September 12.

So Lindsay Paterson believes Scotland ''already enjoys autonomy''

(September 10). Ye Whit?! I trust Dr Paterson's book will argue rather

more transparently than does his article, whose drift has escaped

several of us out here on the mainland.

As Dr Paterson well knows, those who marched in December 1992 for a

Scottish Parliament did so because they wanted an end to the activities

of a London-appointed junta which resolutely ignores the wishes of the

people of Scotland; the marchers were not unaware ''of how much has

already been achieved''.

The key to autonomy, for nations as for individuals, is

self-awareness. This can only be achieved through education, from

nursery schools where the policemen in the picture books wear Scottish

policemen's hats and the teachers speak in the same register as the

children's families, right through to the policies pursued by the Arts

Council and our ''national'' galleries, theatres, and other cultural

institutions.

Your issue of that date demonstrates devastatingly just how far from

any such self-awareness Scotland is in the shape of Donald Dewar's

''review'' of a new book about the port of Leith by Sue Mowat.

In his second sentence Mr Dewar, for so long the scourge (well . . .)

of Scottish Nationalism in the name of all those Scots who voted Labour,

trots out that feeble old self-deprecatory nonsense about the House of

Stewart: ''What a mess the Stewarts made of the business of being

kings'', in blatant defiance of the past 15 years of Scottish historical

scholarship.

In other words, Mr Dewar makes sure his readership remembers that the

Scots have never been able to run their affairs. He also reminds Scots

who have made the not inconsiderable effort involved to learn something

about the real Scotland so effectively hidden from the Scottish people

by their marvellous current ''autonomous'' condition of just how

abjectly unselfaware Scotland is.

Most of Scotland's cultural institutions, including her universities,

are run by members of the English Oxbridge ''elite'' who failed to make

it south of the Border.

They are aided and abetted by native-born Scots who enjoy not autonomy

but an unhealthy self-contempt born of ignorance -- leading, under

appropriate conditions, to an uninformed, racist dislike of English

people in general, to the benefit of no-one at all.

Scotland is in an appalling state, and disingenuousness and haverings

around the semantics of ''autonomy'' are the last thing it needs.

Dr Jamie Reid Baxter,

European Parliament Secretariat,

Luxembourg.