BILL Brown takes issue with the earlier letter from Brian Quail regarding the UK's nuclear deterrent, but there are two further points which should be made (Letters, July 9).

The first is that Mr Quail claims that the case for unilateralism has been won in Scotland. In fact, at every UK General Election since Hiroshima, Scots have voted overwhelmingly for parties which have been committed to retention of nuclear weapons. Like the rest of the UK, on the only occasion when unilateralism and neutralism were offered to the electorate by Labour, Scots voters turned towards the SDP (including voting in Roy Jenkins as MP for Hillhead), which had been specifically set up to maintain nuclear weapons and to keep the UK in Nato. It remains the case that no party at Westminster has a mandate to remove the nuclear deterrent.

The second point is that Mr Quail writes of the British psyche, which implies that there is a separate and distinctive Scottish psyche. Does the British psyche not include the Scots? Or does the human psyche change at Gretna? Or are all of the supporters of unilateralism in England really the Scots who have moved there and have retained their separate psyche? In fact, this is a new, mumbo-jumbo-laden version of the much-reported but never confirmed "different centre of political gravity". More directly, it is the assertion made by Nationalists that the rest of the British (but especially the English) are morally and politically inferior to Scots, which is nothing more than a supercilious intellectual chauvinism.

Peter A Russell,

87 Munro Road,

Jordanhill.

Glasgow.