Many more questions than answers

1) Please confirm that Scotland, after independence, would still want to join the euro, a currency whose interest rate is decided upon to the benefit of Germany and the control of which is firmly centred in that country, as EU paymaster, to the detriment of the economic performance of smaller European nations.

2) Please confirm that you wanted financial regulation in the UK to be loosened in the lead-up to the collapse of RBS and Halifax Bank of Scotland, yet you now position yourself as being better informed as to what the government should be doing to clean up the financial mess those banks whose control you wanted loosened and the actions of Gordon Brown have left us in. Is that correct?

3) Please confirm you believe Scotland should be at the “top table” in Europe, just like Greece and Italy, whose governments have been forced out and replaced by unelected prime ministers to do the bidding of the (equally unelected) bureaucrats of the European Commission. Should Scotland join a union in which democracy is ridden over roughshod and leave the UK where our democratic voice counts?

4) Please confirm you would want Scotland to become independent from the rest of the UK and to have no control over the interest rates dictated by the Bank of England which will affect all aspects of Scottish business. Do you believe such a loss of control and influence is in Scotland’s best interests?

5) Please confirm you refuse to back David Cameron when he fights not only for the City of London, but for all those financial services companies and all the Scottish financial services workers whose jobs, especially in Edinburgh, would have been badly affected by the attempted European raid on one of our major economic sectors.

Do you not support Scottish business and Scottish working people?

6) Please confirm you have more faith in the EU which faces the meltdown of its currency, yet which has taken no concrete steps to protect itself adequately, let alone the rest of the world from the disaster that will result if Italy’s economy goes pear-shaped (not forgetting Portugal and Spain, of course), than you do in the UK, in which the Chinese place much more faith in as a safe place to lend money. Do you believe Scotland and the Scots want to throw the baby out with the bath water and join an EU which is breaking apart at the seams?

One last question: in the event that the eurozone splits apart, would Mr Salmond want Scotland to join the Deutschmark?

Andrew HN Gray

Craiglea Drive

Edinburgh

You raise the very pertinent question (leader, 12 December) about how Alex Salmond would answer the job-supplying, tax-paying business community in Scotland should they agree with David Cameron’s position that a treaty veto was necessary.

If Scotland was broken off and somehow got a seat at the top EU table, would he, the supposed champion of “independence”, have gaily signed up and sent his annual budgets to Brussels for approval?

Where would the longed-for “independence” be then? Would that not reveal what many have long thought – that the SNP’s “independence” was merely a cover for what is fundamentally anglophobia? The questions will not go away. Alex Salmond is a past master at obscurantism, but the day is fast approaching when he must stop being all things to all people.

Alexander McKay

New Cut Rigg

Edinburgh

Alex Salmond has accused David Cameron of “blundering” into altering the UK’s relationship with the EU.

Surely Salmond is just seeking attention. The First Minister is being extremely keen to suppress debate. Is he blundering, or would he be more advised to keep us informed of his master plans?

Ken Currie

Liberton Drive

Edinburgh

Alex Salmond misses the point when he abuses David Cameron of “blundering” by using his veto to protest a deal which leaves the EU configured to the interests of Germany.

John Maynard Keynes first identified the fundamental problem we see today in the euro crisis and the US-China trade tensions and saw earlier in the 1980s US-Japan discord.

Sadly at Bretton Woods he failed to convince the others that the exchange rate regime needed symmetrical obligations on creditor and debtor countries to deal with imbalances.

Germany today is clearly in denial of the growing need to balance its enormous (euro-driven) trade surpluses by making fiscal transfers to the debtor nations of the EU.

Yet a supranational scheme which condemns much of Europe to indefinite austerity will not survive the realities of national politics and Cameron was right to walk away.

(Dr) John Cameron

Howard Place

St Andrews

Did Merkel and Sarkozy want the EU treaty opened up? I doubt it. Did they anticipate that the UK would veto it? You bet they did. Did the Prime Minister want the treaty opened up? Of course he didn’t.

If it had been it would surely have brought about the collapse of the coalition as the right wing reactionary Tories, who still believe the UK to be a world power and sterling a world currency, started baying for withdrawal. If Europe is as sick as the Eurosceptics make out, why is the euro so strong against other world currencies and the pound so weak?

Mike Underwood

Friars Brae

Linlithgow