HECTOR MacLean (Letters, October 17) writes: “We need to win over the support of the majority of voters in Scotland to make independence a reality.” While I agree wholeheartedly, it is doing no more than to declare the obvious.

The question is, are the public statements by SNP ministers and other senior members likely to do that?

Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh (DUP team-up is ANOTHER new low for Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson, October 17) states: “The sheer idiocy of supporting Brexit in the full knowledge of what it will do to harm the country.” Mike Russell, Minister for Brexit, recently opined: “We are in this position because of mad Brexiteers”. And Christina McKelvie, Minister for Older People and Equalities, at the recent SNP conference, claimed the Clearances and Brexit were similar because “both involved rich, privileged, entitled elites deciding the future for others”.

Can I remind all three that over 1,018,000 people in Scotland voted for Brexit, including an estimated 500,000 who regularly supported the SNP? Mike Russell dismisses us as “mad” while Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh not only dismisses us as “idiots” but claims to “have full knowledge” Brexit will harm the country. If I were to ask for “evidence” to support her claim, I would be told quickly by some Remainer that “Brexit hasn’t happened yet”, to which the obvious retort is: “Then how does she have ‘full knowledge’ of something that hasn’t happened?”

Despite her ministerial position, Ms McKelvie obviously knows nothing about the Clearances or what prompted over one million people in Scotland and over 17 million in the UK to vote to leave the EU, although one would have thought the behaviour of the EU since the vote shows we were right.

Add to these examples of the contempt shown for Brexiteers by SNP ministers, the verbal contortions of the hard of thinking brigade of SNP supporters on Twitter, and I am afraid the entire concept of genuine independence is in danger of being killed off.

I have debated with several SNP luminaries in fairly recent years on the question of Scotland in the EU. In none of those debates did the SNP representative manage to persuade a majority of a live audience that “independence in Europe” was anything other than an oxymoron.

None of those audiences dismissed the arguments for an independent Scotland leaving the EU as either “mad” or “idiocy” – in fact, any contempt that was shown was directed at the notion that Scotland could be “independent” in the EU or could be instrumental in reforming the Common Fisheries Policy or the Common Agricultural Policy.

Over the past few days on Twitter, I have been told that Eire, as an “independent member of the EU”, has “more economic freedom than Scotland”. Despite having asked several times for an explanation of how Eire as a member of the Euro, without its own currency, no control over monetary policy, which impacts on its fiscal policy, has economic freedom to act independently, I have yet to receive a reply. I have also asked similar questions in The National – with the same non-response.
Jim Fairlie
Crieff

I STARTED and finished my letter that was printed in Wednesday’s National by saying that all – let me repeat, all – voters who have made the journey from No to Yes are to be welcomed. Where reader Gordon Gallagher (Letters, October 18) got the impression (as I am not aware that he knows me personally) that I was attempting to come across as smug and elitist I do not know – it could not be further from the truth.

Is it not a simple fact that if more people had voted Yes than No then independence would have been achieved?

I agree that more discussion with those who voted No first time around is needed to convince them that independence is the way forward, but please do not assume that I consider myself to be superior to anyone who voted No in 2014.
Hector MacLean
Glasgow

AFTER a decade of severe austerity imposed on millions of people across the UK, by the year 2021 there will be £37 billion less spent on working-age social security compared to 2010.

Half of these cuts will come from the freezing of working-age benefits that has occurred since 2016 and will deliver cuts of nearly £16bn.

Tax hikes and spending cuts worth an extra £39bn every decade for the next 50 years would be needed to prevent ballooning national debt levels, the Office for Budget Responsibility’s fiscal sustainability report warned back in June.

The voters blame all of the economic collapse on immigration. Most of the immigrants about which they complain are people fleeing from wars on their countries. If America and Europe do not want refugees, why do they engage in wars that produce refugees?

This simple question is beyond the intelligence of voters.

The current era is one of irrationality, deception, confusion, anger and unfocused fear, an ominous combination, with few precedents.

