I COULDN’T help but put my head in my hands and groan when I started to the see social media come alive with angry SNP members and groups demanding that Lisa Cameron immediately resign and trigger a by-election for jumping ship and defecting to the Tories, and by the time Humza Yousaf himself called on her to do “the honourable thing” I could almost hear the “Hypocrisy Bus” reversing out of the garage.

In February 2023 the Scottish Government rejected a petition which would have made it a mandatory requirement for elected representatives to stand down in the event they no longer represented the party ticket they were elected on. Not one SNP MSP supported this, so we have to ask, if this is not good enough for Scotland’s parliament, why should we demand it of the Westminster one? Had the SNP supported such a move then I’d be at the head of the line demanding she resign, but they didn’t, and as such they will just have to suck it up and deal with the fallout.

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The current bin-fire which engulfs the SNP is one of the most disheartening events we, as a broad-church independence movement, could bear witness to. The SNP, as the de facto head of the Yes camp, very nearly took us to victory in 2014. So to see this, the latest in a long line of self-inflicted disasters, does none of us any good. At every point in recent years where the SNP have had the chance to take the right path, they have gone up cul-de-sacs and taken wrong turns until they have become completely lost, to themselves and to the voters. They have suffered so many injuries that they now remind me of “The Black Knight” in Monty Python, and I can only imagine that at the next Westminster election their campaign slogan will be along the lines of “we’ll bite your legs off”.

Many party members appear to have adopted the same self-deluding attitude as the leadership, having lost the ability to “see themselves as ithers see us”. Unless there is a serious change within the SNP in the immediate future I am no doubt that the SNP will lose many seats at Westminster next year. It will be a bitter blow to the wider Yes movement.

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In 2014 there was one party with independence as it’s raison d’etre. Now there are at least another two, while others are independence-supporting, such as the Greens and the Scottish Socialists. After the Rutherglen by-election, Labour made the claim that the SNP voters were deserting them to go to Labour. Committed independence supporters may be leaving the SNP, but there is no evidence they are going to Labour, indeed all evidence points to them moving to other independence parties, and very few go full-on Lisa Cameron and jump to a British nationalist extremist party.

I fear that without a change in leadership and direction from the SNP, in the short term, the campaign for Scottish independence will come to a halt. Should Labour win the next UK General Election, there may from some quarters be a sigh of relief that the Tories are gone. All that will have been achieved in such a case is a brief respite in which we can await their return to government, but what will really change in the interim anyway? Labour are moving so far to the right to ape the Tories, that we may as well not bother in the first place. The only long-term solution for Scotland is independence from the basket-case UK. The SNP cannot be allowed to put that at risk.

James Cassidy
Airdrie

SO Lisa Cameron, elected as an SNP MP, is off to the Tories and has abandoned any idea of independence for Scotland, her constituents meaning nothing to her.

No doubt during her election she promised to work for independence and decried Boris Johnson and all his works.

I am reminded of Groucho Marx. “These are my abiding principles, but I have others which you may prefer”.

James Duncan
Edinburgh

HAVING read that our First Minister condemned the abuse being directed at FiLiA attendees by trans activists I wish to express my thanks to him. Women from 75 different countries attended to discuss issues facing women. I am sure they did not expect to be faced by abusive taunts and slogans as they arrived at the Glasgow venue. A venue which had caved into trans activist demands to cancel within hours of the event and which only reversed that decision when its legal obligations under the Equality Act were pointed out.

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Our First Minister was right to point out that such abusive behaviour did not reflect well on Scotland. Unfortunately Scottish women are well aware of such tactics from trans activists. Only last week, women attending a book launch at Edinburgh University had their physical boundaries breached and faced signs with the F word prominently displayed. An LGBTQ event took place at the same time. I can guarantee that there were no protesters with abusive signs outside that event.

Having been called out by our First Minister it is surely time for the abusive trans tactics to stop. They do nothing to foster an open and respectful social climate where diversity of opinion can flourish and all human rights are respected.

Jean Marshall
via email