Sir,
Professor Jim Hunter, in a campaigning article in a daily newspaper this month, was quite right to break ranks with his SNP party colleagues over the centralisation of control of Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) to a new Holyrood quango, and to call on Highlands and Islands SNP MSPs to reject the move.
As Professor Hunter points out, the SNP has, for the past 10 years, cut HIE’s budget, abolished its 10 local enterprise companies and steered the agency toward SNP policy rather than local derived solutions to very different problems.