AS Gordon Brown hits the campaign trail ("Brown claims vision could unite nation", The Herald, March 3), he apparently wants to "repair" our "embittered Scotland".

As he is a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and this is a Westminster election, perhaps he could also clarify how he would repair the UK's black hole of £1.4 trillion public debt, mostly related to his bank bailouts.

He will be aware that making public debt repayments is getting the UK into further debt, since annual UK tax income is more than £100 billion less than UK public expenditure - a massive budget deficit. Perhaps Mr Brown could explain his part in the huge imbalance within public finances, since his governments allowed huge budget deficits in all but two of his 13 years in power, whilst Scotland continued to deliver more tax than spending as it had done since 1982.

Mr Brown is now setting out to become the saviour of our oilfields. Maybe he would accept Westminster's utter failure over three decades to provide good stewardship of North Sea oil for future generations through an oil fund, continuously requested by our Scottish National Party. Indeed, he might apologise for Westminster's overall 30 year mismanagement of UK finances, threatening our welfare state.

The Brown rhetoric is that in Scotland we can now "determine our own destiny". The simple reality is that he is an active participant in the Tory/Labour conspiracy of silence over their planned multi-billion cuts to public services, hiding what welfare payments they plan to reduce in Scotland, and saying nothing about the consequences for our NHS, care services, education, house building, roads, and economic development of Westminster budget reductions in the grant available to the Scottish government. But, let us determine our own destiny, as Mr Brown suggests. The first step should be to protect our Scottish national interests at Westminster against the threat of further Labour or Tory failure to manage the UK economy competently and fairly.

Andrew Reid,

The Old School, Dundas Street, Comrie.

GORDON Brown, in suggesting that public funds should be used to assist the North Sea oil industry ("Brown seeks public funds for North Sea oil fields", The Herald, March 2), appears to have forgotten that there used to be publicly owned companies called Britoil and British National Oil Company. Probably very few do so remember.

Those companies were set up with the aim of maintaining a public stake in the bounty expected to arise from the oil fields. They were supposed to be able not only to have a minority interest in every exploration block licensed by private companies but also to obtain exclusive licences in other areas.

There were to be two benefits. First, that there would be direct income from production, apart from any taxes. Second, there would be built, and retained, a measure of technical expertise such that the performance and the intentions of the private partners could be monitored and, perhaps, influenced. This is the model used by Norway when it set up Statoil, which is now a highly successful worldwide company.

The difference in the dealings with the state companies was that in Norway the government there is by law barred from interfering in Statoil's operations. In the UK, of course, the politicians simply could not bring themselves to leave well alone. The failures of all the nationalised industries can be attributed partly to this obsession with control.

There was a much earlier state company, British Petroleum, owned 55 per cent by the Admiralty until it was sold off after the infamous pillaging of the Burmah Oil Company.

The sale and demise of the state companies, for purely ideological reasons, has now left the entire North Sea industry in the hands of private companies, over which the government has no influence. Those companies will make commercial decisions on whether to continue operating in the area, or to pull out, purely on their own behalf. They are under no obligation to consider the economic effects of their actions on the host nation.

I have personal knowledge of how they operate. About 30 years ago I was chief geophysicist and exploration manager for a subsidiary of a large American oil company working in Algeria. Just as I was about to start a large drilling programme the Algerian government changed the tax rules. Those rules were to the disadvantage of my employers. The company walked away, abandoning its entire investment. The Algerians tried to back-track but it was too late. The trust had been broken.

The tax regime in the North Sea is a mess created partly by Gordon Brown and exacerbated by the present Chancellor. I fear for its future as long as governments in this country are run by incompetents.

John Scott Roy,

42 Galloway Avenue, Ayr.