REPLYING to my letter of February 5, Jim Sillars (Letters, February 6) accuses me of the "old trick" of attacking what he did not write about, but in stating that in his original letter he "made no mention of an EU role in the damaging domestic policies of UK governments, because it had none" and that the EU did not stop the UK from holding the 2016 referendum "as it had no power to do so" he makes exactly the point I was making. Mr Sillars famously commented that "Scotland must be the only country in the world to discover oil and get poorer"; the EU can't be blamed for that either.

Mr Sillars is of course entitled to his views about the EU, but whatever its faults, and I don't deny it has them, the fact remains that 62 per cent of Scots voters at the EU referendum backed staying within the European Union, and at December's General Election the SNP won 48 out of Scotland's 59 seats; indeed, if you lump in the LibDems' four seats and Labour's one, all of Scotland's MPs support the EU, apart from Boris Johnson's six Tories. I am sorry that, on this issue, Mr Sillars appears to be on the same page as Mr Johnson.

Ruth Marr, Stirling.

WOULD it be possible for SNP MPs, and MSPs to give us a break for a few weeks from their whingeing and moaning about how Scotland is being downtrodden by Westminster? Even one week without the negative, miserable and false narrative would come as a relief. However, I doubt that this is possible. Girning seems to be their default setting.

William Loneskie, Lauder.