WE are being prepared – in classic propaganda-management style – for the emergence of a new pro-independence party, led by Alex Salmond. The Reverend writer of a well-known indy website is preparing us for the news.

It’s not good news. I live in Catalonia, where the indy movement is split into six political parties. This division is exploited by the pro-union parties, to create endless internal debate and argument. The pro-indy parties vote in different directions, as occurred recently in the Spanish Congress, over issues that ought to unite them, and the newspapers are full of the tiny details that divide.

READ MORE: Kevin McKenna: Indy party led by Salmond might be just what the Yes movement needs

The consequence? Faith in politicians – never very high – has plummeted further, and the pro-union parties are the ones making the weather.

When Scotland is independent, please have as many parties as folk want. Until then, let’s stick with the SNP or the Greens, and encourage them to get the job done.

Christopher Carnie
Barcelona

“NOTHING is stronger than an idea whose time has come”. Victor Hugo neatly surmises why it would be both desirable and necessary to have a new independence-supporting list party.

The upper echelons of the SNP have become complacent and out of touch. There is a cadre of self-entitled careerists within the SNP. To them, self-enrichment and climbing the greasy pole are more important than delivering independence.

They are motivated not along class lines but by the poison ideology of identity politics. This presupposes that the exploitative nature of capitalism will simply disappear as long as more woman, ethnic minorities and LGBT people join the boardroom.

The loudest proponents of identity politics are the ones who end up on the boards.

This coterie are obsessed with being “woke”. They have almost become the police force for speech and language, haughtily dictating what is acceptable.

Humza Yousaf’s condemnation of the keep Covid-19 out of Scotland demo as “racist” was an egregious example of this. It wasn’t true and was similar to when Hillary Clinton dismissed US voters as “a basket of deplorables”. Yousaf was simply pandering to the Unionist media.

This kind of thinking can create the conditions for a backlash. Anyone who doubts it hasn’t been paying attention as fascist demigods have been elected all over the world. It would be churlish to think such a thing could not happen in Scotland.

The conditions would be especially ripe if Sturgeon wins a landslide on the basis of a second independence referendum and the Tories say no. Voters will lose patience. The top-down thinking of the current SNP leadership means there is no “out of the box” thinking. Everything has to be done though the dead-end of constitutional politics.

The new list party lead by Alex Salmond would bring fresh impetus into the independence movement. It would mean a return to citizen-led. participatory politics. It is a development that should be welcomed by progressive supporters of independence.

Alan Hinnrichs
Dundee

AN online blogger who has developed a visceral hatred for the SNP, and whose blog has lost many of its good contributors to be infested instead with trolls, has become a sad shadow of what he once was as one of the most effective contributors to our last referendum campaign.

He has publicly and loudly called Nicola Sturgeon a liar, which no balanced supporter of independence would do publicly, no matter personal their opinion. He has appeared on Alex Salmond’s Russia Today show.

He has now done a small survey on his online site. No matter how many people participated, his site no longer interacts with anything other than a partisan section of independence supporters and it cannot seriously be taken as any sort of reliable description of the volume of significant opinion in the independence movement.

However – and no matter how you want to paint this – his small survey, which was asking for support of an idea he has been contemplating publicly for some time, indicated only that a minority – a minority – of those participating in it supported a second independence party (led perhaps by Alex Salmond) contesting on the list in next year’s Scottish election.

“Nearly a half” is a minority. I sincerely hope Alex Salmond is not involved in this divisive nonsense.

And I have no idea why it is been given so much coverage. It does, however, reassure me that most of our support is pretty sensible.

David McEwan Hill
Sandbank, Argyll

ISN’T it funny (not funny ha ha) that the well-used incessant phrase “getting on with the day job”, directed at our First Minister from her Unionist political opponents and right-wing media, has now disappeared from their limited vocabulary. Instead she is criticised for doing that very thing!

Now they are shamelessly asserting her successful daily virus briefings are actually political broadcasts and should stop. Or because she doesn’t rubber stamp or quickly follow the easing of lockdown restrictions that are happening south of the Border, down Boris Way, she is being divisive and political.

Shame on them! Her strength of character , standing firm to incessant pressure and bullying, is there for all to see. We are truly fortunate to have someone of that stature in charge. Especially when you think that wonderful country the United States of America has Trump, and England has Boris. Their citizens have my deepest sympathy.

Robin Maclean
Fort Augustus