Letters: Lone question

IT SEEMS to me silly that so many people want so many facts, so many assurances, before they decide whether or not Scotland should be an independent nation again. You can never have any such certainties.

Put two economists in a room at breakfast time and you will have three economic models by elevenses, five by lunch and a headache at teatime. Or to quote George Bernard Shaw: “If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.”

Making a decision on whether or not Scotland should be independent has nothing to do with anything other than whether or not you want Scotland to stand alone (apart from sharing the monarchy, having the Bank of England as lender of last resort, sharing defence, foreign affairs, being in the European Union, Nato and all that sort of stuff).

Would you want Scotland to be an independent nation, warts and all, for example, if in the fullness of time Scotland were to drop into the bottom 10 per cent of countries in the world by any form of economic measurement? Independence is not for Christmas. Go for it, and there is no going back.

Which brings me to my final point. I have never understood the logic of the argument made by our present leader that only Scotland should have a say in whether or not the United Kingdom should be broken up.

Surely England, Northern Ireland and Wales should have a say. Scots have contributed to making the Union, so surely our partners in it should have their say on its possible break-up?

I do hope that thought is not misconstrued as anti-Scottish, though it might be. Nationalism has such a tunnel vision at times.

Alex J Good

Kekewich Avenue

Edinburgh

I DON’T know how many more lectures I can take from Unionist columnists like Brian Wilson from the Left (?) and Alan Massie from the Right, complaining about SNP politicians’ allegedly “nasty” rhetorical flourishes, which we are invited to contrast unfavourably with the supposedly more rational approach of their Unionist opponents (Perspective, 8 February).

But when Alan Massie declares in the context of the referendum debate that “almost all the inflammatory language is coming from the nationalist side,” he is blissfully ignoring the enormous provocation to which Scotland’s democratically elected First Minister has been subjected in the British media in recent weeks in the wake of the launch of his independence referendum white paper.

Being casusally abused by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight as Scotland’s Mugabe and compared in Private Eye, as Brian Wilson reminded us, to Kim Jong-un. Excuse me – Mr Salmond and his party fairly and squarely won a multi-party democratic election conducted on a partial PR system, though of course in the eyes of Mr Wilson and his party that is his real crime for which absolution will remain for ever unattainable.

Ian O Bayne

Clarence Drive

Glasgow

GEORGE Shering (Letters, 8 February) certainly fired some telling shots across the bows of Lord “Nato” Robertson, comparing a separate international Scotland’s potential to that of the Swiss confederation!

I lived but briefly in that country in the 1960s, and saw how a multinational state can function like clockwork when all the levers co-ordinate democratically at the grass-roots.

Mr Shering neglected to mention the Swiss Romansch people’s absolute equality. Compare that to our Gaelic-speaking brethren here.

Douglas Bain

Oxgangs Drive

Edinburgh