WOULD you send your children to a school where they didn't have a desk to sit at?

Would you send your kids to a school that has no discipline, where pupils attend classes as and when they please or even don't ever turn up at all and where discipline rests in the hands of a prefect that everyone ignores? What if the school allowed the children to set their own rules and decide what the parents should pay in fees? What if when the Headmaster deigned to turn up stragglers, who have almost forgotten where the classroom is, were forced to attend by the class bullies and spent most of the time jeering and hurling abuse at "Old Shiney-face" and his curiously distracted-looking deputy?

The farce of SNP MPs being in a power-struggle with Denis Skinner and his gang over who owns what part of the playground ("Commons turf war rages on", The Herald, May 20) is a metaphor for the shambles that passes for democratic governance in the UK.

It is beyond comprehension when the British public can witness with their own eyes just what happens in Westminster, the routinely sparse attendance at debates that don't involve MPs' wages and expenses, the standard of debate which is ritualistic appalling and ineffectual as it rarely influences government policy why we, the "parents", tolerate it.

David J Crawford,

Flat 3/3,

131 Shuna Street,

Glasgow.

DOUGLAS Maughan (Letters, May 20) says there is room in British Politics for a modern, progressive, slightly left of centre party ... in Scotland that space is held firmly by the SNP ". This is a ridiculous description to give the SNP. In eight years of government the SNP have not passed one piece of legislation that gives one penny more of taxpayers money to the poor person rather than the rich.

When recently on TV Andrew Neil asked John Swinney to name one such piece of legislation he was greeted with stunned silence.

On the same Letters Pages today William McCreath states that "the Labour Party was no longer a party striving to improve their (the working class) lot, giving the impression that the SNP .

How, then can the loss of 4,000 teachers, rising pupil teacher ratios, the almost total disappearance of supply teachers, the loss of 140,000 further education (FE) places, £1600 cut in FE bursaries per person and a cut of £1.5 billion available to local authorities to provide essential services to the poor and needy be actions which strive to provide the working class with a better way of life? I could mention many more.

You only know a party 's political colours when they gain power.

Gordon Taylor,

14 Barra Avenue,

Wishaw.