In John Steinbeck’s The Pearl, there are jewellery buyers set up around a fishing community which are all owned by the same plutocrat, but they all pretend to be in competition with one another. When the story’s protagonist discovers an enormous and valuable pearl and goes to sell it, they all gather round and individually bid far less than it is worth in order to trick him into giving it away for almost nothing. Politics is pretty much the same; mainstream parties owned by the same political class, engaged in a staged bidding war for votes to give the illusion of competition.

Within the current UK framework, no matter who is voted in, voters get an Orwellian warmongering government which exists solely to advance the agendas of a plutocratic class.

After the financial crash of 2008, those in power were telling everybody “we are all in this together”, even as they handed over £1 trillion to bail out the banks at the expense of the public purse.

After Brexit, there is nothing left, and the fault is not Russia’s or China’s. The public are insouciant, unconcerned, ignorant, worried only about unimportant things, kept ignorant and confused by a media that serves only the One Per Cent. The people have no awareness that they are headed into total destruction, if not by climate change, if not by nuclear war, then by societal collapse.
Alan Hinnrichs
Dundee

THERESA May has resorted to circumlocution again when asked about progress. Her 15-minute audience with the 27 is reported as issuing no real details or new constructs to resolve the Irish backstop.

She would agree to an extension of

the withdrawal but it would not be necessary because she expects the implementation period to end on December 2020.

Withdrawal and implementation of what? The EU have repeatedly said that future trade deal discussions would only begin after March 2019 when the exit agreements are complete. That includes, crucially, a form of backstop on backstop as well.

At this juncture the French, German and Dutch governments are preparing internal legislation for a no deal on March 30, 2019.

They seem to suggest that the Northern Irish deadlock or “threat” from the DUP to bring down the UK Government will become reality. Or perhaps Theresa May will simply resign and let the warring factions at Westminster slug it out, leading to more uncertainty and chaos there. If No 10 is preparing for a vote on either Chequers or no deal, then MayHem follows irrespective of the outcome.

The inherent weakness of her government having no majority after her botched electoral campaign in 2017 has resulted in her government still at this final stage on implementing Article 50 being at war with itself and everyone else to protect the Union, a new factor in the situation. It has led to the comical statement even from David Mundell to protect Scotland’s place in the Union to his “last breath”!

It must be excruciating for the EU negotiators to have to engage with this incompetent, disorganised and cack-handed

UK government at this juncture. Theresa May produced no new concrete proposals at the meeting in Brussels in her 25-minute slot. She could only come up with some words that everyone needed courage, trust and leadership. Circumlocution to nowhere.

The 27 decided to postpone the November summit as a result.
John Edgar
Kilmaurs

THE SNP: membership, 125,482 (August 2018); MPs, 35; Brexit influence, zilch.

DUP: membership, a small number closely guarded; MPs, 10 (nine until November); Brexit influence, considerable.

Ruth Davidson (SCOTTISH Conservative Leader) and David Mundell (Secretary of State for SCOTLAND) both support DUP demands for Northern Ireland. They, however, are against SNP demands for Scotland. Another reason to be a normal independent country. How much more persuading do we need!
Peter Barjonas
Latheronwheel

THIS week I attended a very stimulating meeting of the Edinburgh Skeptics Society in the Frankenstein Bier Keller. It was entitled “The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe in conversation with Prof Richard Wiseman”. Richard Wiseman is a professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire.

The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe is one of the world’s longest running and most popular sceptical podcasts; releasing regular weekly episodes full of interviews, news, features, facts and fiction, as well as amazing science, since 2005. In these days of fake news and big business political pressure, scepticism is needed more than ever.

It is evidence-based scepticism that is responsible, for example, for the demise of the Church of Scotland, which, we are told, is to close two-thirds of its churches on Shetland.

The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry and the exposure of worldwide paedophilia among Catholic priests are only the most recent evidence for some of the shocking iniquities that religious belief produces.
Doug Clark
Currie, Midlothian

I READ the article on the illustrated book celebrating the Declaration of Arbroath as its 700th anniversary approaches (Unique illustrated book on Declaration of Arbroath hits funding goal, October 20). I think every Scot should have a copy of that document.

I’ve been a nationalist since I was 12 years old – I’m 91 now.

I purchased a copy of the Declaration of Arbroath at an SNP conference in the seventies. If you’re a Scot, you should believe in what it says.
Margaret Thomson
Paisley