I WATCHED BBC’s Question Time for a laugh (why else?) and Ann Widdecombe duly delivered during a discussion on Brexit. She generated loud applause from the Torquay audience when she, in high dudgeon, complained about the dreadful Project Fear that the people of the UK were exposed to from the Westminster Government during the campaign. Dear Ann was not so slow to generate fear when Scotland was subjected to its own Project Fear during the independence referendum .

Her comments included: “We must continue the warnings and if they scare the voters it is because they jolly well should scare the voters” and “Anybody north of the Border with a stable job can work out that if enough employers and financial institutions leave and the nuclear facility is taken off to Plymouth (I think she means the Faslane base and Trident) then said jobs will no longer be there”.

Leaving aside her utter ignorance about moving “the nuclear facility”, she was as guilty as anyone of helping to generate an atmosphere of fear, so her moaning about a campaign of fear during the Brexit debate does not wash.
James Mills
Johnstone

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ruth Davidson's attack on Scotland’s NHS is baffling

TWICE in the past two years I have visited A&E in Scotland and on neither occasion did I wait more than 20 minutes to be seen, despite them being very busy. I was therefore somewhat surprised by Ruth Davidson’s recent attack (The National, February 1) on the SNP Government about the dreadful state of Scotland’s NHS and A&Es.

However, the mystery has now been solved by the BBC’s health correspondent in his online piece NHS Health Check: Hunt Says NHS Problems ‘Unacceptable’. It is true (ie not an alternative fact) that Scottish A&Es just missed their target of seeing 95 per cent of patients within four hours, but the 92.6 per cent they did achieve should be applauded as an excellent result, especially when compared with the latest leaked performance figure of around 83 per cent in England.

Considering Scotland can only spend what Westminster allows it to have, Ruth Davidson should be congratulating Scotland’s NHS staff (and perhaps the SNP Government) for achieving so much more with its budget than England can achieve with theirs.

Of course, all will be resolved when the Brexiteers take back control and divert an extra £350 million a week into the NHS, but until that happens perhaps Ruth Davidson and the mainstream “news” should start praising Scotland’s NHS staff rather than trying to score cheap points in Holyrood and spreading misleading information.

In the era of post-truth politics and alternative facts, it no longer matters for some politicians to misrepresent the facts – all that matters is getting the right headline in the gutter press. It would be too much to expect Ruth Davidson to apologise to Scotland’s NHS staff for implying they were under-performing.

For her to apologise to Holyrood for her misleading Scottish NHS tirade would, of course, be as unthinkable as her reiterating her comments about the lies being told last year by the EU Leave campaigners. With one hand tied behind its back by a hostile and contemptuous Westminster, Scotland is doing really well compared to the rest of the UK. Just imagine what it could do with both hands free!
Geoff Tompson
Helensburgh

I WAS struck by the headlines in sections of the media that, according to Jacqueline Minor, head of representation for the European Commission in the UK, an independent Scotland would have to join an apparent “queue” for EU membership.

This is peculiar as there is, of course, no queue and that was not, in fact, what Ms Minor said.

She said Scotland could jump the non-existent queue as legislation in Scotland is already in alignment with existing EU rules, a situation that she cited as being different when compared to the likes of Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia.

Again, while some sections of the media claimed that Scotland would have to join the euro, Ms Minor made clear that there is “no stipulated timeline” for joining the single currency. New member states are committed to joining the euro, but this is theoretical as they have to join Exchange Rate Mechanism 2 prior to joining, which is a voluntary arrangement. This situation is of course predicated on Scotland becoming independent after Brexit rather than before, which would change matters fundamentally. In 1917 Hiram W Johnson, a staunchly isolationist US Senator, said: “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” Unfortunately, as we potentially prepare for another independence referendum, this looks like history yet repeating itself.
Alex Orr
Edinburgh

MARY Lockhart’s commitment to independence is welcome and I am sure shared by a growing number of what is left of support for the Labour Party in Scotland  (Pro-indy Labour councillor calls for a stronger economic case, The National, February 10). 

It should never be forgotten that the very centre of the Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA) were the pioneers of the Labour Party in Scotland and I suspect had Labour stayed true to that tradition they would now be a most powerful presence in the parliament of an independent Scotland.

Their country’s independence has always been a central tenet of every radical socialist movement – except in Scotland it seems. When Edinburgh’s James Connolly marched into the GPO in Dublin in 1916 he marched in at the head of the Irish Labour Party, which was at that point a division of the UK party. Will Labour in Scotland join Scotland’s march to national self-respect and save itself in the process? Or is it too late?

What I would ask Mary to do would be to broaden her vision a little and recognise the biggest problem. Scotland’s economy is entirely viable and the evidence of that is easy to find if sought out. It is much more viable than the floundering UK economy and this can readily be seen by checking the considered opinions of the rating companies and the indexes on GNP and GDP which consistently place Scotland above the UK.

The problem with all this is that a continuous avalanche of distortion and obfuscation of Scotland’s viability in all the media for all of the independence referendum campaign buried the truth and the Yes campaign did not have the tools over that period to combat this.

It is not a better economic case for independence we need. We already have it. It is how better to get it into the understanding of a wider public. I think we are slowly and steadily getting there – and once a person understands he or she has been lied to and in the process taken for a fool by the Unionist machine – support for the Union case is destroyed.
Dave McEwan Hill
Sandbank, Argyll