A pig in a poke

Could Alex Salmond please advise me where I can find the Westminster acts of parliament which tell me that in the unlikely event the SNP succeeds in breaking up the UK, an independent Scotland will be able to continue to use the UK pound, UK passport, UK state pension scheme, UK drivinglicence, Scotland’s share of national and bank debts, and that Scotland will get circa 90 per cent of oil and gas revenues?

Of course no agreements to these great questions and thousands more exist, nor will they by the time we vote.

Any vote for Scottish independence is a blind vote and based on a fool’s paradise of SNP rhetoric.

We all know our politicians cannot quickly agree a dozen words on a ballot paper so addressing the divorce settlement will take a generation with an uncertain outcome.

Any attempts by a politician or a member of the public to raise the practicalities of an independent Scotland are dismissed by the SNP as being nonsense, silly or scaremongering because quite simply it has no answers to the thousands of questions that we need answers to, so look before you leap and don’t be conned.

William Laver

Gladstone Place

Aberdeen

Bill McLean (Letters, 26 March) suggests that Alexander McKay “should brush up on his history” , while trotting out the usual propaganda about the American Revolution versus the Union of the Parliaments.

Does he think, perhaps, that the Americans arose as one man to throw the British out of the New England colonies?

If he does, he knows precious little about it.

In fact, it is likely that most American colonists were pro-British, but were fearful of the revolutionaries who were fighting for “freedom” and whose stunts are increasingly being found to have been staged and greatly exaggerated as acts of libertarian fervour – such as the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre.

That is why around 70,000 Americans fled to Canada and other British colonies to escape the “freedom” that the revolution brought to the USA.

In the case of the Union, Mr McLean cites the usual bribery claim that is routinely hurled at those who signed the Treaty of Union in 1707.

No proof has ever been found to support this allegation, but that doesn’t stand in the way of a good Nationalist slur, of course.

Mr McLean cites the USA as “the most prosperous the world has ever seen”. Much the same as happened in the case of our Union too, in fact, as any historian will know.

However, I will admit that Mr McLean is quite right about one thing. The Union is unbalanced, thank goodness.

That is why five million Scots have more influence in the world than could have been gained alone as a tiny, peripheral nation on the fringes of Europe, like Denmark or Norway. I will grant him that truth.

Equally, of course, it has meant that the astonishing debts that our Scottish banks collected were paid off by the (British) government, which, again, I acknowledge, is unbalanced.

The impact of Scots on the body politic in the UK is quite disproportionate and, frankly, very much biased in the favour of Scots and Scotland, which is why so many of our leaders in the professions, the unions, Parliament, the House of Lords and the armed forces are and have been Scots for centuries.

Unbalanced?

Indeed. Let us thank our lucky stars that it is.

Andrew HN Gray

Craiglea Drive

Edinburgh