DAVID Torrance draws our attention to long-term dramatic shifts in the popular political viewpoint ("Politics are engulfed in a sea change on scale of tsunami", The Herald, May 4).

He refers to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and of Tony Blair in 1997. He speculates that an SNP landslide on Thursday would be comparable. On the surface perhaps that is perhaps so, but it would not carry the promise of beneficial change for Scotland and the UK, as the elections of 1979 and 1997 did.

In 1979 Mrs Thatcher proposed a radical free-market neo-liberal alternative to the failed state capitalism approach of Labour. After a painful adjustment in the economy which would, had it not been for the Falklands war, probably have cost her re-election in 1983, she was mightily successful. Unemployment and inflation fell, and after 1984 national output grew faster than ever before in the post-1945 era. By 1997 the UK had surpassed France, Italy, Sweden and Germany in gross national product per head. Tony Blair won in 1997, not by offering a dramatic change to Tory policies, but by promising to stick to them. The Tories lost because of their internal split over membership of the EU. Only after Gordon Brown, in his hubris, abandoned both Tory precedent and Keynesian probity in fiscal and monetary policy, did the economy go awry.

There is no doubt that Nicola Sturgeon is a remarkable lady with clearly-stated views. In recent newspaper biographies I read that she became an SNP member at the age of 16 in 1989, the year that Communism collapsed. She has never changed those views, which were in favour of separatism, nationalisation, more regulation of companies, more powers for trade unions, more public borrowing, spending and taxation, stringent confiscation of workers' hard-earned income to fund hand-outs to the able-bodied poor on welfare, and unilateral nuclear disarmament. These views reveal that, during the prime of her life (largely spent in political activity just like Ed Miliband), Ms Sturgeon has learned little from the real world, from experience, contemplation, empirical observation and analysis over the last25 years.

I find such rigid faith truly alarming. Her belief in independence has blinded her to political and economic evolution outside Scotland. We have seen what has happened to Greece, that also has long lived in a socialistic fantasy-land. Is that what half of Scotland's voters want here? Ms Sturgeon calls her ideas "progressive politics". I call them "back to the future with the SNP".

Richard Mowbray,

14 Ancaster Drive, Glasgow.