Davidson off key

Thank heavens for Ruth Davidson. If she remains leader of the Scottish Conservatives, then the Yes campaign will have nothing to fear from that direction (your report, 31 August).

She says nationalism is “out of place in our increasingly interdependent world”. This reminds me of the sneering unionists of my youth, who regularly claimed that Scottish nationalism was irrelevant to a world in which political units were getting bigger. A look at an atlas will show that there are now more independent states in Europe alone than there have been at any time in the past 140 years.

She comes out with more rubbish in the oft-repeated claim that “North Sea oil is a diminishing resource whose price is volatile”. It may (and I write as one who has worked in the oil industry) be diminishing, but there’s still plenty left. And let me now demonstrate the nonsense of the “volatile price” argument: if the UK government gets, say, $100 for a barrel of oil this month, that’s $100 split among 63 million people. If the price drops to $50 a barrel next month , in an independent Scotland, that would be $50 split between five million people, ie in real terms an awful lot more. As wiser heads than me have pointed out, the Scots unionists are the only people for whom a huge oil bonanza is a problem.

As for her statements about mortgages and pension products, produced in Scotland but sold mainly in England, has it never occurred to her that the English buy them because they are the best deal they can get, and not because of the Union between the two countries?

Stan FisheR

Whinfield Road

Prestwick