Dr Ian Paisley, the former Democratic Unionist Party leader Photo: PA

Lord Bannside, who has died aged 88, was better known as the Reverend Ian Paisley, a towering figure who founded Northern Ireland’s Free Presbyterian Church and Democratic Unionist Party.

He took an uncompromising sectarian line before, during and after the “Troubles” — for the outbreak of which he bore some responsibility — yet ended his political life as First Minister sharing power with his old enemy, Sinn Fein.

Paisley was often dismissed by commentators outside the Province as a bigot and a buffoon. His political career was repeatedly written off, yet by its end he had outmanoeuvred his moderate Unionist rivals to become Ulster’s elder statesman, the spokesman for a majority of Unionists and undisputed leader of the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Few could have imagined such an outcome in the Sixties, when the young, uncouth firebrand first led working-class Protestants in vociferous opposition to the genteel Unionism of Terence O’Neill, then prime minister of Northern Ireland.

His fiery blend of sectarian preaching and political oratory, which drew heavily on the book of Revelation and the spicier parts of the Old Testament, proved highly potent during the 1974 Ulster Workers’ Strike, when Loyalists — enraged by plans for an all-Ireland dimension to their government — brought down the power-sharing administration established under the Sunningdale Agreement.

At the core of Paisley’s being was a visceral loathing of the Roman Catholic Church, which would have done credit to a 17th-century Ranter. He liked to whip his audiences into a frenzy with his rhetoric about “Old Red Socks” (the Pope); the “great whore… with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication” (the Roman Catholic Church); and about those who “breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin” (its adherents).

He once tried to ban a school production of The Sound of Music because crucifixes were to be carried on stage. As an MEP, he described the EU as a “beast ridden by the Harlot Catholic Church” and part of a plot against Protestantism.

Woe betide the Catholic who incurred Paisley’s wrath: “Priest Murphy,” he apostrophised a cleric who objected in 1958 to his holding meetings in Ballymoney Town Hall, “speak for your own bloodthirsty, persecuting, intolerant, blaspheming, political-religious papacy, but do not dare to be a spokesman of free Ulster men.”

^{Ian Paisley addressing a meeting in Belfast in 1972 (GETTY)}

In Paisley’s version, the story of Ulster was a long catalogue of betrayal by Unionists and Westminster politicians. True Unionists were obliged to fight for themselves: “Come ye out from among them and be separate” had been the dominant biblical text of his childhood and was the essence of his message to his flock. For more than 40 years the self-styled “Voice of Protestant Ulster” articulated the instinctive fears of its grassroots that compromise and conciliation would lead inexorably to a united Ireland. To them, Paisley had saved the Province from this terrible fate.

The inflammatory force of Paisley’s rhetoric was intensified by his physical presence. At 6ft 4in and burly until his later years, he was “the Big Man” to his supporters. Yet he possessed both humour and warmth. As an MP at Westminster and Strasbourg, and later as a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, he scrupulously served his Catholic constituents as faithfully as his Protestant ones.

In the European Parliament, he cooperated amiably on Northern Ireland matters with his fellow Euro-MP, the nationalist John Hume. “I am anti-Roman Catholic,” he told his supporters, “but God being my judge, I love the poor dupes who are ground down under that system.”

In fact, Paisley held views on abortion and divorce and on the arrogance of the English political class that differed little from those of his Catholic counterparts. When in 1968 he met the Nationalist Bernadette Devlin at a secret tea party, they found themselves in broad agreement about the common grievances of the Protestant and Catholic working classes.

But there was never any hope of uniting in a common cause, for — as Paisley told Devlin — in the last analysis he would rather be British than fair. And since loyalty to the Union and to the Protestant religion were inextricably intertwined in Paisley’s mind, he persisted in his divisive fulminations about the Catholic Church.

