The Debatable Land

Our Legislators at Work

An occasional series in which we dare to take a look at what's actually happening in the Scottish Parliament. Not, I warn you, for the faint of heart or the easily enraged. Now, yes, it's true that most MSPs are well-intentioned, even kindly, souls concerned with the public good. But this takes them to some strange places. Consider these questions from "Health and Wellbeing" questions last week (what an awful title for a government ministry incidentally, one that explicitly endorses the idea of nannying adults)...

Further Tales from the Bold New Scotland

It could have been worse, I suppose. There was a proposal that you'd soon need a special license to be permitted to purchase cigarettes in Scotland. Presumably this would be accompanied by arm-twisting from "health care professionals" to persuade you to stop, or mandatory sessions with a shrink to demonstrate that you were indeed sufficiently and genuinely bonkers as to be granted a special license to enjoy abuse tobacco...

Happily, if somewhat surprisingly, that proposal hasn't actually passed. Yet. Still, yesterday the Scottish parliament confirmed that it was going to ban the display of cigarettes in shops. Apparently a ban on tobacco advertising - itself an outrageous abridgment of liberty - was not enough. So, cigarettes must now be sold under the counter as though they were contraband or, you know, illegal... All this, of course, is part of the effort to "denormalise" smoking, especially amongst teenagers. Said brutes, however, seem unlikely to be persuaded by such piecemeal efforts...

Next on the agenda: banning coin-operated, un-staffed tanning studios and making it an offence to permit anyone under the age of 18 to use a tanning studio. Seriously.

The Wendy (and Gordon) Farces Never Close...

I wasn't quite sure what to say about this. This being the Scottish Labour party's latest attempt to finesse their position on the matter of an independence referendum. Happily, J Arthur MacNumpty summarises Labour's position with admirable clarity:

Labour are Unionists, so don't want an independence referendum, but aren't afraid of the verdict of the people, so want a referendum now, while waiting for the Calman Commission to present its findings, so want to set the timing and question of a referendum which they do want in a Bill which they can't introduce and may even be ultra vires, and as they can't introduce it, they have scored a victory over the SNP by agreeing not to oppose the SNP's main policy come 2010, when they get round to scrutinising the policy in detail that is already available and decide it's completely unpalatable.

And yet, appallingly, come the next election hundreds of thousands (millions?) of my countrymen will still dutifully vote for these clowns.

Not that their counterparts at Westminster are much, if at all, better. That said, say this for Alastair Darling: at least he ran the Paxman gauntlet. There's no way his courageous predecessor - the man largely responsible for the 10p fiasco - would have done that.

UPDATE: Fraser reports that Darling was roasted by Jon Snow on Channel 4. As Snow put it: "All this does, in the end, sum up a complete shambles. You nearly lost the Finance Bill, the Prime Minister could not focus on the reality that the 10p was a problem. Then you have had to do what no Chancellor in our lifetime has ever had to do - change income tax arrangements between budgets. Why should people trust you after this, if things can go so badly wrong?"