A NUMBER of your correspondents have discussed the nature of the question to be put in any putative future Indyref2.
However, it has been clear since 2014 that the only referendum result that nationalists will accept is one in favour of secession from the UK. Therefore their preferred format for a future referendum ballot paper would surely be “Do you agree that Scotland must leave the UK whatever the cost?”
And a box marked “Yes.”
And that’s all.
Peter A Russell, Glasgow.
WE NEED A NEW ACT OF UNION
I AM in wholehearted agreement with GR Weir (Letters, October 1) that the Labour Party has been negligent in not creating its own constitutional project since 2014 – and indeed I have made exactly that point on a number of occasions in these pages. As Dan Jarvis says: “If you don’t talk about a subject, your opponents dominate the agenda.”
For the record, my preference is to start from the obvious place – the status quo which has been endorsed by the SNP’s own referendum, and to create a New Act Of Union. However, this should also include a new unilateral right for any part of the Union to secede, subject to a level of support similar to that expected as best practice by other countries and organisations. This could be either a supermajority, such as the two-thirds required to change the constitutions of everything from the United States down to the SNP, or double majorities as required for Swiss national referendums. Or perhaps both, to be certain that independence really is the settled will of the people – such safeguards would also show that the lessons of the Brexit debacle have been learned.
So Gordon Brown’s commission (“Starmer vows Scotland unity as key speech faces heckles”, The Herald, September 30) is to be welcomed, and hopefully it will spur the nationalists into creating their own new proposal, which will tell us exactly how independence will come about, how much it will cost, who will pay that price, and how long we will suffer its consequences. Without that proposal, we are stuck with the rather pathetic wishful thinking of “it can’t be any worse” and the unsupported “fiddlesticks” assertions which we have to suffer all too frequently in these columns.
Peter A Russell, Glasgow.
Planet Pedro! 