Alex Massie

I don't care to delve too deeply into the clump of giant hogweed that is health policy but if Andrew Lasley succeeds in freezing health spending in real terms then he will have been one of the more successful cabinet ministers even if his ambitious reforms go nowhere or achieve nothing. It is annoying, as Pete says, that this will have to be a secret triumph since it has become an article of faith, apparently, that spending more money on the NHS is always the virtuous thing to do. Nevertheless, a secret triumph that cannot be proclaimed is better than failure. Every developed country must confront the horror of sharply-increasing health costs as the price of human ingenuity becomes ever more expensive.

Readers in England and other less-fortunate lands may not have been following the latest stushie in Scotia new and braw. This time it's the law that's the problem. Or rather, the UK Supreme Court's ability to rule on Scottish appeals on Human Rights and other EU-related business. Last week this led to the conviction of Nat Fraser, imprisoned for the murder of his wife Arlene, being quashed on the not unreasonable grounds that the Crown had failed to disclose vital evidence that cast some doubt on the most important part of the case against Mr Fraser. Kenneth Roy, sage of Kilmarnock, has an excellent summary of the affair. Cue much rumpus and uproar and the predictable sight of politicians embarrassing themselves on television and in the popular prints.

It cannot be said that Alex Salmond's ministry is off to a good legislative start. Not when its immediate aim is, apparently, to rush through ill-considered, illiberal, speech-curbing legislation that asks the public not to worry about the detail and trust that the legal authorities will not actually enforce either the letter or the spirit of the Offensive Behaviour in Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Bill. According to Salmond: "I am determined that the authorities have the powers they need to clamp down effectively on bigotry peddled online. The Internet is a force for good in so many ways – but it can also be abused by those who seek to spread hatred.

What scares Israel more than anything else? Not, I wager, the rockets flying over the fence from Gaza or even, at least on a quotidian basis, the Iranian shadow. No, what happens if the Palestinians say Yes? Granted, the Palestinian leaderships - not without their own battles - have persistently demonstrated a fatal lack of imagination. Jerusalem or Bust and it's always been Bust. But if the Palestinians could bring themselves to acknowledge the Jewish state, Israel would find itself in a corner, hemmed in by the Palestinians' engagement, international pressure and its own sense of what kind of country it should be. But freezing the conflict - which is essentially what is happening now - hardly benefits Israel either.