Les Mackay asks for evidence people become more unionist as they get older. I have that evidence. When I left Kirkcaldy High in 1968, there was huge support for a separate Scotland in my class. In 2014, that same cohort voted en masse to stay in the UK. I see no reason to believe today’s school leavers won’t undergo a similar transformation as they come to understand you don’t cure society’s problems by moving the head office address. Dave Dempsey, North Queensferry.
POLICE Scotland have been forced into a position to announce that minor crimes such as garden thefts will not be investigated owing to a lack of resources and dealing with more serious crime (Mail). This is a direct consequence of underfunding by the Scottish Government as Police Scotland has been forced to reduce in size with shoddy run-down police stations and antiquated police detection technology. The SNP administration which set up Police Scotland has consistently reduced police funding and increased police workload whilst expecting a 100 per cent effective police force. DENNIS FORBES GRATTAN, Aberdeen.
Humza Yousaf sought to portray himself as the “continuity candidate” when seeking to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as first minister of Scotland. Judging by his speech to a crowd after a march and rally outside Holyrood on Saturday, he is living up to that description. He trotted out the same old tired rhetoric as his predecessor. He claimed that Brexit was a “democratic disgrace”, ignoring the fact that the referendum question was put to the whole of the UK and that the result should be accepted on that basis. He ignored the fact that in the unlikely event of there being a second referendum which delivered a Yes vote, Scotland would not meet the economic criteria for omission to the EU. He then compounded that glaring omission by claiming that Scotland could be “at the top table of the EU’: He is indeed continuing the SNP’s politics of fantasy and continuing the decline of the SNP. David Burnside.
IT IS nine years next week since the independence referendum, and with the issue not going away we still do not know the SNP’s masterplan to prevent bankruptcy should their fantasy policies ever go ahead. We also do not know about currency or a hard border with England, and what possible advantages there would be in rejoining the European Union when we would be ruled by unelected bureaucrats and failed politicians. What we do know is that former first minister Alex Salmond said that oil was Scotland’s saviour. But now the nationalists are against issuing any new exploration licences, thereby putting thousands of jobs at risk. Add to this the alliance with the anti-growth, anti-everything crack-pot Greens, not to mention the state of the NHS, education and delayed ferries among many other issues, and it is astonishing that the easily deluded believe the promise that it will be all right on the night. How gullible can people be? ROBERT WILSON, Newarthill, Lanarkshire.
There is nothing ‘bold and ambitious’ about Humza Yousaf’s plan for Scotland...