SNP is clear on independence

I HAPPEN to live in the Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk parliamentary constituency of Michael Moore and it saddens me greatly that my MP, the Secretary of State for Scotland, should accuse others, including the SNP of which I am a member, of “muddying the waters” on independence (Insight, 15 July).

I was at the SNP conference in Inverness last year when Eden Court almost burst at the seams with delegates and members in the main conference hall and in every available side room when First Minister Alex Salmond gave his rallying call speech to the party and the nation on the proposed referendum for independence on the Saturday. He called then for a straight question, “Independence, Yes or No”, and no-one heard him discuss anything else.

I spoke to John Swinney, the finance secretary, on the 
Sunday morning when we were both picking up our respective copies of the Sunday papers. In all of these was a reference to a “devo-max”, or was it called something else? I cannot remember but it sure was not anything that Alex had said less than four hours before the first editions of these papers went to press.

Where did it come from? Ever since the media have been full of nothing else apart from snide remarks about “separation”.

Kenneth Gunn, Selkirk