WHILE broadly agreeing with the Rev Fraser’s concern for the increasing tendency of the state to encroach on personal freedom Letters, October 29), I feel that he omits an important, if not over-riding sovereignty, from his list of three which he claims counter-balance our freedom. That is the sovereignty of the individual. John Stuart Mill puts the matter clearly: “Over himself [the individual], over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

Nowhere could this be more relevant than in the matter of organs for transplant. The proposal is up, and will likely be adopted through legislation, that use of organs post mortem should not be in the gift of the individual (to whom they rightly belong) by express or rightly assumed consent as now but should be via confiscation by the state in the absence of express or rightly assumed denial of that. Thus a worthy end is to be achieved perhaps by unworthy means overriding, by presumption, the individual’s sovereignty over his/her own body.

Rev Fraser claims and illustrates that “the Scottish Government has authoritarian tendencies and contempt for civil liberties”. I do not think, however, that it travels that path alone. Politicians generally appear to believe that their raison d’être and justification is to legislate, often without clear vision of practicalities and consequences; in particular if laws are to be properly monitored and policed. Pursuing that policy they are thus likely sooner rather than later to encroach upon the liberties and rights of the individual and increasingly so.

Until our politicians can be persuaded to legislate merely to keep society on the ordered side of anarchy will the freedoms of the individual vis-à-vis the restrictions and impositions of the state be brought into proper balance.

Darrell Desbrow,

Overholm, Dalbeattie, Kirkcudbrightshire.