THE SNP administration is accumulating a formidable portfolio of policy under-achievement: in policing, school education, the universities, the National Health Service, and in the rejection of the technical findings of government-established expert committees on fracking and genetically modified food. These weaknesses are now followed by a failure properly to vet parliamentary candidates (“SNP candidate is dragged into MP property deals row”, The Herald, October 5). They tell us all we need to know about a party of opportunists with no cohesive ideology and no consistent set of values and virtues.

We are witnessing the beginnings of an SNP “collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions”, as Marx once wrote of capitalism. Oddly, the SNP's nemesis will probably be that old Marxist himself, Jeremy Corbyn, and for three reasons. First, it is inevitable that, having peaked at the General Election, the SNP will start to lose votes back to a rejuvenated Labour Party. Secondly, there is little difference on domestic and foreign policy between Corbynism and Sturgeonism. Both creeds are founded on high taxation, high public spending, high borrowing, confiscation of private wealth, inheritance and land, central planning of the economy, nationalisation (starting with the banks and the railways), and on sanctimonious prattle about equality, diversity and multiculturalism. Both parties oppose Trident renewal, and, therefore, we must assume that, on moral grounds (but not as a credible defence strategy) Ms Sturgeon, too, would not be prepared to “press the button”. Thirdly, these hard left policies will bring down both Labour and the SNP because they constitute a programme for losers who steadfastly refuse to recognise that liberal, free-market capitalism has won “the battle of ideas”.

Where Corbynism and the SNP part company is on which dead-end road to socialism to take, perhaps best summed up by the oxymoronic slogan of “independence in Europe”. Mr Corbyn is starting to appreciate the burdens imposed on the EU working class by the straitjacket of the euro, of ever-increasing political integration, and of the chaos caused by the migrants crisis. Consequently, as UK support for leaving the EU rises, Mr Corbyn will hitch his support to the No side in the coming referendum. The SNP can do no such thing. Their distasteful hatred of the UK and their visceral Anglophobia leave it with no choice but to favour the Yes side, clinging to the party leadership's delusion that Scots will vote for the EU while the rUK votes against. The separate homogeneous “we”, by which Scottish Nationalism superficially defines its creed, will be revealed as the nonsense it always has been.

Richard Mowbray,

14 Ancaster Drive, Glasgow.