More and more I despair at the content of the Scotland on Sunday. For some years after it arrived on the 'Sundays scene' I loyally purchased it, but it's a few years ago now since I even bothered to pick it up in a shop and read the headlines.Because it appears on my reader I tend to read the online version headlines and I think this article is perhaps the biggest lot of drivel I've ever read in a paper which once was regarded as a newspaper of quality.Let's have a look at some of the remarks attributed to Graeme Pearson, a Labour MSP who was formerly director general of the Scottish Crime and Drugs Enforcement Agency.“The arrival of a possibility of Scottish independence amidst the creation of a single police force [in Scotland], if not properly thought through, will go a long way to creating more national ‘boundaries and hurdles’ than ever existed before.”Purely scaremongering. The police force, when promoting their beliefs in a single force, have stated the new force would reduce boundaries and bureaucracy.Pearson says that continuing to rely on London-based intelligence agencies such as MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) after independence would be “untenable”.But a separate Scottish Government would face a difficult task in creating a Scottish version of the services from scratch as they would require skills and techniques beyond those used by police forces north of the Border.Pearson is saying no serving Scottish police officer is trained in intelligence techniques and that an independent Scotland's new government would have difficulty in building its own intelligence service.

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