Paisley’s anachronistic quality fascinated and appalled English observers, who seemed rarely to speak his name without the precursor “that dreadful man”. In Northern Ireland, however, the view of Paisley — among both Protestants and Catholics — was more complex. In his earlier years, his tireless exploitation of inflammatory rhetoric seriously damaged the image of Unionism abroad, and drove frightened Catholics closer to the IRA. The IRA leader Daithi O Conaill, asked about a rumour that there were plans to assassinate Paisley, replied that it would never happen: “Paisley is the best recruiting sergeant we’ve got.”

^{Ian Paisley at a rally in Belfast (CAMERA PRESS)}

Moreover, while Paisley condemned Loyalist attacks on Catholics throughout his career, in the Eighties he flirted with the prospect of Protestant “people’s militias” and once conveyed journalists to a hillside in Co Antrim at night to witness 500 men in military formation brandishing firearms licences. Loyalist paramilitaries criticised him for inciting them to violence, then distancing himself when it occurred.

The bulk of Unionists felt alienated from the rigidity of Paisley’s massive certainties. But when any whiff of compromise was in the air, his intransigence became a reassurance to people unable to break free from their history. He remained the most popular man in Ulster politics, topping the poll in every European Parliament election from 1979 to 1999.

In the 2003 Assembly elections, Unionists rejected the moderate Unionism of David Trimble and voted for Paisley and his party, not because they cared about his views on the Sabbath, but because they believed Paisley would not “sell out” to the Republic or Sinn Fein.

Ian Richard Kyle Paisley, the younger of two sons, was born on April 6 1926 in the Catholic section of Armagh. His father, whose family was descended on both sides from early 17th-century Scottish settlers at Sixmilecross, Co Tyrone, had served in Carson’s Ulster Volunteer Force during the 1912-13 Home Rule crisis. Later, James Paisley became a drapery store assistant and Baptist pastor who formed his own breakaway church at Ballymena, where Ian attended the Model School and the Technical High School.

In 1942 Paisley enrolled in the Barry School of Evangelism of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, a small sect that had broken with the mother Church in the 17th century. He was ordained by his father in 1946 and appointed minister at the Ravenhill Evangelical Mission Church in Belfast. He became active in the National Union of Protestants, which campaigned for the election of fundamentalist Loyalists to the Stormont Parliament.

In 1951 Paisley was invited to conduct a mission at Crossgar, Co Down, where his uninhibited preaching split the congregation; in consequence he founded the Free Presbyterian Church, with himself as moderator: “We in Crossgar,” he declared, “are going back to the old standards and to preach the faith of our fathers.” Despite the opening in Belfast in 1969 of Martyr’s Memorial, one of the largest modern Protestant churches in Europe, the Free Presbyterian Church remained a minority faith with no more than 10,000 followers by 1981.

^{Ian Paisley (PA)}

The foundation of his Church handicapped Paisley’s political career in that it was never recognised by the Orange movement. Paisley had joined the Orange Order after the war, and by 1951 was chaplain of two of its lodges. But the Orange Grand Lodge refused to recognise his ministry, and he made himself unpopular by launching an attack on a Grand Master who would not condemn the advertising of alcohol. Though he remained in demand as a preacher, Paisley finally left the Order in 1962 in protest at the attendance of the Lord Mayor of Belfast at a Requiem Mass.

Paisley’s dedication to the Lord never inhibited his appetite for publicity. In 1958 he denounced the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret for “committing spiritual fornication with the anti-Christ” by visiting Pope John XXIII. In 1962 he handed out Protestant pamphlets in St Peter’s Square and accused the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, of “slobbering on his slippers” when he met the Pope. In 1963, after John XXIII’s death, he expressed his satisfaction that “this Romish man of sin is now in Hell”.

Also in 1962, Paisley resigned from Ulster Protestant Action, which strove to keep jobs in Protestant hands and resist the “dark sinister shadow” of Dublin, to “concentrate on Church affairs”. But during the 1964 general election he provoked riots by objecting to an Irish tricolor outside the Republican headquarters in Belfast and sloganising against an ice cream shop of “Italian Papists on the Shankhill Road”.

