CALUM Stewart presents legal opinions on pro-EU membership of an independent Scotland (Letters, November 1).

He cites Graham Avery as saying that Scotland's population have acquired rights as EU citizens having been members for 40 years and would therefore not be asked to leave it. I feel certain that the logic and indeed legal argument is not so simple.

I agree with Mr Stewart that the fuss over the First Minister's advice question/answer has detracted from the main issues at stake.

I thought I had acquired rights as a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and my ancestors have had them, in its various forms, for hundreds of years yet some people are determined to ask me to give them up.We seem to have one membership rule for the UK and another for the EU.

If Mr Stewart and his experts' opinions are correct then a referendum question "should Scotland be independent" has to have the small print appended –" but if you vote yes remember you will still be a part of that other union – the EU – and have to abide by their many directives".

It appears to me that the entire question of giving up one established union and hanging on to another is an issue which must be settled long before a vote is cast.

Catalonia goes to the polls on November 25 and the independence rallies there display a passion which reveals they are serious about independence from Spain. Artur Mas, the political leader of the wealth-producing Catalonian region of Spain has already been reported as suggesting that if they have a referendum the wording should be " Do you want Catalonia to become a new state within the EU? "

Bill Brown,

46 Breadie Drive, Milngavie.

THE letters you published on October 31 preceded a vote in the Westminster Parliament concerning the budget of the EU. It was noticeable in the comments from Edward Roe and Iain A D Mann that no mention was made of the net contribution made by the UK to the financially rapacious EU. For internationalists like me who work with Chinese, Russian, African and Indian Subcontinent citizens amongst others, as well as those of EU extraction, the EU appears to be no more than an expensive specialist club. And it is a club used to beat those who cannot join the merry-go-round.

The Little Europe mentality as portrayed by some of your correspondents claims to be internationalist in approach. It is nothing of the sort; it is based on antipathy to France and Germany. The original enterprise (a coal and steel union) was set up to stop those two countries going to war. The EEC, as joined by those voting in the UK referendum in the early 1970s, then morphed into something unrecognisable. We now have the absurd position of an independent Scotland that is immediately subsumed by a European superstate. Thus, despite the poverty (often of expectation) present in Scotland and the rest of the UK, all the wealth generated by oil, gas, other energy sources and fisheries is going to be handed over to the EU. And all this at a time when councils, police and other public bodies here are having resources cut. Are we truly expected to believe that increasing the budget for the EU is value for money? And an independent Scotland is going to be signed up for this with not a mention of how big the premium for club membership is likely to be.

Dr Ronnie Gallagher,

5 Wyndhead Steading,

Lauder.