottish independence “is not a question of saying Scotland could not afford to be an independent nation state” (Letters, 12 August).

At the same time, I am puzzled by her apparent obsession with the perceived inadequacies of the SNP’s ­current taxation policies as there is absolutely no guarantee that in the event of ­independence these would be ­rigorously implemented in every detail.

For a start there is the possibility – which she would surely not dismiss – that at the first post-independence Scottish parliamentary elections, a Labour-led coalition armed with (in her view) a more plausible set of genuinely social-democratic taxation policies might be elected in place of the current SNP administration which by then might have lost much of its electoral popularity.

There is, in any case, no real prospect of permanent single-party SNP rule occurring in Scotland in the aftermath of independence – contrary to what Maria Fyfe seems to imagine in her worst nightmares. This is especially so in view of the element of proportional representation in the Scottish electoral system which the SNP is not planning to change in favour of the discredited “first-past-the-post” system, favoured by Westminster.

Moreover, even if the electorate voted to re-elect the SNP at the initial post-independence election, John Swinney (assuming he retains his present post as Finance Secretary) might himself choose to adapt and amend the party’s current taxation policies in the light of the much broader range of fiscal and borrowing powers which would then be at his disposal.

Ian O Bayne, Glasgow