Labour will blow its chances by playing the SNP's game

The SNP is a nationalist party that wants independence. It will take whatever powers you give it and say “Thanks very much, but we still want independence.” You can't triangulate with it and hope to gain anything yourself. The old saying is as true as ever: “If you know something can bite you, don’t let it lick you.”

We should not be talking about more powers, but proper implementation and transparency around the powers that we already have and which the SNP abuses at every turn.
Victor Clements, Aberfeldy

Vow pledges were delivered

AS surely as Boxing Day follows Christmas, supporters of Scottish independence will respond to any proposal to improve the governance of the UK by shouting "The Vow" and listing a long string of grievances.

These will include unconditional guarantees of EU membership, a number of promised frigates, perpetual legal guarantees of constitutional privileges, federalism in the UK and much more. The problem is, of course, that no such pledges were ever made in the Vow of 2014: the three pledges were to preserve the Barnett Formula (delivered); to deliver more powers to the Scottish Parliament (delivered); and enhanced statutory protection for Holyrood (delivered).

What is now clear following the delivery of Gordon Brown's report, New Britain – Renewing Our Democracy And Rebuilding Our Economy, is that a new and radical alternative is available, and we can move on from the old sterile debates of Yes/No and Nat/Yoon. The debate is now between the past and future, and the nationalists amongst your readers have shown their hand by demonstrating how they are stuck in a past of spurious grievances and confected untruths.

The rest of us can take inspiration from the sage advice of one our most revered and ancient seasonal songs: in the words of Sir Nodsworth of Holdersfield, let's "Look to the future now – it's only just begun!"
Peter A Russell, Glasgow

A generation? That's eight years

THE Indyref2 debate generates much speculation over the duration of "a generation". The definitive answer – eight years – has been provided by Gordon Brown who, in Rip Van Winkle fashion, awakes from his slumber whenever an independence referendum is imminent.

Perhaps he will explain how, in the wake of his last words of wisdom in 2014, we now find ourselves out of the EU and saddled with immigration policies under which the Rwanda deportation plan is sadly redolent of the tragic mindset and attitudes which engulfed the German nation in the 1930s.
Willie Maclean, Milngavie

A de facto move by Starmer

SIR Keir Starmer stated on Monday that a vote delivering a Labour majority at the next General Election will provide a mandate for the far-reaching constitutional change in Gordon Brown’s proposals.

Would that result constitute a de facto referendum? Would it need a majority of votes or just a majority of MPs?

Surely a change of this magnitude would provide a perfect opportunity to develop a proper, written constitution to ensure the next government can’t chuck it all in the bucket if they don’t like it? Oh wait, that would require popular assent to the constitution, and how would that work? What if one or more of the “nations and regions” don’t approve of what’s to be imposed on them?
Cameron Crawford, Rothesay

More to indy than the SNP

IT annoys me when in the media the independence issue is linked uniquely to the SNP and the impression given that “if we could only get rid of the pesky SNP” that the demand for self-determination would disappear. The SNP didn’t invent or own the issue, it’s a substantial and increasing percentage of the population that demand it.

The demise of the Scottish Labour Party has come about not because its supporters died en masse but because they started to vote for a party that listened to them rather than followed instructions sent from London. Scotland still has a very popular left of centre political party that listens to Scots rather than the English Establishment and as long as it keeps pushing for independence we will keep voting for it, until, that is, Scottish Labour grows a pair.
David J Crawford, Glasgow

Why can't we be like Ireland?

WHEN Gordon Brown’s latest plan offers less than his last-ditch “near-federal” Vow promise to save the Union in 2014 and fails to give Scotland the powers to deal with immigration and address health care staff shortages, full fiscal powers to boost our economy or a way back to the EU, it is instructive to compare Scotland’s position in the Union with Ireland, which this week celebrates 100 years of independence.

Scotland’s North Sea has generated hundreds of billions in tax revenues for London governments which have allowed Denmark and Norway to become world leaders in renewable energy manufacturing. Energy-rich Scotland with its massive green renewable potential fares badly when compared to Ireland, which has no oil production. In the last 50 years, the Celtic Tiger has seen rapid growth and GDP per capita now surpasses the UK. Irish citizens enjoy a much higher standard of living than in the UK with better state pensions, lower income inequality, the highest life expectancy at birth in Europe and a younger population with one in five born elsewhere while Labour and Tory outbid each other on curbing immigration. Exports to the UK are worth £21 billion a year but only 13 per cent of Ireland’s total.

RTE has 10 radio stations and four TV channels compared to BBC Scotland’s miniscule output. Ireland also has proportional representation and an elected head of state unlike London’s antiquated first past the post system of government. Since Brexit, 1200 financial sector jobs have moved from London to Dublin and more than 40 direct sailings each week to Europe transport Ireland’s flourishing exports. Why not Scotland?
Mary Thomas, Edinburgh

Scots-Gaelic rivalry is pointless

THE old canard about Gaelic and not Scots being the “real” language of the Scots, re-hashed today by Ewan Macintyre (Letters, December 6), should have been laid to rest decades ago. Scotland throughout its history has been a plurilingual kingdom, starting when Kenneth MacAlpin united the Brythonic-speaking Picts with the Goidelic-speaking Scots. Galloway and Strathclyde (also Brythonic-speaking), the Lothians (Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon-speaking), the northern mainland (Norse-speaking) and the Western Isles (Gaelic-speaking) were added by successive kings; and French had been adopted as a court language by the time of the first War of Independence.

The Gaelic language was never called “Scots”: that myth too should be well and truly dead. The people known to the Romans as Scoti and to the Saxons as Scottas were Gaelic-speaking, and their language was referred to in Latin as lingua Scotorum, translated into the vernacular as “the Scottis langage” – the language of the Scots. Mr Macintyre asks why the Northern English dialect of the southern and eastern parts of the kingdom came to be known as “Scottis”. For the simple reason that it had become the language of the kings, the government and administration, and the brilliant national literary culture.

A key point here, in view of the importance of Scotland’s credentials as a European nation in the arguments for independence, is that it was through Scots and not through Gaelic that Scotland became culturally an integral part of Europe. No-one with any knowledge of the subject can doubt the scope and quality of our Gaelic literature; but Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns are mainstream European poets as Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir and Alasdair Mac Mhaighistir Alasdair, their near-contemporaries and at least their equals in poetic merit, are not.

Pointless rivalries in the cultural independence movement are as unnecessary and potentially as harmful as in the political. Gaelic and Scots are both languages of Scotland, and vehicles of literatures of which any nation could be proud.
Derrick McClure, Aberdeen

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