I DETECTED an air of desperation about Ian Bell's article ("Ed Balls speech that was a suicide note for Labour", The Herald, June 5).

It is not for me to come to the defence of Mr Balls, who, along with Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, was the chief architect of our economic difficulties. But we should praise the Shadow Chancellor for at last acknowledging his own past failures. Mr Bell, on the other hand, cannot bring himself to recognise that socialist economics, based as it is on accumulating debt and on the omniscience of a state run by the leftist great and good, is an oxymoron.

But Mr Bell's palpable despair mainly derives from the collapse of the SNP independence strategy of socialism in one country and never again a wicked Tory government. Everywhere you look, the wheels have come off the separatist bandwagon.

Gordon Wilson, a former leader of the SNP, and Jim Sillars foresee defeat in the independence referendum,.

Against most people's expectation, it would appear from a recent poll that 16 and 17-year-old prospective voters are even more hostile to independence than their elders ("Salmond 2014 poll blow as teenage voters back Union", The Herald, June 3). That prime cut of SNP opportunism has clearly soured.

The insurance companies warn us of higher premiums, as the economies of scale of a UK-wide market are lost. Only last week, research by a leading insurance company revealed that private pension saving and provision in Scotland is much lower than that in the rest of the UK owing to higher levels of personal debt unsecured against housing equity. .

Yet Iain Mann and Alan J Sangster (Letters, June 3 and June 5 respectively) react as if economic data have no relevance, as compared with the mystical benefits of independence. Mr Sangster asserts that the alleged rise in sea levels attributable to global warming (recently-published Met Office figures show that average world temperature has not risen at all over the last 16 years) will merely add to public expenditure in the south-east of England, to the disadvantage of Scotland.Yet IGas and Cuadrilla have each just announced expectations of at least 50 years' UK supply of gas from the mile-thick Bowland Shales in north-west England. That represents a huge amount of tax revenue, plus lower fuel prices and thousands of jobs, none of them available to an independent Scotland.

To all realistic and sensible people who eschew socialism and greenery, independence is as dead as Monty Python's parrot. But we shall have to bear this inane debate for another 15 months.

Richard Mowbray,

14, Ancaster Drive, Glasgow.

IN assuming that young voters planning to vote No in the independence referendum are prosaic materialists devoid of romantic ideals, Colette Douglas Home perpetrates an astonishing non sequitur ("We have failed generation who are not romanticists", The Herald, June 4). I suspect that moral ideals and sentiments have more influence with citizens on both sides than the endless unprovable arguments about economic advantage which have been prominent in your columns.

As for romance on the No side, let me advance the claims of friendship and beauty. We have with our southern neighbours a friendship which has endured since 1559, admittedly with a few hitches in the 18th century. We have stood together against Louis XIV, against Napoleon, and in two world wars. We benefited from empire when Britain was a great power. Now that it is not, is there not something shabby in deserting our old friends for supposed temporary economic advantage?

The referendum is about how we want to live with our neighbours on the same island, not about short-term politics and economics, and the long view should prevail.

As for beauty, for me the clincher may be called the York Minster argument. York Minster happened to be the first English cathedral which I visited as a boy in 1956 and it inspired a life-long love affair with English cathedrals and parish churches. But for other readers it may be Blenheim, or Chatsworth, or the British Museum, The point is that, while we are both Scots and Britons, the aesthetic and cultural riches of England are part of our birthright and our ability to visit them is a matter of right. But once the border separates two independent countries, either of which is fully entitled by reason of its independence to limit or control crossing in either direction, access to what was our cultural birthright in England ceases to be a right and becomes a negotiated privilege only.

Why on earth should we vote for such a loss of ownership of beauty? We are indeed better together. To be both Scots and Britons enriches our lives as neither does on its own.

Dr Ronald A Knox,

8 Queensborough Gardens, Glasgow.

DAVID Chillingworth assumes that the issue of independence can be separated from faith ("The churches have an opportunity to discuss the place of faith in society", The Herald, June 5). Why? Who is to say that his faith and his worship, whatever it is, will not be affected by the settlement? The trouble with all proposed changes is to make assumptions that may be unwarranted in the event. A person's identity is closely allied to his perception of his national identity. The two are inseparable.

