Scotland

Taken last week actually but you get the idea and is posted for the especial interest of exiled Selkirk folk everywhere. People, rightly, go on about the Highlands but Southern Scotland can often be just as lovely and is, I think, comparatively under-rated. The same might be said of Northumberland. Note to the Scottish government: this landscape would not be improved by plonking a socking great wind farm atop these hills.

That's the question Jeff Breslin asks at Better Nation and, as a bonus, he gets the answer right too: Alex Salmond. In truth, it's not a difficult question no matter how one approaches it. From a governance perspective the SNP have been modestly underwhelming. This still represents a major advance from the days of the Labour-Lib Dem coalition that preceded them. Nor is there any reason to hope for anything this time around from a Labour party actively hostile to anything that might even be mistaken for a fresh idea. On those grounds alone, a Labour minority ministry in Edinburgh is a dreary prospect. The Scottish elections in May are likely - nay bound! - to be interpreted in a UK context by much of the London press. They shouldn't be but they will be.

Though this blog has tried to ignore the fact, there are elections to the Scottish Parliament this year. In just over ten weeks time in fact. I've ignored the subject because, frankly, the idea of Iain Gray - he's the leader of the Labour party in Scotland - becoming First Minister is too depressing to contemplate before the idea is thrust upon us by cruel reality and dastardly necessity. Mr Gray is the fifth person to lead Labour's Holyrood group since devolution and by some hefty distance the least impressive. This is a low bar to fail to clear but there you have it. For months now it has looked as though Labour would "win" the right to govern with no new ideas at all.

You know, when you see that Neil Clark has written a piece for the Guardian arguing that, from his perspective, this government is even worse than Margaret Thatcher's you might expect to be entertained but you don't anticipate him making sense. But, lo, here he is: [...] Clegg, and his fellow Orange Book Liberals, are actually more keen on market forces and globalised capitalism than the so-called Tory wets were. In last year's election, the free market fundamentalism of the Liberal Democrats was ignored by many commentators and voters who saw their opposition to Labour's security measures, and their advocacy of electoral reform, as evidence that the party was progressive.

At some point it seems wise to suppose that Ed Miliband isn't playing any devious or subtle long game and that, far from being baffling, his public pronouncements are probably a pretty reasonable guide to what he actually, truly believes. And he really doesn't think that Labour made any significant errors while in office. Surpluses are for wimps; real men run deficits even in boom times. In this, as in so much else, Miliband rejects Tony Blair's analysis and sides with his old mentor Gordon Brown. Fair enough. Iain Martin finds this perplexing, not least from any electoral/political perspective and he's right. Miliband's views are touchingly old-fashioned. So much so, in fact, that perhaps he's in the wrong parliament. He'd be quite at home at Holyrood.

Tim Montgomerie's response to Danny Finkelstein's column is, as was expected, interesting and challenging. For now, however, let's focus on just one line: Mainstream Conservatism is also more pro-poor because it's the poorest Britons who suffer most from crime, uncontrolled immigration and the unfair deal that London's lowest income boroughs get from the Barnet [sic] formula. Emphasis added. One hears this sort of thing quite frequently. Which is fine. But three points: first, over time Barnett is designed to actually reduce differences in spending allocations. It may do so more slowly than some would like but that's a different argument.

Commenting on this post, "Robert the Bruce 2.0" complains: Scotland has its own Government, Parliament, Courts, Legal System, Royal Household, Great Offices of State, Flag, Banner, Badge, Anthem, Language, Lingo, Sense of Identity, Country and Football Team. It is a Nation that is more than capable of standing on its own feet. Yet now, under Devolution and ' Devolution 2.0' it is treated as a semi-autonomous and semi-detached region of the UK. In a constitutional settlement that is patronising and insulting. If independence is good enough for the Irish, the Israelis and the Icelandic it should be good enough for Scotland too. Unless, of course, the people of Scotland consider themselves too lazy, too ineffectual and too feckless to take responsibility for their own futures.