The next year Paisley headed the opposition to the meeting in Belfast of O’Neill and the Taoiseach, Sean Lemass: “No Mass, No Lemass” read the placards, and “IRA murderer welcomed at Stormont”. In 1966 Paisley’s appeal for a “renewal of the spirit of Carson” resulted in the re-formation of the UVF, which is said to have carried out bomb attacks designed to look like IRA outrages, though Paisley was never directly implicated.

In July 1966, after several attempts, Paisley achieved a modest martyrdom by getting sent to jail for three months after insulting Presbyterian dignitaries for their “Romanising tendencies”. While inside he wrote an “exposition” on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, which won him an honorary doctorate from Bob Jones University in South Carolina; he took up the title of “Doctor” with enthusiasm.

Out of prison, Paisley agitated against O’Neill with a renewed intensity, attracting an eclectic range of followers including the pederast John McKeague (despite Paisley’s later campaign to “save Ulster from Sodomy”). O’Neill compared the rise of Paisley to the rise of Hitler, doing Paisley little harm with his more enthusiastic followers.

The foundation of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in 1967, and signs of the IRA’s resurrection, intensified Protestant alarm. In October 1968 Paisley reacted to a civil rights march planned for Armagh by forcibly occupying the city centre. Three months later Loyalist thugs ambushed a civil rights march between Belfast and Derry at Burntollet Bridge, and at the end of January 1969 Paisley was sentenced to another three months in prison for his part in the Armagh fracas.

But it was O’Neill who suffered the consequences. On his release from prison, Paisley pressed him close at Bannside in elections for Stormont. When, that April, O’Neill agreed to universal suffrage in local elections his government began to fall apart, and a series of explosions in Belfast blew him out of office.

The province descended into near anarchy, and in August British troops were sent in to restore order. The British government’s hopes that support for Paisley was not widespread were dashed the next year when, on O’Neill’s elevation to the peerage, Paisley won his seat and went on to take North Antrim at the June 1970 Westminster election.

Paisley turned his fire first on James Chichester-Clark, who had succeeded O’Neill as Prime Minister, and then on his successor, Brian Faulkner. When Faulkner, with the support of Edward Heath’s government, resorted to the catastrophic policy of internment, Paisley denounced it as “the best bonus the IRA ever received”.

The imposition of direct rule in 1972 and the Provisional IRA’s bombing of the Four Step Inn in the Shankill Road gave Paisley the boost he needed to make the final break with moderate Unionism. He established the DUP to unite religious and political fundamentalism, institutionalising the split in Unionism that had long been inherent in his activities.

In March 1973, after a White Paper proposed a new Ulster assembly in which Catholic nationalists would be proportionately represented, Paisley got himself elected to the new body by promising to wreck it. He was as good as his word. The following January, a month after the establishment of a power-sharing executive under Faulkner, Paisley and his followers paralysed proceedings by occupying the seats reserved for it. It took eight policemen to remove him from the chamber. In May, a general strike of Protestant workers brought about the collapse of the executive and a return to direct rule.

Paisley’s rejection of any kind of power-sharing guaranteed political deadlock for the rest of the decade, and in 1979 his intransigence was vindicated when he topped the poll in the first European elections. His tactics were to list the number of Catholics in each member state and present himself as the Protestant champion who would cleanse the Romish “whorehouse” of Strasbourg.

He professed great hopes of the incoming Margaret Thatcher; so when she initiated talks with the Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, on “possible new institutional structures”, he was appalled. “Every man in Ulster,” Paisley bawled, “is now to declare himself whether he is on the side of the lying, treachery and betrayal of the British government, or whether he stands ready to defend, to the last drop of blood, his British and Irish heritage.”

Paisley could not prevent the signing of the 1985 Hillsborough Agreement, under which an Anglo-Irish conference was set up. Unable to sway the two governments, he turned his tactical gifts to undermining their potential allies in the official Ulster Unionists (UUP) under James Molyneaux.

At first Paisley and Molyneaux were united in opposing the Anglo-Irish Agreement and signed a joint declaration to the effect that “Ulster says No”. In 1986 they called a Loyalist strike that ended in a wave of violence. “Mrs Thatcher,” bellowed Paisley, “has declared war on the Ulster people. I have news for the Prime Minister. God is in his heaven. The day of glory for Margaret Thatcher is over. The day when she was hailed in robes of glory has passed. The robing of this woman is going to be the robes of shame, for God will take her in hand.”

