WITH regard to Mark Smith's article ("The SNP needs to tackle its anti-Scottish problem”, The Herald, August 23), while it is one thing to hate Westminster governments imposing policies on Scotland, it is undoubtedly quite another thing to "hate English people". I've met many SNP members who hate the former but after 50 years membership of the SNP I've never met anyone who hates the latter; and I am part-English. Indeed, I know many English people who are members of the SNP in all parts of Scotland and who make a fantastic contribution to the party; some of them are elected members of Parliament.

I would remind Mr Smith that it is not the SNP which is displaying narrow nationalism by wanting to leave the European Union, on the contrary it is the SNP which is leading the fight for Scotland to remain within the EU, which was the decision taken by voters in Scotland at the referendum. Given its outward-reaching and positive attitude to the EU, and the desire to see Scotland remain at the heart of Europe and with a seat at the United Nations, perhaps it there ever was to be a name change, a better reflection on where the SNP stands would see it known as the Scottish International Party.

Ruth Marr,

Stirling.

“WHEN I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean”. The Humpty-Dumpty theory of language is obviously endorsed by Mark Smith.

I am an unapologetic supporter of Scottish independence, but I never describe myself as a nationalist. Why? Because this word must be the most ambiguous in the English language, so much so that it has long ceased to have any practical function in discourse. It has no taxonomic value.

Just think: Nelson Mandela was a nationalist, so also were Radovan Karadzic, Ho Chi Minh, Mladko Radic, Slobodan Milošević, Mahatma Gandhi, and Adolf Hitler. A word that includes such contradictory definitions is meaningless.

Mr Smith is hideously wrong in claiming that Anglophobia is at the heart of the SNP. In fact, many of its supporters are English.

One cannot be a true internationalist without recognising the existence of nationalism.

Brian Quail,

Glasgow G11.

THE England Get Out of Scotland Banner, the subject of comments made recently by Nicola Sturgeon is not racist, bigoted or anti-English. The banner is a copy of an older Irish banner saying the same and is all about the conquest of Scotland by England in 1707 when the parcel of rogues in a nation, our nobles, accepted the equivalence of more than £398,000 in bribes to sell out Scotland. The banner in its true meaning is calling for English institutions like Westminster, the Bank of England, the BBC, the English Monarchy and the Ministry of Defence at Faslane with Trident to leave Scotland so that we are no longer a province of England, no longer a colony of England.

With regard to English people who live, work and retire in Scotland, they are always welcome. It is a mark of the timidity of some that such a banner has been unfairly criticised when Boris Johnson when Editor of the Spectator in 2005 allowed a poem to be published that talked about putting the Scots in ghettoes and calling for our extermination and hardly an eyebrow was raised. That is truly racist and Scotophobic and should be condemned by all right-minded people but very few voices are raised.

The banner will be shown in future with no apologies from me and I will give the final word to Police Scotland to whom complaints have been made about the banner when it was shown. When I explained what the banner was about they allowed it to be displayed as we had not broken any law.

Sean Clerkin,

Barrhead.

I AM engaged in correspondence with the Electoral Commission about the conduct of a further independence referendum. The Commission appears to be unaware that in Scotland the people are sovereign and not the Scottish Parliament. Therefore the Commission requires to consult the Scottish people about such issues as yes/no and remain/stay questions; also the need for a two - thirds majority to settle a constitutional question.

Thus there may need to be a two stage referendum, the first stage consulting the sovereign Scottish people about how an independence referendum should be conducted.

The SNP, allied with the unelected Greens, controls the Scottish Parliament and hatea being outranked by the Scottish people.

William Durward,

Bearsden.

CORRESPONDENTS Philip Adams and Alan Fitzpatrick (Letters, August 22), express a preference for the question in the next independence referendum to ask whether the voter wants to remain or leave. Unfortunately, such a question would be legally unsound. The Treaty of Union of 1707, which forms the constitutional basis for the United Kingdom, was negotiated as an international treaty between two sovereign nation states, Scotland and England. It follows that if the citizens of Scotland (or England) vote for independence there is then no UK to break away from. The UK disappears, to be replaced by the old/new nation states of Scotland and England. The Yes/No question posed in the 2014 referendum, as approved by the Electoral Commission, was crystal clear, and I see no reason to depart from it.

Professor Alan Murdoch,

Perth.

Read more: Yes First Minister, anti-Englishness is a problem in the SNP, but so is anti-Scottishness