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Hoots & Havers December 07

I’ve never understood why the West Lothian question should be such a huge problem. The bottom line is that the current state of affairs is utterly unsustainable. The absurdity of Brown, Darling etc deciding on English domestic policy and not that of their own country is obvious.

There used to be a Scots Grand Committee at Westminster to look after us and there will have to be an English Grand Committee to look after them. I think this is the Rifkind answer, although it could equally have occurred to Homer Simpson. The government is leery about this solution since their majority depends on the support of Scots MPs, but that’s just tough. It wasn’t much fun for Scotland either when English Tories could ignore the wishes of the Scots electorate and impose Conservative solutions against the wishes of our electorate, and I doubt the majority of English voters who support the Conservatives are too chuffed at having Labour Scots imposing undemocratic policies on them.

The clarity of thought required to implement such a remedy may be more difficult to come by. The Scottish parliamentary elections have been less than satisfactory to date since neither politicians nor the electorate seem capable of sorting out the difference between issues that Canongate can control and those handled by Westminster. The last election seemed to hinge on the unpopularity of Tony Blair and his Iraq policy over which, of course, the Scots parliament had absolutely no say. So anyone who voted SNP for that reason was a fool, and such lack of comprehension of the powers of the Scots parliament could have disastrous results some day.

Under a post West Lothian system of government, one could still have Gordon Brown leading a UK government. He could do his thing over foreign policy, macro economics etc., and he could even campaign with proposals for English education and health. He might win a national majority but is unlikely to win an English one. In the English Grand Committee on domestic affairs, he’d have to do a Salmond - state what he intended to do and dare the opposition to vote against him. Since politicians have to really scrabble around to find anything more than the minutest differences in their policies these days, consensus should be easily reached. And he’d be no more likely to voted down in Westminster than Salmond is in Edinburgh. And if he was, that’s democracy for you.

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I became scunnered by the game of golf whilst still very young. The problem was that I’d take a swipe at the ball and, if I connected effectively, the thing would soar into the sky and disappear, often forever. Eventually I discovered that I was short-sighted and not everyone saw the world in the same pleasant blur that I did. So I got specs. It didn’t help cricket much because I also had the common male pattern red/green colour blindness which made a little red ball against green grass virtually impossible to see. And I’ve never really got back into golf.

I was four-eyed for many decades. Until a fortnight ago. Then I bust my only decent pair of specs and - Lo! - I found I could see. What has happened is that the natural degeneration of vision that requires jerries to wear reading glasses has cancelled out my short sight. My better eye can spot a coin on the pavement, unaided, at a hundred paces, and my other one can still sex a flea an inch in front of my nose. For a brief period I shall look cool, except that folk tend to tell me I looked better in glasses.

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Those that visit Comment on the web will know that the feedback section has changed in response to the ever growing waves of spam that flooded in. I was one of those that used to remove it. It arrived from places like the Ukraine, the US, Jordan, and Senegal.

Some advertised strange pharmaceuticals; others tried to get you to visit porn sites and many of these were quite astonishingly graphic. I never came across a blandishment to have it off with a bike, but virtually everything else imaginable was there. In fact it was quite educational and confirmed my opinion that sexuality is one of the most bizarre aspects of human behaviour and, being a well-brought up Presbyterian, one of the least savoury.

The messages never hedged. www.banginggrannies.com or www.rutwithgoats.co.uk And the accompanying photographs could make you blench. Only rarely did one have time to expunge a message without several people already having had a look at it. The new Comment ‘blog’ was started and the old unmonitored system abandoned. And then, ten days later, someone pointed out that it was still there and could be accessed by those who had put the page in their ‘favourites’. Nothing worthwhile had been posted, unless you consider 200 spam messages worthwhile. Most of the porn had been viewed about a dozen times. Except for the pedophilia. The two or three posts that advertised ‘Lolita’ sites had nearly fifty hits apiece.

Since the pages could have been accessed from anywhere in the world, it doesn’t mean that Highland Perthshire folk are particularly kinky. But someone surely is.