That February, in the midst of this abuse, Mrs Thatcher invited Molyneaux and Paisley to Downing Street for a “chat”. It was typical of Paisley that when he emerged, he professed himself impressed by her sincerity — only to revert to polemics when he got home. As unrest escalated, the pact with Molyneaux came under increasing strain. By 1989 the UUP had agreed a policy of forging better relations with the Republic and the pact was broken.

Paisley’s tactics of alternating negotiation and walkout continued to obstruct progress under Mrs Thatcher’s successor John Major. In 1990, and again in 1992, Paisley agreed to join inter-party and inter-government talks, only to quit in protest at what he saw as the Republic’s territorial ambitions in the Province. The Downing Street Declaration of 1993 brought predictable accusations from Paisley that a “secret deal” had been done with the IRA. “You have sold Ulster,” he told Major, “to buy off the fiendish Republican scum.”

After the IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries declared a ceasefire in 1995, however, the British government sensed the tide turning in its favour; and when Paisley went to see Major he got a less friendly reception. Their brief conversation ended with Paisley being summarily ejected from Downing Street.

In deciding to go over the heads of the DUP and negotiate with the UUP under Molyneaux and later David Trimble, Major banked on Paisley misreading the public mood in the Province. And when in 1998, under the new Labour government, the people of Northern Ireland voted overwhelmingly in favour of ratifying the “Good Friday” Peace accord, it seemed the tide had turned decisively.

But it was too soon to dismiss Paisley, who took every opportunity to stir up Protestant fears of plots and secret deals, aided by the IRA’s endless procrastination over decommissioning . Devolved government was tried, and collapsed, four times, sitting for 30 months in total. As they felt the ground slipping from under them, the language of Trimble’s UUP and David Hume’s SDLP became more immoderate, but they were out-outraged by Paisley’s DUP and Gerry Adams’s Sinn Fein.

In the 1998 Assembly elections, hopes at Westminster for a poor showing by the DUP were confounded when the party came within an ace of toppling Trimble’s UUP as the largest party. The DUP took two seats in the power-sharing executive (Paisley, like the leaders of the SDLP and Sinn Fein, chose not to become a minister), but its ministers refused to attend meetings of the Executive Committee (cabinet) in protest at Sinn Fein’s participation. The Executive was suspended after the IRA was found to be using Sinn Fein’s Stormont office to track potential targets.

^{Ian Paisley (REX)}

In the 2003 Assembly elections, the DUP overtook the UUP, achieving 30 seats to the UUP’s 27, and in the 2005 general election it very nearly wiped out the UUP, taking nine seats to the UUP’s one.

In October 2005 Paisley was sworn of the Privy Council, an honour to which he became entitled as leader of the fourth largest political party in the British Parliament.

Paisley was disarmingly honest about the strategy that had served him so well since his arrival on the political scene: “I may be in the driving seat, but I don’t necessarily have to drive,” he said. “I can sit in that seat with a poker and give Tony Blair a poke in the ribs, but I don’t need to come up with any formula or solutions. The government created this mess and the onus is on Blair to come up with the solution.”

Having established himself as both the key and the main obstacle to any return to power-sharing, Paisley continued to conduct his adversarial Punch and Judy show with Gerry Adams. Yet there were signs that he was mellowing, which coincided with a bout of serious illness in 2004; that autumn he travelled to Dublin for an amicable meeting with the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern.

When, in September 2005, a group under the Canadian General John de Chastelain confirmed that the IRA had finally decommissioned its arsenal, Paisley refused to accept their verdict, insisting: “You can’t build the bridge of trust with the scaffolding of lies and underhand deals.” And in July 2006 he told a rally in Portrush that Sinn Fein would join the government of Northern Ireland “over our dead bodies”.

