Scotland

The answer may not be what you think. It seems that South Lanarkshire council have embarked upon the most idiotic defamation action of the year. Over to Jonathan Mitchell QC to explain: South Lanarkshire Council has long had a certain reputation for Brezhnevism. Recently it seems to have excelled itself by bringing proceedings for defamation in Lanark Sheriff Court against the membership of a local community council for an article on its website which linked to another article on a different organisation’s website entitled “South Lanarkshire Council and Scottish Coal Hand-in-Hand at Community LIE-aison Meeting”.

George - now Lord - Foulkes is taking his leave of Holyrood and returning to the comfort of the red benches in the House of Lords. It's fair to say that Foulkes's ability to wind up nationalists has not endeared him to SNP supporters. Still,  Lallands Peat Worrier is quite right that the national bard would, were he still drawing breath, have felt the need to mark this heavyweight departure with some stirring lines in the old Scots demotic. Happily LPW was on hand to take dictation. It begins: To a Foulkes   So ye're gaun at last, ye Lairdly ferlie? Your impudence protect you sairly! 'Tis time again for struttin' rarely In whitrat cape ~ Geordie, ha' no fears o' dinin' sparely In sic a place!

Back when the Iraq war was new and innocent and still pretty popular I recall a Scotsman headline announcing that, with the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards entering the city, there was now the sound of Bagpipes in Basra. There was something thrilling, something tribal too, about this. Regardless of the arguments about the war, the skirl of the pipes summoned and honoured the ghosts (real and imagined) of warriors past.  One of those warriors was Piper Bill Millin and he is dead now.

Good to see that Craig Levein, the new Scotland manager, has a sophisticated grasp of football tactics. As this note left in the dressing room last week demonstrates: Final score? Sweden 3 Scotland 0.

Meanwhile, in other Glasgow news the city's evening paper makes its readers an offer they can't refuse. I believe this exhausts my annual quota of posts making gentle fun of Glaswegians.

First things first: it is extremely inconvenient, even embarrassing, that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi is still alive nearly a year after he was released from Greenock Prison on the grounds that he was believed to have not much more, and perhaps fewer, than three months to live. Nevertheless, the fact that he has lived longer than expected does not advance or give any greater credence to the notion that there was some conspiracy designed to free him come what may and regardless of any other considerations. Nor is there any evidence, despite recent press reports, that BP (everyone's favourite whipping boy now) played any role in Kenny MacAskill's decision to send him back to Libya.

Meanwhile, good sense vis a vis the criminal justice system is going viral at an alarming rate. At the Scottish Parliament MSPs voted  - 63-61 - to reject a (typically illiberal) Labour amendment (backed by the Tories too) that would have imposed mandatory six month prison terms for anyone found carrying a knife in a public place. And now they've only gone and endorsed a proposal that creates the presumption that prison sentences of fewer than three months are generally to be avoided on the reasonable grounds that they don't do much good for or to anyone. It's probably necessary, alas, to point out that opposing mandatory minimum sentences for carrying a blade does not mean one supports blade-carrying or stabbing.

Like the Devil's Kitchen, I'm late getting to this story travesty. The most enraging aspect of it is, of course, that one can no longer be surprised by this kind of behaviour. Yet again the police and the criminal justice system prove themselves out of touch with common sense or decency. A grandmother has been jailed for five years for possessing a "family heirloom" World War II pistol. Gail Cochrane, 53, had kept the gun for 29 years following the death of her father, who had been in the Royal Navy. Police found the weapon, a Browning self-loading pistol, during a search of her home in Dundee while looking for her son. She admitted illegal possession of the firearm, an offence with a minimum five-year jail term under Scots law.

Sunder Katwala has already done a terrific job dismantling this fatuous piece of New Statesman guff by James Macintyre. But that doesn't mean other people can't play the game too. Macintyre, you see, wants to see a United British football team. Not, mind you, because he thinks it might be better than England's but because this is needed "for the sake of the Union". Yes, really. Macintyre's piece is remarkable, not least because I'm not persuaded it contains even a single sensible sentence while every one of its assumptions is wrong and each of its dubious interpretations is as hopeless as anything ever produced by a Russian linesman. It's so bad he could probably have persuaded the Guardian to pay* him for it. So...