Less than a year from the ''once in a lifetime'' referendum, a leading Nationalist wishes a second plebiscite in the first line of the SNP's Holyrood manifesto.

The worst fears of many are stirred by this news: the inevitable divisiveness, the trauma, the perhaps fatal economic damage of a series of referendums. In the last referendum the Nationalists had every advantage: the timing, the wording, millionaire backing, disenfranchising the close to a million Scots living elsewhere in the UK, a lacklustre No campaign. They still lost.

Alexander McKay

Edinburgh