SOMEWHAT akin to a sporting encounter, a referendum contains drama, narrative, performances, momentum, and a climax. Team managers and political leaders both prepare to win on the day. Great fun. No way to decide a nation’s future.

Just as you can’t replay a cup final, a referendum is not available as a device for one party to regard victory as irreversible but defeat as a temporary setback.

We should reflect that if the vote had gone the other way a year ago, we still wouldn’t know even now what we had voted for. Negotiations would be on-going until the putative Independence Day in March 2016. It’s crazy to make the big, irreversible decision first and negotiate the detail later.

If the separatist politicians call another referendum they will inevitably generate a nationalist Braveheart, do-or-die, “wha’s like us?” atmosphere. The campaign will be blown around by the issues of the day, and secure facts, figures and forecasts will be hard to come by and wide open to speculative interpretation. The politicians will reduce themselves to managers, cheerleaders, opportunists and gamblers.

I expect mature politicians to shoulder their responsibilities, accept that a referendum is an exceptional event in a representative democracy, and to use our long-standing, well established processes and institutions constructively. That’s what they are elected to do: represent their constituents, do the tough talking, show leadership, take decisions, and make themselves responsible for them.

If it’s in their manifesto, and if they are in a position to do so, the SNP at Holyrood next session can claim the electoral mandate to openly negotiate Scotland’s departure from the UK at government level.

Every step of the way would be subject to scrutiny and careful consideration. Sober and boring it may be, in contrast to the thrill of a referendum, but it would produce a far better and more secure outcome.

Tim Bell,

11 Madeira Place, Edinburgh.

JAMES Reilly (Letters, September 16) asks: “What are we hoping to be independent of?"

The “sine qua non” of independence is control over the life and death question of war and peace, that is, defence. Independence means that our young men will no longer be conned into fighting wars in distant land in the interest of American Big Oil and transnational corporations. No more will broken-hearted mothers like Rose Gentle mourn their sons needlessly killed in illegal wars, promoted by lying politicians.

Above all, it means that Scotland will no longer be home to the biggest arsenal of H Bombs in Europe. We will no longer be complicit in the ongoing war crime that is Trident. And, since it cannot operate from anywhere else other than the Faslane/Coulport complex, it means the rUK also will be freed from this obscenity.

Trident is the hidden “dreadful dictator” of our policies whose very existence is ignored by him. This is why I am wanting change.

While we wax horrified and indignant that North Korea tries to do exactly what we are doing, we continue on the purely racist assumption that we are entitled to deploy weapons which are denied all other states. This hypocritical position is intolerable, and independence alone will free us from it.

Brian M Quail,

2 Hyndland Avenue, Glasgow.