IS Scottish sovereignty worthless? Was the Union of 1707 really a Union or was it an incorporation of Scotland into England? Are any of Scotland’s parliamentary traditions, values, authority or influence incorporated into Westminster? It seems not. It seems that the English Parliament continued unabated without even blinking while the Scottish Parliament was dissolved. Theresa May’s pronouncement that there will be no referendum in the next parliamentary term illustrates clearly that Westminster is not a UK parliament, but an English one and that power lies completely within the Westminster Parliament’s remit.

This is completely at odds with Scotland’s view of sovereignty. In Scotland sovereignty (power) lies with the people. This is the reason that all monarchs in Scotland were Kings or Queens of Scots, not Scotland. Since the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, sovereignty lies with the people, not parliament. This, of course, is contrary to sovereignty in England, where power and authority lie with the Crown, or more accurately, Westminster. The people of Scotland have voiced their opinion and should be listened to – that is sovereignty. A majority of Scots voted for pro-independence parties in the last Holyrood election and the SNP wrote into its manifesto, for that election, that a second independence referendum would take place if there was a significant material change, like the UK voting to come out of Europe while Scotland votes to remain. This is, indeed, what happened. Thus the Scottish Parliament, calling for a vote to take place in Holyrood to hold a referendum, was merely following the wishes of the people. The vote was duly held and passed. The referendum should now take place.

Westminster should now recognise that it is a UK parliament and that in Scotland, sovereignty lies with the people and further recognise that the people have spoken. Instead of Mrs May using distinctly English traditions, she should don her UK hat, recognise that Scotland is one of the other nations in the Union and say to Nicola Sturgeon: "Yes, you may have your referendum; when would you like to hold it?" That would be democratic and illustrate that we are actually in a Union where both sides have a voice.

Andrew J Beck,

5.01 Condominium, 7 Uthant, Jalan U-Thant, 55000 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

PETER A Russell (Letters, May 26) has not thought things through. He writes, re funding of policies “that they are only possible because of the many billions of pounds that Scotland receives under the pooling and sharing arrangements of the United Kingdom”. In this respect he must regard himself as a subsidy junkie, as he infers that we get largesse from a generous Treasury - ignoring the vast billions of oil money that disappeared into the Continental Shelf.

I quite often used to ask those who regarded Scotland as being subsidised how much they themselves received; this was generally greeted with indignant spluttering. My response was that a nation does not get subsidised per se, but individuals do.

“Not me, Lord, not me!” was the response.

Jim Lynch,

42 Corstorphine Hill Crescent, Edinburgh.

WITH the mountain of print on the subject of the forthcoming General Election, it might be worth noting the unreported reality that the UK has, since 1979, experienced almost 40 years of uninterrupted Tory policies. Where has that got us? The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and our children can't afford to buy a house in an artificial house price spiral, created by greedy, out of control bankers who drove a horse and cart through income versus maximum mortgage borrowing rules.

With all the talk of the cost to the taxpayer of various social benefits, isn't it interesting that none of our so-called economists ever wants to refer to the other side of the equation? The Laws of Limited Liability, introduced almost two centuries ago to keep entrepreneurial businessmen out of debtor's prison, have now become an accepted Frankenstein culture that allows the legalised theft of outstanding debt that inevitably the ordinary citizen has to foot the bill for. Its terrifying monster is the curse of the modern-day slave and the rampaging war-horse of a super-rich establishment – globalisation.

DH Telford,

11 Highfield Terrace, Fairlie.

I AM one of a dwindling generation born before the Second World War. So my hopes for the future of the countries of the British Isles centre very much on my children’s, and my grandchildren’s, generations. But I do confidently hope for them all (they live in Scotland, England and Northern Ireland) governments which enable societies to flourish based on the very best of all our values - multicultural, diverse, tolerant, open, outward-looking and committed to the struggle for justice both here and across the world. (The emphasis on “fairness” which we are hearing from some parties just now dangerously obscures the deeper and tougher demand for “justice”, which is truly and desperately needed.)

For myself, I shall continue to vote SNP, as the only major party which does not take its orders, in the last resort, from London.

Rev Dr WJ Harvey,

501 Shields Road,

Glasgow.

A COLOURFUL flier has flopped through my letter box to tell me that in Stirling in the forthcoming General Election the Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party is the only viable alternative to the SNP. That Labour and the Lib Dems are too weak is represented graphically on a histogram – "How we voted in Stirling on 4th May 2017", with the parties depicted in descending order by four coloured bars in blue, yellow, red, and orange. The figures are as follows: Conservative 37.9 per cent, SNP 35.5 per cent, Labour 14.5 per cent, and Liberal Democrat 3.4 per cent.

Call me a nerd, but I took out a ruler and measured the heights in millimetres of each bar on the graph: Conservative 46, SNP 41, Labour 12, LibDem 2. The Lib-Dem vote was approximately one-11th of the Conservative vote. On the graph it is represented as one-23rd of the vote. The Conservative vote was approximately 2.6 times the Labour vote. On the graph it is represented as approximately 3.8 times the Labour vote.

Last month before the council elections I got a similarly colourful flier from the same party, bearing a similar graph. This time the bar chart represented SNP 47 per cent, Conservative 28 per cent, Labour 14 per cent, and Lib Dem 4per cent, though what was being measured was not made clear. You might have expected the Conservative 28 per cent bar to be precisely twice the size of the Labour 14 per cent bar; it was in fact three times the size. The Conservatives had achieved 60 per cent of whatever the SNP had achieved, but it was represented pictorially as 75 per cent.

The purpose of a graph is to represent two or more variables pictorially so that their relationships are made clearer. Here, the respective Labour and LibDem performances have been represented to be poorer than they actually are, in order to support the notion that a vote for either party is futile.

Just because we're all supposed to have "flunked math" doesn't mean we should let any political party get away with such misrepresentation of the facts.

Dr Hamish Maclaren,

1 Grays Loan, Thornhill, Stirling.