And what do we mean by faith? It is not merely the faith of the Scottish churches, not even of the traditionalists among these or the progressives. It must include the faith that is atheistic having abandoned the miraculous and, to a modern mind, unbelievable core of the Christian faith. Even so, they are related: the faith of the modern atheist here has developed from the Christian faith. So his belief system is founded on it, though different in essentials. Other faiths are harder to deal with, being very different from either and, in practice, seem alien to many Scots.

To the extent that a parochial view is more ethnocentric, the position of the minor faiths, newly arrived here, is less secure with independence than in a larger grouping where the principle of freedom of worship is well established, as it is now.

The issue in the end comes down to: who do you think you are mainly? A Briton or a Scot? If I were a Scot first, I would have to believe that the most important aspects of my identity were Scottish not British. I do not think this. Had it not been for the British response in the Second World War, I do not think there would now be a Scotland, never mind a Britain. We would be part of a German hegemony, and all the decent, brave, brainy folk would have been exterminated to make resistance impossible.

I value my Scottishness in the same way that I value the Welsh, the Irish as well as the English, all of whom contribute in their special ways to the United Kingdom. I think clannishness is a mistake when I see it.

Scotland cannot make any headline on a world stage; it is too small; but Britain can. It has already; many times; and the outcome was marvellous, for the entire world. I hope and expect it to be marvellous in future. We Britons are not finished yet.

William Scott,

23 Argyle Place, Rothesay.

HOW dare Lord Foulkes seek to influence the employment of Iain Macwhirter as the presenter of the Road to Referendum TV programme ("TV show in referendum row", The Herald, June 4)? Iain Macwhirter is a professional journalist of repute. That is how he earns his living. George Foulkes as a councillor, MP, Minister, MSP and member of the House of Lords has made a lavish living out of the public purse. Thank goodness that Ofcom declined to investigate his complaint and that STV sent him away with a flea in his ear.

I found the programme to be an excellent history of Scotland's political story. For those of us who lived through those times, it was a well-produced and well-presented reminder of how we got to where we are now. For those unfamiliar with the journey it would be invaluable. The "talking heads" came from a wide range of political opinion, who had also lived through those times and whose comments were interesting and enlightening. I look forward to reading Mr Macwhirter's book on which the series is based. Perhaps, once he actually views the programme, Lord Foulkes will be man enough to apologise to the journalist.

Mrs Pat Dishon,

62 Inchview Terrace, Edinburgh.

IAIN Macwhirter claims that until the 1960s Conservatism/Unionism was the dominant force in Scottish voting patterns ("Independence in the UK is not such an alien concept", The Herald, June 6). This is not true. Although the Tories make much of the Conservative majority in Scotland in the 1955 election, the period after the Second World War represented an aberration.

From the time the vote was extended to most males in the 1880s, Scotland was more inclined than England to support the anti-Conservative alternatives: the Liberals, the ILP, the Labour Party. The Tory majority which emerged for a short time in the 1950s would be a temporary manifestation of post-war British nationalist feeling.

Mary McCabe,

25 Circus Drive, Glasgow.

WHAT the current Conservative membership are to make of their party is anyone's guess. We have had the "no further" line in the sand from Scottish leader Ruth Davidson on more powers for Holyrood, Then it was: more powers, but not too many. But the final ignominy is for the head of the anti-independence Better Together campaign and former Chancellor Alistair Darling to be invited to address the Scottish Conservative Party's conference at Stirling. It is bizarre that while Mr Darling will be given the opportunity to inform the conference about his views on the Union and on powers for Holyrood, the party membership have been barred from discussing their own views on the matter – all to save embarrassment for party grandee Lord Strathclyde who has been charged with coming up with proposals. What a waste of an opportunity for him to hear first-hand what his membership think.

This mishandling can serve only to provide a propaganda platform for Mr Darling to exploit and to assist the return of Labour regimes at Holyrood and at Westminster, with the latter being assisted by the preponderance of Labour MPs we send there in such numbers that could deprive the English of the Conservative government they may well vote for – reminiscent of the case for devolution of Scots being governed by a regime they did not vote for.

Both Labour and the Conservatives are signed up to so-called extra powers from the Calman proposals which will come in in 2016 – if there is a No vote. As both parties have compromised Calman by working up alternative powers, perhaps they could each explain what status Calman now has.

Douglas R Mayer

76 Thomson Crescent, Currie.