YESTERDAY’S edition of The National should be reduced to a McCrone Report-only edition and an invitation given to all SNP branches and other Yes groups to purchase copies to start putting through letterboxes etc by the hundreds of thousands. It should be the start of the long overdue effort to begin informing the public of just why we need independence.

We should have a leaflet series headed “Are you aware that...?” I could think of dozens of topics that could be reduced to leaflet-sized messages containing information that our own media shuns and we ignore.

Take Scotland’s population over the past 100 years. It has grown by about 15% – yes, that little. This must be the lowest country rate in the world, a world where the population has grown by about 500% in that period. Growth in Norway and Denmark was more than 100% , and even in England it was 70%.

How much oil have we produced and what was its worth? Between 1980 and 2010 we produced more oil and gas than Abu Dhabi. Have you been to Abu Dhabi? They even own Manchester City and Paris St Germain. We are told that we have the weakest economy in the EU and some even believe it. It is time to ask the public to ask why.

It is time also that the SNP branch network multiplied in numbers, got out into the streets with information supplied by HQ, and started making the case for independence. Back in the days of the 1970s oil campaign my constituency had four branches in each of Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch and all were very active co-operatively. I see no such branch activity today. Thank goodness we at least have All Under One Banner to keep the message alive.

Nick Dekker
Cumbernauld

MANY have forgotten that the Brexit referendum in 2016 was advisory only but was politically binding. Therefore we can organise a referendum for Scottish independence which is advisory but politically binding, thereby bypassing Section 30 of the Scotland Act and Westminster approving such a referendum.

The Scottish Government should now proceed with the above without any more delays and do what the SNP is supposed to be about –gaining our independence – because the British state’s Brexit difficulty is Scotland’s opportunity.

Nicola Sturgeon cannot kick the can of independence any further down the road or we will lose this brief window of opportunity to gain Scottish independence at a time when working-class people in Scotland need to to be rid of Westminster austerity and instead embrace an independent Scotland based on redistribution of wealth and income, and not the neo-liberalism of Andrew Wilson’s vision of Scotland.

Sean Clerkin
Glasgow

SO now we, and presumably he, knows what he was wittering on about last week. I refer of course to our revered Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson, with his talk of “lethality” and “interests abroad”.

Your article (Hague judges tell UK to give islands back, February 26), brings once again to our attention the sad fate of the innocent inhabitants of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean, who were deprived of their homeland by a British Government 50 years ago. This was all done just so that our “special relationship allies” could have another base from which to carry out influencing or threatening acts in another part of the globe where they really had no good reason to be.

Can the Foreign Office please tell us, and the rest of the world, just exactly how UK possession of these small areas of faraway ground is helping to protect the citizens of the UK from “terrorist threats, organised crime and piracy”?

Looking around us at the moment it seems to me that these threats from terrorist and crime syndicates are not doing too badly right now.

Maybe of course there is a “piratical” vessel belonging to the EU sailing up the Thames as we speak, and they just haven’t told us about it!

In this day and age it seems totally unacceptable that a decision of this nature by a United Nations court should be totally ignored by a permanent member of the Security Council just because it does not like it.

It may not be binding, but surely this sends out a totally wrong message to other countries around the world who may be planning a bit of illegal activity to benefit their own aspirational ends.

All of which could raise another interesting question: When the break-up of the UK takes place, where does that the leave the rUK (England) in relation to its place at the UN Security Council?

George M Mitchell
Dunblane

FURTHER to Hayley Valentine’s statement that there is no anti-Scottish bias in the BBC (‘I’ll defend BBC’s indyref coverage until my dying day’, February 25), I remember a Radio Scotland interview many years ago where it was put to someone in the BBC in London that Scotland is mostly ignored by the mainstream media down south.

The interviewee said that was nonsense, and to prove it he said he had a notice pinned up in his office saying “Remember Scotland”. He sounded quite chuffed by that – until the interviewer asked him why he would need to have such a notice pinned up at all!

Iain McClafferty
via email

THANK you Martin Hannan for quoting my letter in your article (Stirling hears of the tough problems facing farmers, February 27) but perhaps you should correct your statement that I am “of Stirling SNP” for their sake.

I attended an open meeting organised by SNP Stirling, and Stirling SNP may be relieved to know I am not claiming to represent them being neither from Stirling nor a member of the SNP.

Murray Dunan
Auchterarder