Yet that October Paisley was party to the St Andrew’s Agreement — involving both the British and Irish governments — in which all parties agreed to fresh Assembly elections and a resumption of power-sharing in return for Sinn Fein accepting the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The elections confirmed him as leader of the province’s largest party, and on May 8 2007, at the age of 81, he took office as First Minister, with Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness, a self-confessed former IRA commander, his deputy. Power-sharing was resumed with remarkably few difficulties, Paisley and McGuinness even attending events together until Paisley stepped down as First Minister on June 5 2008, handing over to Peter Robinson, who would prove more intransigent.

Paisley retired as an MP at the 2010 election, being created a life peer as Lord Bannside , and in 2011 he stood down from the Assembly. That November he gave up the leadership of the Church he had headed for two-thirds of his life, retiring from the pulpit in January 2012. Yet he continued to insist: “I’ll not be changing. I will go to the grave with the convictions I have.”

Ian Paisley married, in 1956, Eileen Cassells. They had two sons, Kyle, a churchman, and Ian, MP for North Antrim and a former DUP assemblyman, and a daughter, Rhonda, a former Belfast councillor and television presenter.

Lord Bannside, born April 6 1926, died September 12 2014

Your editorial (Literacy: helping all children, 12 September) is a re-run of the well-wishing and hand-wringing we’ve heard many times before. The question of helping children to read has to involve (among other things) two key matters: availability of a wide range of reading matter that appeals to the children involved; children’s freedom of choice – the “right to browse”, as I call it. Central to this is the provision of books in local and school libraries with qualified staff on hand.

In the neglected Ofsted report Moving English Forward (2012) there was the recommendation that every school should develop a policy on “reading for enjoyment for all”. This has the potential of opening a nationwide discussion about how best to enable all children to read for pleasure. This was not only overlooked by the last education secretary, it was explicitly rejected by the then schools minister when I asked him if this government would be implementing this recommendation. He said that this government’s policy was to avoid interfering in what schools do. I don’t think he was experimenting with irony with that. Three years later, the present secretary of state has that recommendation sitting in front of her. Instead of rolling out homilies about getting grandparents to read to their children, she should go back to her own inspectors’ report and do what they suggest.
Michael Rosen
London

• Patrick Wintour (Report, 8 September) writes that the UK has the second most unequal level of children’s reading in the EU but, as the English Spelling Society points out on its website: “Italian children who start school at six have repeatedly been found to be able to read and spell most words one year later, whereas English children take 10 years to achieve an adult standard of spelling (Schonell & Schonell 1950; Vernon 1969, 1977; Thorstad 1991).” Is the need for spelling reform going to be complacently ignored much longer by English people who seem incapable of understanding that other peoples look on their treasured institutions (such as an antiquated spelling system) with disdain and disapproval?
DBC Reed
Northampton

• The closure of public libraries across the country or their divestment from local authority control to volunteers (raising fears as to their sustainability) will surely impact on the success of the children’s reading initiative. I sincerely hope Save the Children UK will acknowledge this, as the success of its project depends upon it. Political leaders are currently allowing the public library service to be dismantled piece by piece, turning a blind eye to children being denied ready access to free books and the expert assistance of library staff.  It is imperative that Save the Children and The National Literacy Trust do not follow suit. They must lobby government for a change of direction, so that their efforts to achieve improved literacy in the country can be realised and not ring hollow.
Shirley Burnham
Swindon, Wiltshire

• Any initiative to improve literacy levels is to be welcomed. I do hope however that the campaign will understand that the key to getting children reading is first to engage them in wanting to read. Literacy levels have remained stubbornly stuck despite a plethora of government initiatives, such as the literacy hour, because children are introduced to the mechanics of reading and writing too early. It is the love of story and the development of language that is needed in the early stages. At our school we find that children learn more quickly and without stress when one introduces reading and writing at age six rather than four, especially when matched with a curriculum steeped in the wonder of storytelling. Good SEN intervention is also needed for some children.

