Peter McColl IT’S been obvious for some time that the political cultures of Scotland and the rest of the UK have been diverging and I think that was well manifested in the differing votes in the EU referendum. We’re now in a situation where the Scottish Conservatives are more liberal on immigration than the Labour press office are. So on the morning of Theresa May’s aggressive speech against immigrants Labour’s press office put out a tweet saying the real problem with the Tories is they haven’t cracked down on immigration. I don’t think that represents the Labour leadership but there are significant elements within the party who believe that. The Scottish Tories aren’t making any running at all on immigration; Ukip are a laughing stock in Scotland. Whether an independence referendum is winnable is another question and there are serious questions to be asked and answers to be given around the economy, and that’s one of the things we’ll be looking at this weekend. Phyl Meyer I THINK we’d all be concerned about not winning indyref 2. If we have one we need to win it, but it’s hard to look at the current political situation and not think that increasingly the people of Scotland are going to be looking at what’s happening down south and not think: ‘We can’t be having any of that, let’s get the hell out.’ That’s the way I feel. I supported independence the last time because I thought it was the best bet for charting a different course, a more positive future for the country. But now I think it’s even more desperate – it’s a case of we really cannot put up with this anymore, we need get away and do our own thing. My wife’s Canadian so I hear all the anti-immigration rhetoric and if it weren’t for immigration my kids wouldn’t be here. Scotland is different on that issue – we’re not perfect but there’s increasingly very little comparison between that atmosphere in Scotland around these issue and the atmosphere down south, so I think we need to go our own way. John Nichol I THINK indyref 2 is too soon. I was fully expecting it at some point but I think Nicola Sturgeon’s pushed the plunger way too soon on this one. There’s going to be two years of Brexit negotiations. I would have preferred her to wait until the end of two years. As it is the referendum might come at the end of the two years anyway, but I would have preferred her to wait. It’s hard to say you want to see the UK go down the plughole but I think the SNP needs to see the UK economy crash and burn in order to win an independence referendum, because at the moment I don’t think they’ve got the figures to win it. Peter Mountjoy-Smith THERE are different views within the Green Party – there’s a strand of thought a bit similar to the SNP in which independence is a goal in itself. There are others for whom it’s a possible means to an end, and I’m one of those. So the question is very much what is on the table? What would it mean? For example, if the idea were to gain independence in order to get into the EU and adopt the euro, that would be an absolute catastrophe, an utter nightmare. At the time of the last indyref, the SNP were completely unclear about their ideas for currency, for what it would be. They were quite deliberately fudging the issue coming up with stuff about “it’s our pound”, trying to obscure the difference between having your own currency, shadowing someone else’s currency and the rest of that. There needs to be far greater clarity about those things, clarity about what’s on the table, because otherwise it’s a bit like Brexit – you know: “What’s the deal?” No-one knows, no-one in Westminster knows. One of the big problems last time was the eventual end state was quite unclear. Since then we’ve had problems with the oil price, so a lot of the assumptions that underpinned the case last time are completely taken away. The question then is what would the future be? What would arrangements be for currency, arrangements for trade? Is the idea to get into the EU but have trade barriers with what is currently the largest single trading partner – how would that work? There’s a strand of thinking in the Green Party that wants to see answers on those things before the choice is put to people.–