Letters: We should ask voters what's Better since we stayed Together

Back in the day when the Tory party broke/cultured the mould by employing an advertising agency, Saatchi and Saatchi came up with “Labour Isn’t Working” with a visual of an extended dole queue. So the knocking-copy campaign came of age.

Fast forward to the 2017 UK General Election and out of the traps came the Tories with the tactic of limiting the debate to the politics of a second Scottish referendum. Jim Sillars’s assertion that the SNP has no policy committees was given credence in that the young lovers in the election TV campaign were a woeful counter statement. If, indeed, this quasi-romantic nonsense was devised by a body of people, they should hang their heads in shame.

So, let’s get knocking. The Union is not a partnership of equals but rather an 18th-century colonial amalgam with England as the force majeure. Currently, the pejorative ascendancy rests with the centralist establishment. It need not be thus. Anti-independence is almost a double negative, so “Unionist” parties should be referred to as “dependence” parties. If we are “separatists”, then they are “colonials”. In the 21st century, colonialism cannot be seen as progressive.

Sandy Prentice
Address supplied

AS Dave McEwan Hill writes (Letters, January 17), in 1910 Scotland had around five million people and England 26 million and we now have just over five million and England 56 million.

At the time of the 1707 Union Scotland had about one million folk and England about five million – a ratio of about one to five then, and one to eleven now.

Had we avoided union with England we might expect to have a population now of 10 to 15 million, probably better distributed around the country and much more prosperous than now – similar to Switzerland, but there would be fewer folk of Scottish origin in North America and Australasia.

World history would have been different, but we are where we are and if we want prosperity in the future we had better choose independence. With independence we can choose who gets to stay here and which, if any, international bodies we seek to join.

David Stevenson
Edinburgh

THE RBS memo published by the Treasury Committee, joking that customers should be left to “hang themselves”, is damning (RBS treatment of businesses like an ‘abattoir’ say MPs, The National, January 19). While it dates back to 2009, it raises very serious questions about how banks might behave in our Brexit future.

The function of a bank should be as an enabler of business within society and to support our economy, but even before Brexit is a reality, bank net lending to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has been collapsing. Recent history shows the vulnerability SMEs face and the devastating consequences of business failure. We need reassurance that the banks will act responsibly and step forward with plans and products for their business customers whatever the future brings.

Michelle Thomson
co-founder of Momentous Change Ltd. and ambassador for the APPG on Fair Business Banking

FRAE the Land o’ Burns here comes a pernickety point for any lass or lad o’ pairts tae ponder. For a week now adverts and posters of market-day ale-swiller Tam, the country’s couthiest hero, dead or alive. Greater than Connery, grander than Dalyell. Rabbie’s Tam could well be a World No1, only to find himself publicised as Tam O’Shanter, like maybe a Celtic Connections vocalist.

I wince when I see that humdinger misnomer, and silently curse the cultural culprits. Tam, ah Tam, sic a farin’ ye didnae deserve. Yer a truly epic hero wi’ a wee human weakness, getting fou and unco happy.

Breaking news: I heard last night that Question Time on Burns Night is in Dumfries, “where Robbie wrote Old Lang Zyne”. Mm, it so happens that in auld lang syne, 1953 I’d say, professional bumbler Alastair Sim headed a show called Folly to be Wise – where ignorance was bliss.

Jack Newbigging o’ Irvine