Letter: Flourishing small economies are rare

From a purely historical perspective, countries in voluntary unions, including the UK, USSR, Germany, Italy, and more recently the EU, are the most successful economies the planet has ever known.

Countries prizing independence, which include most of South America, Africa and Asia, make up the poverty-stricken developing world.

In short, unionism is a progressive quality found in the world's most advanced countries.

While Alex Salmond and his misty-eyed supporters of the SNP cling to the odd isolated country, such as lucky Norway, and a mere handful of others as examples of what independence can achieve, one swallow does not make a summer. Nor does one example prove a hypothesis.

A considerably more realistic appraiser notes that every failed state on earth from Zimbabwe and Iran to North Korea is just as typical of what Scots could get with true independence. In any case the most obvious characteristic of all nation states is how many of them were born in a spirit of extreme violence.

To the credit of the SNP (and indeed of all Scots) this has never been their way.

However, there is no question that when we set men against men, for whatever reason, hotheads are ever ready to take us down the same sad old road regardless of all consequences.

I appeal to Mr McKay's critics, when travelling homewards, tae think again. This is the 21st century, after all, and it is their medieval sentiments which are long out of date.

ROBERT VEITCH

Paisley Drive

Edinburgh

Is Scotland really "very small and very vulnerable" as suggested by Alexander McKay? We may not have the population of Germany or France, but our current headcount of around five million is in line with the average population of most other European nations.

We also have a vast array of natural resources including oil, water and untapped renewable energy potential, whisky and technology, while our successful tourism industry hosts the largest arts festival held anywhere in the world every single year.

That Mr McKay sees such a nation as "small and vulnerable" perhaps says more about his own bleak outlook on his own country than about the reality of modern Scotland.

Gavin Fleming

Grassmarket

Edinburgh

A splenetic burst of nationalist bile seems to have resulted from the rescue of Ireland's bankrupt economy with writers such as Bill McLean (Letters, 24 November) telling us that "the Irish economy is fundamentally in better shape than that of Britain". It must be the way he tells them.

Meanwhile, Stan Grodynski states that I "seem reluctant to support a referendum on the … long-term future of Scotland". Wrong.

Indeed, The Scotsman has published at least one, if not two, letters in the past year in which I have advocated just such a referendum and sooner rather than later.

It is as plain as the nose on your face that the smaller and weaker nations of the European Union are struggling to cope with interest rates and an entire economy which is run by and for the benefit of Germany.

Their fragile economies do not succeed in a one-size-fits-all EU economy where bubbles like the Irish and Spanish property markets can hyper-inflate before bursting.

How lucky we are that we still have our own currency and the power to alter interest rates. This means that we can help bail out our neighbours in the Irish Republic and prevent their disease infecting us.

Those nationalists who advocated pushing for independence in Europe, as they call it, which is a thoroughly dishonest term, must rue the day they ever suggested that Scotland be part of the broken European system.

Indeed, the Scottish people are clearly aware of the siren sounds of the splittist tendency who wish to draw Scotland onto the rocks which have wrecked Ireland's ship of state.

Andrew HN Gray

Craiglea Drive

Edinburgh