With voting system and referendum, SNP fails to accept will of Scottish people

SO, THIS week, we have Mr Salmond crying into his cup at the voting system which brought about the end of the SNP's majority hold over Scotland's parliamentary system.

Ironically, this is the same voting system that he’s previously championed when it made him First Minister, and again when it made him First Minister leading a majority government, but now that it has delivered him a result that he neither expected, nor could contemplate, it somehow is broken and of no use any longer.

What Mr Salmond seemingly lack the nous to comprehend is that this is actually the way democracy works. Displaying this constant sense of grievance and injury at the electorate’s decision is at best, callow and juvenile.

The fact is, the SNP returned to minority governance simply because only 55 per cent of the electorate decided to vote (down from 85 per cent in 2014’s referendum) and only 46 per cent of that number gave their vote to the SNP, which means less than 26 per cent of Scotland voted SNP in this 2016 election. This would appear to be the real reason for Mr Salmond’s discomfiture and inexorably tiresome grievance.

Mark Ward

Dalmellington Road, Crookston, Glasgow

Nicola Sturgeon aims to rekindle the only recently extinguished flames of the destructive independence referendum despite its destabilising effects on the Scottish economy. The point has been made by Ruth Davidson, amongst others, that the SNP did not include any mention of a second referendum in their election literature, so the question must be posed as to the legitimacy of any such plan being instigated by them.

If the tax moneys that I and millions of other Scots who did not vote for the SNP and who voted decisively against the last “once in a lifetime” referendum on independence are being spent on something which is a settled issue constitutionally, then it would seem right that the individual members of the SNP administration should be taxed by HMRC individually on the millions that they will, no doubt, spend despite the matter now being a matter of the settled will of the Scottish people.

Alternatively, I would hope that someone with deeper pockets than me would take a pro bono action against them for their defiance of the Scottish people and for the misuse of public funds for party political ends.

Such a person could take action under the banner that no politician should be allowed to ignore the “democratically expressed will of the Scottish people”, as the SNP say they wish to do.

Now, who was it who said that?

Andrew HN Gray

Craiglea Drive, Edinburgh