Letter: Paying the price

We must hope that, if "independent public policy consultant" Tom Miers has fee-paying clients, they get more impartial advice than his unpleasantly biased critique of the SNP government ("Fiddling While Scotland Burns", Perspective, 6 July).

Apart from it being unreasonable to expect this government to have grand strategies already in place - let alone funded - to abolish social deprivation, poor health and substandard education, public transport, etc, he tarnishes the undoubted truth that Scotland has desperate problems in those, and other, areas of our national life by the shabby accusation that we are distracted by "hate" of our southern neighbours.

Miers, and those unionists anxious for the SNP to fail, might bear in mind that these chronic social ills are our inheritance of being locked into this Union for 300-odd years. Those who cling to the belief that our salvation lies in more of the same are surely blinded by that curiously British belief that an unwritten constitution, a dysfunctional Royal Family, a dash of sectarianism and a pinch of xenophobia somehow makes Britain "still the best country in the world".

David Roche

Forest Way

Blairgowrie, Perthshire