ANOTHER LETTER FROM NICOLA... (AND TRIS)

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PS Mr Hague: 

Given that you seem to think that it is reasonable for you to come to Scotland to deliver a lecture about how you think things might be when Scotland is independent... (and you might remember that your record on forecasting what we will do and how we will do it in this country is far from being faultless) ...perhaps you might like to add some information on how the alternative will work for us.

Mr Hague and the Tories were desperately
anti-devolution, you'll remember

The alternative, of course, being that we remain in the UK, that we continue to be ruled by your party, in your parliament, populated mainly by your countrymen, in your country... and therefore, Mr Hague, something you might be expected to know a little more about.

Because, you see, this is important to us. Not just to our Deputy First Minister, but to us too.

You simply cannot expect people to make a democratically legitimate decision on their future based on a white paper from the Scottish government and a series of scare stories from the UK, most of which have already been discredited by, for example, Nobel prize winning economists, parliamentarians and ministers of other EU countries ... and by common sense.

You must lay out what is likely to be on offer.

I accept that that is not something that you can do for the whole of the British nationalist parties. The White Paper issued by our government is a view of how things could be. It is the view of our current government, and one which could be changed by the Scottish people should they wish to vote for a different government in the future as, at some point, they almost certainly will. (We could try to ask Ms Lamont for a vision of an independent Scotland, but she doesn't have one. Indeed we wonder if she has any vision at all. Of course given her desire to share a platform with Mr Cameron, it is possible that their visions are identical.)

Ms Lamont's vision is...erm...ugh... yeah

So we do not ask you for a definitive vision of how the UK will be after 2016 should the Scottish people remain as part of it. But we can reasonably ask you to lay out is what a UK government under the Tories might be like.

We can, of course, ask Mr Miliband to do the same for a possible Labour government, and even Mr Farage, as he now appears to have a very considerable influence on English politics.

Ms Sturgeon's letter isn't a political stunt. Any thinking person wants to know what your vision for Britain is, so we can look at it in concert with that of Mr Miliband (we already know that Labour would devolve health to Edinburgh ...presumably having first taken it back to London) and compare them both with the vision we already have of  Scotland as painted by Ms Sturgeon and Mr Salmond.

Please do give it some thought.

Regards

Tris

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Stuart has taken some of Hague's speech to pieces here. 

As always with Wings' stuff, it is worth a read.