FIRST of all, a huge thank you to all who bought our launch issue last week. We’re still crunching the numbers but it’s safe to say our sale of 19,000 combined print and digital exceeded expectations.

We did our best to get enough copies in shops but demand can be difficult to predict. As it was, around 1000 shops sold out. Apologies if you were among those who could not buy a copy. We’ll be increasing our supply this week so hopefully those problems will not happen again.

As ever, if you are having difficulty finding the Sunday National – or indeed the daily National – don’t hesitate to let us know.

Thank you also to the hundreds of readers who told us how much they enjoyed our first issue. We are very proud of our relationship with our readers and we’re happy that will broaden and deepen with the addition of more from the Sunday National. We hope you enjoy our second issue today, although our front page story makes for disturbing reading.

Opposing fracking is a perfectly reasonable position to take. Indeed the Scottish Government has made sure fracking does not take place within our borders.

It’s hard to see, then, the justification for labelling those who have demonstrated against fracking “domestic extremists” and even more difficult to accept that the police could infiltrate communities around Grangemouth to gather intelligence on those “extremists”.

The tactics on anti-fracking demonstrations were adopted by the force’s second chief constable, Phil Gormley, who left his post in February this year.

The news that his successor was to be Iain Livingston was warmly received by many of Gormley’s critics. Hopefully he will now reconsider how the police regard and treat those who have made known their views on fracking by taking part in public demonstrations.

If he doesn’t there will be several in the upper echelons of the political world happy to explain why he’s wrong.