No consolation prizes for Yes

CONTRARY to your leader (1 September), unionist parties should not lay out plans for “more powers”. The first strategy of the No side should be to win by at least 75-25, through the strength of the pro-UK message alone. The second strategy should be to ensure that on 19 September, 2014, the separatists fall hard on to barren rocky ground, with nowhere to go and nothing to hold on to, with no-one to blame but themselves, and where they linger broken and lost for years.

Yet, astonishingly, it appears that the No side want to lay out a nice comfy bed, filled with consolation prizes for the separatists to bounce back on, the very next day.

This will enable Mr Salmond to claim victory in defeat. He will boast about how he has extracted all these “promises of new powers”. He will argue that it is now only a matter of time before Scotland has moved far enough away from the rest of the UK to vote Yes.

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The “unionists”, meanwhile, will have provided the rope with which to hang themselves, if they “do not make good on their promises”.

The political rejuvenation of the nationalist movement will be assured. The “unionist” ­parties will only have themselves to blame.

A perfect opportunity to destroy organised political nationalism is being put at risk through a devolutionary obsession demanded only by those who work in the remunerated Scottish political sector, those who study it and those who report upon it.

Alistair McConnachie, Glasgow

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