The SNP, the Labour Party, the Greens and the Scottish Socialists display a sanctimonious complacency regarding UKIP.

The party is viewed as wicked, right-wing and English, and, they usually claim, has no appeal in a caring, unselfish, socialist Scotland.

Undoubtedly UKIP, like all parties whose pitch is built upon a sense of nationalism, has a distasteful streak of xenophobia in the DNA of some of its members. But Britishness, UKIP's defining credo, is not standard-issue nationalism. It did not result from the ethereal, Wagnerian notions of blood, earth and spirit that historically has motivated all nationalist parties, and that has led continental Europe and Ireland into so much trouble since the mid-19th century.

Britishness was created from the political unification of these islands after 1707, and is expansive and inclusive in its outlook. It had to be in order that the Union might prosper; it had the Scottish-driven 18th and 19th-century liberal enlightenment of Adam Smith, David Hume, Robert Burns, Thomas Carlyle and Walter Scott to underpin it. Britishness symbolises not mystical notions, but philosophical ideas like the rule of law, respect for private property, free market exchange, self-reliance, mutual support and respect, individual rights, liberty and democracy.

And it is the deep-seated popular belief in, and power of, these ideas that fuelled the explosion of UKIP last Thursday. It was an explicit rejection of a metropolitan elite and its worldview embedded in Europhilia and in a long and slavish acquiescence in every deceit and directive from Brussels and from the European Court of Human Rights. While the SNP rejects that same metropolitan elite, the party will discover over the next 18 months that Scotland is not immune from the forces which UKIP has now released.

Recently on Newsnight Scotland, Professor John Curtice informed us that there is no consistent poll evidence that suggests Scottish voters have markedly different views on Europe from those in the rest of the UK. The European Parliament election in the spring of 2014 will focus the debate on UKIP's home turf, and will leave the SNP exposed.

Under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Labour introduced and developed a "rolling" electoral register, thereby ensuring many newly arrived Bulgarians and Romanians will be able to join hundreds of thousands of other EU citizens in determining the UK result.

This will be grist to UKIP's mill. But thanks to the opportunism of the SNP, the same people will be able to vote in the independence referendum in September 2014. I can't wait to hear the pro-EU and anti-euro referendum SNP trying to explain why johnny-come-lately foreigners should have a say, while 800,000 native Scots in the rest of the UK should not.

Richard Mowbray,

14 Ancaster Drive,

Glasgow.