Letter: SNP risks losing ground over land issue

As an ex-SNP supporter, I took Tom Gallagher's comments (Letters, 8 March) to heart. He has correctly identified the drift away from the SNP listening to the vox populi to pandering to the megalomania of moguls, plutocrats and "quangocrats".

We can see this very clearly in the rush to support landowners and developers in building wind farms that will never make any substantial contribution to our energy needs, but we can also see it in other aspects of national life.

A good case in point is the status of land ownership in general and particularly in our national parks.

In all its analogies with Fennoscandia, the SNP never propounds the democratic land tenure system there. That means, by comparison, Norway has "landowners per square mile while we have square miles per landowner".

Further, the SNP has even failed to embrace the concept of Scottish National Parks being owned by the Scottish nation, as opposed to billionaire non-nationals who wouldn't be allowed to own land in their own country's national parks let alone in any other Fennoscandian or European country.

If the SNP won't get behind their own people, why should they expect people to get behind them? We'll find out in May.

Ron Greer

Blair Atholl

Perthshire

It isn't credible, as Tom Gallagher supposes, that the SNP hasn't thought of the consequences of "embracing captains of industry". Wasn't "captains of industry" Thomas Carlyle's term for the elite which carried with it the connotation of "the right to rule"?

Ellis Thorpe

Old Chapel Walk

Inverurie

I sincerely hope the SNP will remain in power after the election in May, although if recent opinion polls prove to be accurate then Labour could be returned to power.

I find it incomprehensible that the electorate in Scotland would regard the present Labour Party as being superior in any way to the present SNP government.

If Labour are returned to power it could be seen as poetic justice. After all, they were mainly responsible for creating the financial mess the country is in, and it is only right and proper that they should clear it up. Having said that, I'm certain the SNP could do a better job.

Jim Carson

Larchfield

Balerno, Midlothian