A recent inspection report concurred with our own assessment that by age 11 our children had equalled or exceeded reading levels of children who started learning to read much earlier. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are also more likely to be stressed and therefore adding the pressure of learning to read before they are ready is not going to work, however many hours you put into it.
Frances Russell
Greenwich Steiner School

• Having spent a working life helping Hackney infants, deprived or not, in learning to read, I welcome the launch of the Read On. Get On campaign. But however worthwhile the aim of “galvanising the nation so parents, grandparents and volunteers play their part in teaching children to read” I fear it will prove no more useful than a sticking plaster unless our wealthy but unequal society can also be galvanised to radically reverse the trend to ever-greater levels of economic inequality, which correlate so clearly with children’s unequal reading levels.
Peter Walford
London

You generally refer to Cameron, May, Gove etc as Conservatives or “the Conservative party”. This may still be appropriate for the formal tone of your news articles. But for your comment pages, editorials and diary column, please adopt the phrase “the effing Tories” (Poll boost for no campaign as PM flies in, 11 September) as standard.
Dominic Rayner
Leeds

• Following on from Alison Harris’s letter (6 September) on the fate of British war horses left in France at the end of the first world war, in the village in the Creuse where my mother-in-law came from the story was told of the peasant who bought a former British army horse for work in the fields. The trouble was that the horse didn’t understand French.
Robert Nowell
New Barnet, Hertfordshire

As one who has been a producer and commissioning executive on both sides of the Atlantic for more than 30 years, I thought it would be helpful to provide some context for Charlotte Higgins’s recent reporting on the BBC’s drama output (The BBC Report: Fit for purpose, 21 August). When I was president of HBO Films, I was invited to give the annual Bafta keynote address in 2006. My theme was how, in the early days of HBO, we had co-opted all the best practices of British television and how producers and broadcasters around the world looked to BBC drama as the benchmark by which they judged themselves in terms of “the quality of their work, diversity and richness of their talent”. This remains as true today as it did then. BBC dramas earned 21 Emmy nominations this year – more drama nominations than any of the four US broadcast networks. At the awards ceremony in Hollywood, the BBC stole the night with seven Emmys for Sherlock, beating the six for the final season of the highly regarded Breaking Bad.

One of the themes underpinning Higgins’s thesis is that the range of BBC drama does not live up to the best of American television drama. She mentions as examples Breaking Bad, The Wire and House of Cards. However, the truth is that in Britain we see only a tiny selection of what is produced in America and these series are the exception not the rule. They are not representative of the majority of American television drama. The irony, of course, is that House of Cards was inspired by a BBC series of the same name and to argue that the current BBC drama slate doesn’t include a drama like The Sopranos is, in fairness, something that could be said of any broadcaster or cable company in the UK and the US. BBC dramas like Sherlock, Luther and Top of the Lake stand shoulder to shoulder with the finest American series. The BBC’s The Honourable Woman is currently playing in the US and has received remarkable reviews. The New York Times wrote: “This is a BBC series that is excellent … British actors and writers still have so much unrivalled training and talent that they easily sweep up the best projects. The star of The Honourable Woman is an American actress, but throughout the series British brains and guile get the job done.”

The BBC’s licence fee allows Ben Stephenson and his team of commissioning editors to strive for “high artistic ambitions” (to quote from Higgins) protected in part from the dictates of the commercial marketplace. The BBC drama department’s scale and diversity of output, its support of writers like Hugo Blick or new talent like Jack and Harry Williams, and its ability to make decisions based on creative merit rather than just financial imperatives is unique in the television landscape worldwide. It is something we should cherish and protect. In conclusion, as the executive producer of the upcoming television adaption of Wolf Hall, I would like to clarify that the BBC commissioned the six-hour mini-series long before it was produced for the stage.
Colin Callender
New York

London Fashion Week is a glittering showcase for the fashion industry (Report, 12 September). But fashion’s dark side is kept in the shadows. The event promotes the creativity of the UK’s fashion industry, but is silent over the millions of workers who produce clothes for high-street chains. The British Fashion Council would rather we all forget about those who often work long hours, on poverty pay, in unsafe conditions to produce the clothes we love. We can love fashion, but hate sweatshops and want a fashion week that lives up to its responsibility to all the workers who make the fashion we buy. The time has come for London Fashion Week to mention the garment workers.
Owen Espley Senior campaigner War on Want
Simeon Mitchell Deputy chief executive All We Can

