Self-delusion lies behind SNP’s vision

What crumbles away into nothing is any kind of analysis by those who have lapped up, uncritically, the underlying message that has emanated from the SNP in general and Mr Salmond in particular for many years.

From decrying the amount of financial control over banks pre-2008 to wishing Scotland to emulate Ireland and Iceland and join the Arc of Insolvency, as it soon became, Mr Salmond has repeatedly put his foot in it, right up to the elbow.

When he stuck his neck out on foreign affairs, Mr Salmond got it wrong again when Nato bombing took place in the Balkans war. It was, he said, “unpardonable folly”.

Now, in 2012, my relations have holidayed in the very places where civilians were being slaughtered by Serb nationalists when Mr Salmond made his deeply thought-out observations, thanks to an organisation many SNP supporters abhor. They see Nato as having no relevance in post-Cold War Europe. History demonstrates otherwise, however.

Many tourists come to Scotland for romantic reasons. In like manner, the thought processes of those who seek to split up our frontierless nation into separate, aggressively competing countries with policed borders, vying for natural resources and endlessly bickering, clearly show the same, blinkered inattention to harsh reality.

The facts have repeatedly shown that those who spawn the romantic view Mr Pia so effectively criticises are mere fantasists.

It is not that they are merely guilty of blatant superficiality when they explain their message to the voting public. The real crime is that they actually allow it to persist in their own, uncritical minds.

Andrew HN Gray

Craiglea Drive

Edinburgh

Simon Pia’s article on “La Grande Illusion”, as he puts it, sounds wearied by his experiences at the Edinburgh Festival as “yet another well-meaning member of the Scottish Left tells me they will be voting Yes in the referendum”.

Perhaps it is he who, after so many years as a New Labour spin doctor, is still “out of kilter” with the public mood.

I organised the Edinburgh People’s Festival debate on independence that Simon refers to and heard him again describe the SNP as “bourgeois nationalists”.

I gently chastised him afterwards by asking how often he used such Marxist language as Iain Gray’s “adviser” and whether he ever ventured to describe his employers as “bourgeois  unionists”.

He refers to the “bile and betrayal felt towards Labour” by the aforementioned Left and yet only concedes those parts of the party’s record subsequent spin doctors have deemed permissible – on Iraq, its neo-liberal economic policies and its assault on civil liberties.

He cannot yet find it in himself apparently to condemn the party’s odious links with the Murdoch empire, its reckless banking policies, the worst anti-union laws in Europe, its love of PFI, or its numerous attacks on the welfare state.

The point Simon must surely accept is that voters in Scotland comprehensively rejected that record.

And while we may agree that rejecting New Labour is not the same as endorsing the SNP, which is no less neo-liberal or rightward moving, it is, for the time being, the main beneficiary of this  public mood.

Ironically for Simon, the SNP’s vision of independence is one New Labour can easily recognise as they have both now signed up to neo-liberal economics, low corporate taxes, poor labour relations and Nato-induced  war-mongering.

The Scottish Socialist Party is determined to move the debate on independence on to such substantive issues and side step the “constitutional navel-gazing”, as Simon Pia calls it.

We believe that the  strongest card the independence movement has is its transformational attraction.

We have announced a series of public events taking place around Scotland in the coming months, explaining why working-class people will be better off with independence.

The first of those meetings takes place in Edinburgh next Wednesday with John McAllion and Campbell  Martin challenging the  assumption that this is an issue for the “chattering classes” alone and insisting  it is working-class people who stand to reap the  greatest benefits from independence.

Colin Fox

Scottish Socialist Party

Alloway Loan

Edinburgh

There is an element of utopianism in Simon Pia’s view on why some people back independence, ie a kind of blind faith that all will be better off come separation, with little or no evidence to back this up.

William Ballantine

Dean Road

Bo’ness, West Lothian