SIR, Johann Lamont tells us she is “proud of what we have achieved over the last three years”, especially the referendum: “We held Alex Salmond to account”. This, in the light of her explanation for her sudden departure, is breathtakingly hypocritical. Now she tells us London won’t allow Scottish Labour proper autonomy. Officials in Scotland’s Labour HQ, we learn, are UK Labour employees, answerable to London. Lamont’s highest appointees, as ex secretary general Ian Price discovered recently, can be called to Westminster and sacked – without consulting the Scottish leader.

She tells us that Labour politicians in London, and some in Scotland, are “dinosaurs” who “do not understand the politics they are facing” and are concerned only with their own interests, failing to see that “the focus of Scottish politics is now Holyrood, not Westminster”. She could and should have told us this back in September when it might have made a difference, but she chose to peddle a sham, a travesty, to the voters. She deceived us. The Labour party deceived us.

Jack McConnell says the way she has been treated is “outrageous”, while Henry McLeish has weighed in with a devastating critique of “the suffocating control of the UK Labour party and Westminster.” Milliband simply says that she “deserves significant credit for the successful No vote” – faint praise, no apology, no attempt to acknowledge, never mind to address, the issues raised so dramatically by her departure.

Meanwhile, the media is only interested in the dinosaurs and what they have to say: George (Rt. Hon. Lord) Foulkes recommends Gordon Brown as new leader, despite reluctant noises from that quarter. The Daily Mail reports that Jim Murphy is “being lined up” (i.e. it’s all being fixed in London).

The caretaker leader is former deputy Anas Sarwar – also a Westminster MP, as is Alastair Darling. UK Labour’s only idea, apparently, is to shunt in a big manager from Westminster, someone who does not currently have a seat in Scotland’s parliament. No-one down there seems to understand that this kind of thinking is the root of the problem.

How can the special one ask for his or her constituents’ votes in the general election when they all know s/he will abandon them in search of a Holyrood seat within a year? Or does UK Labour think it can have a First Minister of Scotland who does not attend the Scottish parliament, but rules in tandem with a deputy who does? Outrageous though it sounds, this has apparently been suggested. Has the Labour Party abandoned all ambition to rule again in Scotland?

Why is no Holyrood candidate being touted in the press? Think back to Labour’s media-management of the referendum: Labour MSPs other than Johann Lamont were hardly (allowed to be?) visible during that campaign. They might say the wrong things, so Westminster sent its own big-hitters to protect the union. Milliband’s managers now look so limited in their thinking because they know next to nothing about Scottish Labour MSPs.

UK Labour has clearly not even come to terms with the level of devolution that Scotland currently enjoys, and it is hard not to see the parallels between Scottish Labour’s problems with Westminster and Scotland’s problems with Westminster – the ignorance, the patronising arrogance, the high-handedness, the lack of understanding or any attempt to understand, the sense of owning everything, the hostility to any aspirations which do not suit that establishment.

This is what it is like to be ruled from Westminster. This is why we must work to loosen its hold on us, and why the goal of breaking that hold completely must never be abandoned.

I am, etc.

Ian McFadyen Caledonian Road Peebles