I READ with interest the article about a Scottish currency written by Robin McAlpine of Common Weal in Tuesday’s National (We need our own currency, June 19). As a person who has read in full the recently published Common Weal report How to Start a New Country and also the SNP’s Sustainable Growth Commission report, I feel that there is too much hot air being banded about regarding the currency a future free Scotland will use. It should not be a decisive issue.

Common Weal and the Growth Commission report both say the same thing, namely we will have our own Scottish currency and our own central bank.

The only difference is emphasis. Robin McAlpine is correct when he says that if we shadow the UK pound we will lose free control of interest rates, relegating those to the Bank of England. However, he is in my opinion being unrealistic if he contends this can happen nearly from day one. It will take time to settle down and create our new governmental processes and procedures, say five years to get fully going. This includes a central bank, which will be needed as a lender of last resort for a new Scottish currency. The SNP report allows up to ten years to shadow the pound. It does not say it will be ten years. Also the SNP report in its current form is not policy yet.

It will take a few years to set up a new currency in a stable and controlled way. We must take care, as any sign of financial uncertainty will cause the money markets to attack us in order to make a fast buck. This is why shadowing the UK pound makes sense. It should be for the shortest and most sensible time possible. However, if we crash out of the EU with no deal then shadowing another currency may be prudent.

Please, independence supporters, do not chaff on about differences when they are actually minor. We need to win. On currency Common Weal and the SNP are saying the same think. Stop please pushing your own agenda’s for all our sakes.

Robert Anderson
Dunning, Perthshire

I WELCOME the article by Robin McAlpine on a Scottish currency, and note that the contrast he makes between Iceland and Greece on the currency issue is the same example I use in my book, Currency in an Independent Scotland.

There clearly needs to be debate on this important issue, and the debate needs to be wider that just the question of having a Scottish currency and a central bank and when such a currency should be implemented.

If we are considering introducing our own currency, should we not be considering the type of currency we require? Should it be a fractional-reserve currency or a full-reserve currency? After the experience we all had of the inherent weakness of the fractional-reserve system in the banking crisis and all that this cost us, is it not time to consider something better?

Even Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England when the crisis struck, has serious doubts about the fractional-reserve system, which is clear in his book The End of Alchemy. Only fools keep doing the same thing when they discover that it leads to real problems, and expect that this it will not lead to the same problems again.

Yes, we desperately need a real debate on this issue. However, the Growth Commission wants to make provision for a central bank in Scotland and the prospect finally of its own currency, Common Weal support a central bank and a Scottish currency, and many others in the Yes campaign would agree with these objectives. We can’t legislate for this and the institutions required for it until we have independence. Why don’t we all agree on these fundamentals and enter into the independence campaign on a united front on that basis?

Once we have a decision on independence, we can then debate the nature of the currency we want and the institutions we need to legislate for when we are setting them up, which will take about three years. During that time we could have a period of sterlingisation as Robin suggests. It seems to me that we should be happy to examine and debate this issue in some depth, but the first step is to secure political independence in a referendum, and indeed we need to secure this before we can implement a central bank and the other institutions we require.

Andy Anderson
Saltcoats

CAN we bring an immediate halt to this nonsense about “declaring independence now” or doing UDI (Letters, June 17, June 19)?

You can do neither unless you have the guaranteed support of a significant majority of the population, the police force, the armed services and civic government.

To do a UDI without these would be a total disaster and finish us of (deservedly, for utter stupidity). I suspect many of the voices calling for such are not on our side at all. At this point in time we have to win an independence referendum or a parliamentary election (with a majority of the vote) fought on the single issue on of dissolving the Union and assuming full sovereignty.

Circumstances might change, of course, and politics indeed has a habit of accelerating change, but this is where we are at the moment.

David McEwan Hill
Sandbank, Argyll