I’VE just renewed membership of the SNP at the end of my first year, how time flies. Before, I was an active member of The Labour Party for 20 years; at one stage I was elected as the candidate in the safe Westminster seat of Strathkelvin and Bearsden. However, the big trade unions had other ideas and told the Scottish Labour Party that their preferred son was supposed to be the candidate, so I was summarily ejected. I did still get a nice note after the election from Helen (now Baroness) Liddell, then Scottish Secretary, congratulating me on my election as an MP ...

It’s been interesting seeing the differences between Labour and the SNP. The local member meetings of the SNP have been much better than Labour’s were. The meetings are conducted efficiently and they are comradely; members seem genuinely committed and united in a common purpose. Labour’s meetings were often just about point-scoring against other members.

There are many reasons why I became disillusioned with Labour, and they pre-date the rise of Jeremy Corbyn. I’m an inter-nationalist not a nationalist; I believe a country is enriched by immigration and the best border crossings I’ve encountered involved high mountain passes and a cairn. So I thought long and hard before joining the SNP. There are two reasons why independence is the best course for Scotland.

The first is the rightward drift in English politics. I daresay it comes and goes in cycles, but it’s always going to be there and I don’t want to be tied to it. I accept that social attitude surveys show that Scotland often mirrors England, but that isn’t set in stone: Scotland can change for the better.

The second driver towards independence is the bourach of the current devolution settlement. Powers have been devolved piecemeal and, as after the Scottish referendum, in a panic. How on earth can the Scottish Parliament deliver a coherent programme of government when there are so many interlinked policy areas over which it has no control?

Kezia Dugdale (“ Dugdale calls for new Act of Union”, The Herald, December 8) goes on about a new Act of Union and a more federal structure. You can’t have a federal structure with four members, one of which has over five times the population of the other three combined. You would end up with English votes for UK laws, remarkably similar to what we have now. It’s time for Ms Dugdale and the Scottish Labour Party to stop flogging the dead horse and start working towards a modern, outward-looking, socially just and independent Scotland.

Doug Maughan,

52 Menteith View,

Dunblane.

HAS there been a time in living memory when Scotland has been so poorly served by its Governments in Edinburgh and London, its banking and financial institutions and its public servants?

Pre and post-devolution our politicians have presided over a continual decline in our economy, while singularly failing to show they have the necessary strategic skills and political will to even start to arrest the decline, never mind turning it round. Banking and business leaders shamelessly put self-aggrandisement and self-interest before the interests of the ordinary folk on whom they rely to make profits, and have forgotten what decent customer service means. Meantime our local authorities blindly stagger on in the same old way, refusing to accept that they too must change.

Scotland is in a right mess. We lack leaders with the skills needed to see us through. Sometimes they don't seem to have the inclination even to try. Where is the vision, the intellectual rigour, the leadership, and the willingness to work together to arrest and turn round the decline in Scotland's economy and wellbeing before it becomes irreversible?

Looking at what we are witnessing at present; those qualities are not at Holyrood; certainly not at Westminster; not in banking and business circles; not in the public services. And what now is the point of a devolved government when the UK Government can simply say "no" to proposals which are irrefutably in Scotland's best interests just because it doesn't suit it? Scotland hasn't thrived as part of the UK for years, it isn't thriving now and it doesn't look as if it ever will. We do not have a sufficiently robust enough economic infrastructure to thrive as an independent country, in our out of the EU. It seems that all we can look forward to is more of the dreary and depressing same: bumping along but never really getting anywhere.

If the best we can expect is more of the same, Scotland's future economy and wellbeing is bleak indeed. I never thought I would live to see the day when our young people would be well advised to pursue their futures away from their homeland, but that day has come. Shame on all those who have brought Scotland to this sorry pass.

Robin Heron,

Flat 2/1,

18 Woodlands Terrace, Glasgow.

THE two civic responsibilities which are almost totally controlled by Holyrood are the law and education. They are therefore the best measures of the success of the SNP during its time in government. It is surely of huge concern therefore that it has presided over a disgraceful slump in the results achieved by Scottish school pupils in the Pisa assessments. As we have seen an unremitting rise in the number and quality of Higher examination results in this period there must be a case for a public inquiry. The prima facia case is that pupils and parents have been cynically misled as to the standard of education they have received.

As a measure of governmental competence, it leaves in tatters the grandiose claims about how much better we would be in the fantasy world that is the vision we are urged to embrace by the SNP.

Graeme Fraser,

3 Lampson Loan, Killearn.

I READ one of your Friday headlines, “Sturgeon quits politics for crafting after bruising battle” (The Herald December 9), and thought for a moment that Santa had got my other letter.

?John Dunlop,

9 Birnam Crescent, Glasgow.