Letters II: New voices need to be listened to in indyref2 campaign

I know I am not alone in finding myself growing disenchanted by what seems to be an independence establishment. The very people who failed to win last time are now apparently assuming the right to be the voices heard this time. Talk of getting the band back together is turning me off and demotivating me, and others.

The great and the good (largely based in and centred on Glasgow) telling us how things must be handled is not good for anyone. It strikes me as very arrogant that 800 self-appointed people can claim to be “writing a new chapter in our country’s story of our progression to self-determination and independence”. I wish your report had challenged that.

The independence movement seems overstocked with people claiming to be initiators and leaders, and it serves to alienate others of us who are expected to simply fall in and canvas. It is our movement too, or should be.

In a similar vein I was glad to see Carolyn Leckie raise doubts about detailed white papers (Assembly buzzing with words of wisdom, The National, January 16).

For instance, while I support the idea of a basic universal income, it is not appropriate to make it a part of any independence discussion. It is a separate matter, as is European Union membership. The issue that needs to be addressed is simple: independence. Any linking of Yes with claims for detailed plans, budgets etc makes any Yes campaign a hostage to fortune.

Part of what went wrong last time was, surely, too close an identification of Yes with SNP politics. It follows that falling tax revenues from oil are used to discredit SNP budget plans as in the white paper for 2014, and therefore the Yes movement as a whole.

That is even legitimate.

I am worried by the Common Weal White Paper Project which is already heading into some scary detail about residence rights and a curious second chamber to a Parliament based on conscripted members of the public.

That idea is best described as imaginative. I am at a loss as to why the project, as it is, fails to put forward ideas, indeed a range of ideas and encourage discussion, rather than make such concrete proposals.

We need good information and a nationwide debate. I fear on the current trajectory any indyref2 is going to be thrown away.

CC Neill
Dundee

JULIA Pannell got so much wrong in so short a space (Letters, January 17. If she had been reading this newspaper she would have a far better understanding of how the members of the EU have identified the dangers of the TTIP and the CETA documents and already have caveats in place.

Russia did invade Finland, while Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, having broken free of the USSR, established their own governments and own currencies and re-established their national pride.

They ran the German mark in parallel and when the euro came along, they ran that in parallel too, eventually adopting it. All of this long before applying for EU membership. Julia, Scotland isn’t trying to escape from the UK, it is trying to remove the stranglehold Westminster has over its ability to run itself. It could never be dominated by the EU in anything like the way it is by Westminster.

Christopher Bruce 
Taynuilt 

CLEARLY, Julia Pannell is entitled to be against membership of the EU but accuses it of trying to “lumber us”with TTIP. Brexit means the Tory Government may have to accept TTIP in a nation-to-nation deal. This could resolve the massive difficulties of  the English NHS – by selling it off to American medical companies – which I think has been the plan for some years. As for paid holidays, pre-1998 no UK worker had a right to these, although some organisations allowed for them.

When Susan Hodge (Letters, January 11) referred to a “cabal of bankers” she must have been thinking of those based in London who destroyed the UK economy in 2008. While Ms Pannell may be correct that the EU is not a socialist body, it does work as far as possible to the benefit of ordinary people.

Bill McLean Newmills 
Dunfermline