Better not bigger

If independence is equivalent to a family member leaving the nest, then a crucial part of that process is a separate bank account.

A Yes vote is a protest against centralisation. But sharing a currency in an equal way is just a form of centralisation.

This means you go up when the parent currency goes up and down when that currency drops. Sterling itself shares the ups and downs of the US dollar.

So you need to be sure of  the economic strength of the currency to which you are linked.

Why has a unique Scottish currency not been considered?

Israel, with a comparable size of population and an area only the size of Wales, has its own prestigious airline and buoyant shekel, while Switzerland also with a comparable size of population but minus our  resources has its own airline and currency.

Bigger doesn’t mean better or stronger.

Margaret E Salmond

Dunbar Street

Aberdeen

It is a sad indictment of the  intellectual bankruptcy of  Better Together that its apologists are reduced to arguing that if Scotland left the Union the net effect both politically and  economically on rUK would  effectively be “nil” (according to Scottish Secretary Alistair Carmichael).

But this same Scotland today, representing less than 9 per cent of the population of the UK, is somehow “bullying” a country ten times its size, and on which it exerts no material influence.

The proposition needs only to be stated to be seen to be absurd.

The same people anxious to see the EU fully embrace the Ukraine argue, without a hint of irony, that Scotland’s case to retain its hard-earned 40 years of EU membership is zero; and its people will rightly be spurned by Europe and sent into the wilderness.

The reason Better Together is fundamentally wrong is that it believes this whole issue is about Scotland. It is not.

It is about the political failure of the UK, and the total surrender of British politics to the greed, folly and rapacious self-interest of London and the City of London, to the point at which this has brought the Union to the edge of a financial abyss.

The current political system is incapable of serving the interests of anyone outside the Home Counties, whether they live in Scotland, or Somerset, or the north-east of England.

Scotland demonstrably does not have the power or influence to change the whole UK, but it can look after itself.

Meanwhile, the proposition that all this will be cured miraculously by an election in 2015 that will bring in Labour or the Liberal Democrats to save the day is absurd.

John S Warren

Tulipan Court

Callander

The letter from Tim Jackson (21 February) is largely answered in the referendum report in the same issue.

It may be relevant that European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, who is Portuguese, was recently described in the Portuguese press as “a Spanish doormat”.

This is probably more insulting in Portuguese than it sounds in English.

In his statement about Scotland and the EU he may have been following the wishes of UK Prime Minister David Cameron rather than of Spain.

In any case, there seems little logic in regarding Scotland as a “new” state but the Rest of the UK as a continuing one. The Acts/Treaty of Union of 1707 stated that the United Kingdom of Great Britain would come into being on 1 May, 1707.

Ireland was added to the UK in 1801 and, as part of the UK, modified to Northern Ireland in the 1920s.

If the Union of 1707 is terminated then two previously existing states resume their existence.

Presumably, these should be treated equally by the EU and other international bodies.

David Stevenson Blacket Place

Edinburgh