Cigar Weekly

DO we want Scotland to be regarded as the nut job of Europe? It's hard to tell at what point a national image becomes officially mental, but it might have been reached when junior health minister Shona Robison came up with the loony idea that cigarettes should be hidden under the counter, in the latest persecution of smokers and shopkeepers.

Or perhaps the crackpot moment was reached when the makers of the new film Stone of Destiny were forced to use incense to simulate smoke from false cigarettes while recreating a Glasgow University party of 1950.

Scotland is already notorious to film people as an über nutter zone for allowing no exemptions to the indoors smoking ban, while England co-operates. Recently, we lost a Scottish production about civil rights campaigner Lord Wolfenden. The film team had to move to England because Wolfenden's pipe was his trademark.

Before that, we made eejits of ourselves by banning an onstage Winston Churchill (played by Mel Smith) from smoking a cigar.

The rigid, frigid, humourless approach of the Tartan Taliban carries a threatening atmosphere.

The whole Scottish Parliament, with the exception of the Tories, agreed this totalitarian tripe. So why not ban tobacco being sold in any form?

This would, of course, mean Scotland giving up its share of the GBP 8billion the UK makes in tobacco tax every year. Gosh, is that silence I hear over that idea?

On diet, cabbage-related advice isn't having results at Holyrood itself.

A fair number of MSPs belong to a great waddle of tribunes of ra people.

There are jammy roly-polies who treat their bodies not as temples but as amusement arcades. Yet their plump paws eagerly press the "Yes" button for more bans for everyone else.

Ministers with too little Big Stuff to do become interfering pests.

Robison used to be SNP health spokeswoman but was demoted to a junior role when the party took power. While she was busy persecuting smokers, it emerged she'd neglected to discover if Tayside health authorities really had rescued the records of child patients from a disused hospital in her constituency.

Robison accepted their blethers that they would take action but didn't pursue it. The records, containing embarrassing family details, were still lying around.

I don't know what more can be done to penalise smokers, other than recreating village stocks and labelling them an "outdoor smoking facility".

The Scottish Government must find the money to protect Scotland's only drama school in Glasgow, now that star James McAvoy has made its cash crisis high profile. It was the previous Executive's fault that the college was underfunded. The deficit at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama is "only" GBP 600,000, sweetie money to politicians. It costs over GBP 1million a year just to maintain the Holyrood building itself for a poorer cast of actors.

There are treasure troves of public money you never hear about. People assume these are intended for national emergencies, but Alex Salmond should see if he can rustle up GBP 6.6million to pay off this new student debt problem. It now turns out that around 3,000 postgraduates may have to stump up an average of GBP 2,200 right away, to clear some bookkeeping anomaly.