I wish you would stop treating the Scottish referendum like a horse race in a betting shop, focusing only on poll after poll after poll (No campaign holds on to lead with less than a week to go, 12 September). It isn’t just about what Alex Salmond says. It’s about England and Westminster ignoring the whole thing until the last minute, and then threatening to punish Scotland for daring to be democratic. It’s about the disaster in the making for the Labour party of joining in with Cameron instead of drafting intelligent proposals with key people in Scotland that would address the change so many people are desperate for, and not just for Scotland but with all of us, for the whole country. This is about the demand for democratic change and participation in making change happen. Independence will succeed if the mass of the Scottish people currently involved in the debate take it forward by organising themselves and becoming engaged in the development and implementation of good policy and practice and governance.

Suzanne Moore’s column (11 September, G2) on Scotland should have been included on your Comment pages. It’s the best you’ve carried on the subject so far. But what has really been missing is commentary from people from all social classes and backgrounds, and from the social welfare, health, education, science, agricultural, economic and government sectors, talking about what they want change to look like in an independent or a more devolved Scotland.
Marge Berer
London

• It’s absolutely up to Scotland to decide on their own future, but if they vote yes, please can the rest of the UK have a referendum to decide if we want to share our currency with another sovereign state. That’s not an issue for them to decide.
Juliet Cairns
London

Sloppy and lazy? No, young people who are passionate about making the world a better place

Sir, You report that schools turn out teenagers who are “sloppy, lazy and not up to the job” (Sept 11). In my experience they produce talented young people who are passionate about making the world a better place but who need time, guidance and support to grow into the polished professionals that businesses increasingly expect today.

For some young people the best place to learn about the world of work will never be more time in school. An alternative path can be volunteering and, in particular, a year of full-time voluntary service. The act of “giving back” not only empowers young people and builds confidence but the experience, alongside valuable training, builds exactly the personal and professional skills that businesses are looking for.

Sophie Livingstone

Chief executive, City Year UK

Sir, The problem with schoolchildren dressing sloppily may be down to the odd inclusion of the tie in many uniforms. Almost no one likes wearing one, as evidenced by the speed at which it is ripped off as soon as possible. It is impractical, uncomfortable and dangerous where there is machinery around, and it carries bacteria. Ditch the tie, for adults too, and we may discover that smart dressing is possible without it; there is a middle sartorial way between the extremes of suit and tie or jeans and T-shirt.

Dr Hillary J Shaw

Newport, Shropshire

No fully experimental study on songbird predation has ever been carried out — for fear of what it might find…

Sir, Dr Sir Christopher Lever’s claim (letter, Sept 10) that numerous scientific papers show that predators have no impact on songbirds does not stand up to scrutiny.

The last RSPB review of predation in 2007 only found four out of 254 papers on this subject and they have subsequently been discredited. The University of Reading found in 2011 that no fully experimental study on songbird predation has ever been carried out in the UK.

The shameful truth is that nobody wants to conduct research on songbird predation for fear of finding that we would have to do something about it.

Clive Sherwood

Trustee, Songbird Survival

Diss, Norfolk

The piece of paper found inside one soldier’s knitted sock led to a proposal of marriage

Sir, A relative of mine married the knitter of some socks he received during the Second World War, having found her address on a piece of paper in one of them.

Whether it was a rolled-up ball of brown paper (“Wartime socks”, letter, Sept 11), I don’t know.

Barbara Bligh

Exeter

The composer’s Fifth Symphony is the Morse equivalent of V, and was broadcast to raise morale during WW2

Sir, It was Courtney Stevens, of Magdalen College, Oxford, who recognised the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (letters, Sept 11 & 12) as the Morse equivalent of V, and consequently the music was broadcast to raise morale and give hope to the occupied countries in the Second World War. The music was played at his memorial service in the college chapel in 1970.

JM Carder

Anstruther, Fife

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