FOLLOWING Ian Bell's two articles last week ("Farage forages to stand up best for right-wing England", The Herald, April 30, and "Vote pitches old pessimisms against a vibrant optimism", The Herald, May 3), and the comments thereon by your correspondents, I feel I must come clean:

I intend to vote for Ukip in the European elections.

I acknowledge that, ever since the pontifications of Sydney and Beatrice Webb and other leading Fabians a century ago, the Left has claimed the moral high ground. Everything that we old-fashioned liberals hold to is ipso facto wicked. We believe, following Beveridge, in a welfare safety net, not a hammock. We believe in the 1944 Education Act with its tripartite set-up of grammar schools, secondary moderns and technical schools, organised selectively by the 11-plus examin­ation, as the best guarantor of social mobility and working class advance­ment. Above all we believe in free markets, free trade, capitalism, limited government and the widest space for individual liberty and personal responsibility. All these are predicated on Gladstonian fiscal continence and sound money. We believe that governments, in the interests of economic and social stability and harmony, must have power to control immigration, as indeed they do everywhere except in the European Union. Since only Ukip holds to these ideas, the party will get my support.

Oddballs though many Ukip members are, they are no different from the weirdos and nerds that inhabit the other parties - witness some of the members of the Militant Tendency, the International Marxist Group and the Socialist Workers who were in and out of the Labour Party in the 70s and 80s. And the Anglo­phobic behaviour of some members of the SNP on a regular basis at their conferences just makes the flesh creep.

I shall vote for Ukip simply because the European Union has become the greatest impediment to all I believe in. Electing a member to represent me in the European Parliament is pointless. That body is neither democratic, responsible nor accountable. It is a retirement home for party apparatchiks to live the good life at the taxpayers' expense. The May 22 European election is the nearest we shall get to a referendum on membership of the EU, and we should grasp the opportunity to shake the system.

Moreover, the leaderships of the other parties have to answer the questions of why they support an EU that, via the euro, does down the poor, the youth and the working class of southern Europe; why they implement wasteful, eye-wateringly expensive European green energy directives; and why they support high food prices through the Common Agricultural Policy. In addition, the SNP has got itself into the position of consigning its goal of independence to a growing political integration organised by Brussels and Berlin. That is beyond parody.

So Ukip will get my support. No doubt that, as the Left screams, makes me a racist too.

Richard Mowbray,

14 Ancaster Drive,

Glasgow.

LABOUR'S EU election leaflet has just dropped through the letterbox. On Europe, its main selling point seems to be "£135, the amount every Scottish household benefits by" from the UK's annual rebate. I am no statistician, but I understand that not once in the last 32 years has the UK got more out than it paid in. Could Johann Lamont explain this mystery subsidy? Or better still, send out £135 in a brown envelope to the address below?

William B Robertson,

101 Gilmour Street,

Eaglesham.