JIM Sillars has totally lost the plot! Just when we thought we had averted the risk of fracking, he launches a moan (I can hardly call it a campaign) to have the Government’s ban overturned in the face of over 90 per cent support.

A little corner of Dumfries and Galloway was selected by the Mansfield-based Coal Authority to endure the “benefits” not only of fracking but of underground coal gasification under the Solway and of long wall mining.

The economy of this area is almost wholly dependent upon farming and tourism. As soon as you leave the M74, the roads network is primitive. The infrastructure for unconventional energy extraction would prohibit farming and would destroy the tourist trade.

The effects of this technology would alter the land drainage system. The perceived risks of contamination of the water table by carcinogens would ruin the reputation of our agricultural products. Our narrow roads would be impassable under the strain of heavy articulated lorries delivering materials to wells. The value of our homes would plummet by an estimated 25 per cent in an already poor area.

There is no local expertise whatsoever in extraction technologies, and any jobs created would be short-lived and not for local people whose livelihoods would meanwhile be destroyed. Yes, trade unions should act in defence of jobs, but the threat is Jim Sillars!

Ian Richmond, Dumfries and Galloway

NICOLA Sturgeon is not up to the job according to Jim Sillars, who in his own opinion is an intellectual giant.

This is the man who called Scottish football fans 90-minute nationalists. Having won Govan in a by-election he failed to be re-elected. The public had rejected him, so the SNP got the blame.

He then slunk off to a post in the Middle East and was not heard from again for many years. Alex Salmond had the temerity to remain in office when he should have stepped aside in favour of Sillars; or so Jim thought.

This is the same Jim Sillars who first called for “Independence in Europe” but voted for Brexit. This mess of contradictions sums up the conceit of this disappointed old man.

Margaret Pennycook, Glasgow

THE dangerous and desperate lack of UK leadership – whether it is the farcical handling of Brexit or countless billions being spent on the HS2 rail project, the crumbling Westminster and Buckingham Palaces and upgrading Trident – is extremely sad and shameful. These projects will certainly bring greater prestige, prosperity and wealth to the London establishment, while Britain slides further into trillions of debt.

As change defines life, the endless platitudes and empty rhetoric of the old Unionist parties are now unacceptable to a weary and sceptical electorate in a faltering UK.

Compared to the shambles of a fractious and divided Westminster, Holyrood, with managerial competence, led by a united and popular SNP aided by Greens and socialists, has produced good and stable government in Scotland for 10 difficult years. This SNP government has indeed been busy “getting on with the day job”, opening bridges, duelling roads, banning fracking, creating a National Investment Bank, scrapping the public-sector pay gap and so much more.

The steady and consistent leadership of Scotland’s First Minister and her united and competent ministers is in stark contrast to the United Kingdom’s hesitant and powerless Prime Minister and her disunited and incompetent band of squabbling ministers.

With the narrow Brexit vote in England dragging the rest of the UK out of Europe, it is not Scottish nationalism but extreme British nationalism which will lead inevitably to an independent Scotland re-joining the world family of nations, free of the need to be at the top table of world affairs, slavishly following a divided America and the ludicrous nostalgia for a so-called benign and glorious British Empire with all its inequality of privilege and prestige.

Grant Frazer, Newtonmore

I AM intrigued by the use of the word “independence” in the desire of us Scots to pursue the dissolution of the Union the Parliaments. Independence from whom? From what?

It would seem to me to be a simple matter of the renegotiation of the relationship that exists by treaty. Surely the way forward is a negotiation similar to that undertaken when the Union was proposed.

This would mean a convention to consider the relationship to be retained between two trading partners who would be free to pursue separate political agendas and trading policy; whose resources would no longer be pooled by default but would be available through trade as in any other relationship between sovereign states.

The authority of the parliaments would be equalised and Westminster would become the English Parliament, which would legislate for England, Wales and Northern Ireland until such time as these countries renegotiated if desired.

Should this state of affairs transpire, we may find it to be a less costly in time and treasure than another referendum.

David Neilson, Dumfries