AS well as the pandemic, there’s pandemonium in the Tory party.

It’s becoming more obvious day by day that the current incumbents in Downing Street and the Tory government can’t govern either themselves, England or Wales, and if only they’d face reality here.

Having last won in Scotland in 1955, we’re long gone. It’s just a case of cutting that Gordian knot. I know I’ve omitted Northern Ireland, but it’s well known that the Tories are capable of turning on friends, families, allies and shafting them: repudiating treaties, lies, broken promises and un-fulfilled vows.

READ MORE: Jeremy Corbyn could be expelled over Labour antisemitism claim

So does northern England really believe it’s safe and secure? Not according to their newly elected 50 Tory MPs, who have been reported as signing a letter to the PM demanding a clear road map out of lockdown. A shoogly peg must have been noted following on from an email onslaught from business and general public alike, as well as the current media overdrive.

But when you see the PM and his MPs lurching from pillar to post with their hastily rewritten statements, policy updates before said policies are embedded, and hand-picked failures like Dido Harding, I wonder how will it resolve itself?

We’re crashing out of the EU with either a No Deal plain and simple, or a poor deal disguised as mutton dressed like lamb. Will rUK wait til the next General Election for redress? Will the Tory party keep a floundering PM as his and their party’s approval rates plummet? Or will they wait til January and having got Brexit done, will they engineer BJ’s exit? Is there a serious possibility of civil unrest in England as Brexit bites, and winter grips?

And all the while, there’s us. If Michael Fry is correct, another calamitous by-product of being dragged out of the EU will be the effect on farms, farmer, farmland and our Scottish produce (Why Scots farming faces a massacre without a swift return to the EU, October 27). Strictly speaking, this shouldn’t be news. Surely the majority of us who voted to remain in the EU didn’t do so out of some knee-jerk reaction to Leavers, but with due regard to the broad benefits of membership in a bigger union where smaller countries (Republic of Ireland, and the others) are regarded as partners to be at least listened to, regarded and backed up, not thrown to the wolves as expendables.

No-one advocates violence, least of all me. I saw the army called out in former East Pakistan. You can push a people just that bit too far, and it was just too far when the democratic vote and decision of the people of (then) East Pakistan was disregarded. I wonder what “too far” will be here?

Selma Rahman
Edinburgh

BRIAN McGarry (Letters, October 29) correctly states that with more than 50% of the list vote, the SNP will probably get one MSP elected in each region, giving them an overall majority. This still leaves nearly half of MSPs supporting the union.

Here is a better plan. If those voters all vote Green on the list instead, then we will get three or four Green MSPs elected in each region. That will give us nearly three-quarters of MSPs for indy and the Unionist parties will lose nearly half of their seats.

The discussion can then move from “should we be independent?” to “what kind of independent country do we want to be?”.

Andy Collins
Cupar

I NOTE in Hamish MacPherson’s article on Scotland and the Empire he says that “we will be residents of the island of Great Britain and I have never seen any suggestion the name should be binned” (Scottishness and the growth of the British Empire, October 27).

Can I refer him to the long but excellent introduction to the book The Isles by Norman Davies, where he discusses at length the naming of these Isles and that they are not geographical but politically and ideologically loaded. This includes the name “Great Britain” (where’s “little Britain”?). The “Great” is not an idea of being “big” but of being “superior” – of ideas of imperial greatness.

READ MORE: Scottishness and the growth of the British Empire in the 19th century

This is the reason he settled eventually on just calling the book “the isles”, and not using any loaded political naming.

I have no desire after independence to be included in a political description of an imperial mindset! (PS “little Britain” is to be found in Gaelic, “A Bhreatann Bheag” = Brittany).

Crìsdean Mac Fhearghais
Dùn Eideann

TO try to keep them safe, as well as myself and my island community, I having avoided travel to family in Edinburgh since the pandemic kicked off.

I therefore have little sympathy for Chick McKenna (Letters, October 28) in his attempt to get refunds for three separate holidays booked in these uncertain times.

N Somerville
Isle of Mull

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