Alf Young brings us the thoughts on contemporary Scotland of Professor John Kay, a columnist in the Financial Times who was brought up in Edinburgh ("Question is, which tune will the SNP dance to?", August 1).

Prof Kay ascribes a "small-minded, grasping materialism" to the Scottish political debate and says: "Scotland's economic problems, like its opportunities, are of its own making." Is it just me or does this have something of a Presbyterian ring to it?

But he then immediately points out an external source of problems in the form of "the vagaries of the global economy". These seem to be something like the weather, over which apparently we can hope to have no control and just have to ride out as best we can.

Perhaps we need to overlook the effective nationalisation of Northern Rock, the US government's rescue of Bear Stearns and its effectively unlimited financial backing for the two largest mortgage institutions in the US. Then there's the Bank of England's recent special liquidity provision to UK banks. What can the UK and UK governments be thinking of?

As we know, economies are run by people for the benefit of people, and people have votes. What governments do in response to electoral pressure is up to them, but are voters entirely wrong to look to their governments for some level of economic security?

The arguments for independence are hardly all about oil; still less are they all about grievance. But why shouldn't oil, for example, get a look in? Are the Canadian oil-producing provinces full of "small-minded, grasping" materialists because they established an oil fund to spend on their own priorities? As for the Norwegian and Dutch oil and gas funds, well, that is provincial.

On Alf Young's question about the economic policy choices facing the SNP, the evidence shows that the choice has already been made. It's somewhere to the left of the Labour Party and goes back an unfashionably long way - to social democracy.

Alasdair Rankin, 11 Gillespie Crescent, Edinburgh.

Alf Young makes much of pithy comment by economist John Kay.

This is the same John Kay who, back in 1980, wrote (against a background of Thatcherite de-industrialisation) that the belief that the end of economic activity is production rather than consumption is mistaken and that "mineral royalties which once enriched undeserving landowners now enrich an undeserving population" (The Economic Implications of North Sea Oil Revenues, by P J Forsyth and J A Kay, Fiscal Studies, 1980).

Observation, or legitimate grievance?

Neil Robertson, Dundee.