A CONSENSUS has been developing south of the Border which seeks to reduce Scottish representation at Westminster to the class of "'untouchables" in the caste system of politics.

As soon as the Tories in their despair of victory hit upon the obvious strategy of demonising Labour to English voters by association with the alien SNP, Labour's only defence in England was going to be to join with them in disassociating themselves from such a poisonous group of people. Even the Liberals were doing it with Nick Clegg's declaration that doing deals with the SNP would be so unseemly as to be as unacceptable as doing deals with Ukip. There has developed a consensus to deny legitimacy to SNP representatives in a UK Parliament.

What they all seem to have lost sight of, or not care about, is that if the SNP do win upwards of 50 seats, they will be the democratically elected representatives of the whole of Scotland. I am not myself a supporter of the SNP, but it is deeply offensive to me to be told by the entire UK establishment that my representatives will be beyond the pale of legitimate involvement in the governance of the country to which I thought I belonged. In effect, what we are being told is that Scottish representatives will be excluded from involvement in reasonable processes of parliamentary democratic governance. I wonder if they have all thought through the implications of that quite shocking concept. If Scots are really being told that they have become too alien by their choice of representatives to be permitted to influence through them the governance of the United Kingdom, then the supposedly Unionist parties of the UK are, in effect, showing us the door.

The rhetoric of all the parties in this election on this issue makes it clear that there is a desperate need for radical constitutional change well beyond the further devolution presently on offer whatever happens at the election if the Union is to be preserved. The only thing that will now preserve it is the obtaining by a Scottish parliament of powers consistent with the very obvious aspirations of its people, and that means self-governance of everything except defence, foreign affairs and those elements of economic policy associated with belonging to the same currency, and at the same time a commensurate reconfiguration of representation at UK level. The calling of a constitutional convention must be the very first act of the new prime minister of the UK whoever he is. I am sadly not confident in either the wisdom or statesmanship of either possibility.

Stephen Smith,

56 Ormonde Drive,

Glasgow.

I REFER to Catherine MacLeod's analysis of the stage we have reached in the all-pervasive General Election debate (" Devolution was start of Labour's problem", The Herald, May 6). She observed that, if the election results for Labour are as bad as predicted , then Tam Dalyell and Bob Hughes should receive an "apologetic nod" from Labour's great and good, because they were both opposed to the Labour Party's devolution plans.

It is worth recalling that Tony Blair, who had been reared in Scotland and went to school there, was a reluctant devolutionist. It has been reported that, prior to his becoming Prime Minister after the 1997 General Election , he would have dropped the Labour commitment to devolution if he could have got away with it and remained reasonably unscathed. However, faced with the serried ranks of Scots in the pre-1997 Shadow Cabinet, such as Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, George Robertson, Donald Dewar, and Derry Irvine, all proponents of devolution , he felt he had to proceed. However, he insisted on the Referendum , which took place in September 1997 and produced a decisive result, leading to the return of the Scottish Parliament on 12 May 1999.

The forces leading to some form of devolution for Scotland had become irresistible and devolution itself, once introduced, was always going to be subject to refinement and improvement without of necessity leading to independence, as the referendum of September last year illustrated.

Ian W Thomson,

38 Kirkintilloch Road,Lenzie.