SNP is clear about where it is heading

Joyce McMillan (Comment, 31 July) is right to challenge the SNP to flesh out its vision of an alternative future for Scotland to that now being imposed on it by a Westminster coalition rejected by 63 per cent of Scottish voters, but her claim that SNP has had nothing to say about its alternative is disingenuous.

She can get a clear sense of the SNP's preferred direction of travel by consulting both its record in government and its general election platform.

In government its opposition to PFI, its support for a unitary NHS, its abolition of the right to buy for new social housing, its investment in an increased role for the third sector in public service provision, its pilots on free school meals, its progressive penal policies, its promotion of renewables, its acknowledgement ahead of any other party in the UK that inequality is not simply a symptom of poverty but a cause of it.

And in the election its call for an end to Trident, its critique of the short termism of the London parties' "slash and burn" approach to public expenditure regardless of the longer term social or economic cost, and its promotion of full fiscal autonomy for Scotland backed by rising world energy prices all point firmly towards a social democratic future for Scotland based on the Nordic model.

The record contains inconsistencies, and major policy dilemmas remain for the SNP to resolve, but given the shared responsibility of the Unionist parties for the cumulative failures of UK policy and governance over the last several decades, the SNP remains Scotland's best bet by far for a more just and prosperous future.

STEPHEN MAXWELL

Palmerston Road Edinburgh

Having joined the SNP in 1947, in the belief that it was a national party which put Scotland first, I was interested to read Thomas Murray (Letters, 2 August) saying that it now defines itself as "a democratic left-of-centre political party".

I had no idea, then, that we were committed to a non-revolutionary kind of socially-divisive class war. Perhaps I should now reconsider my position. Such a description seems to be more appropriate for the Labour Party, now stuffed with noble Labour peers and evidently moribund south of the Border.

(DR) DAVID PURVES

Strathalmond Road

Edinburgh