I’m sure my occasional correspondent Big Rab won’t mind me quoting this post on his blog recently about the background to the strike by public sector workers on Thursday. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

“Remember when teachers, nurses, doctors, librarians, social workers, care assistants, bin men and lollipop ladies crashed the stock market, wiped out banks, took billions in bonuses and paid no tax?

No, me neither.”

I thought the Tories were supposed to be the party of law and order.

Yet I well remember Tim Yeo once speaking up for those who, due to the use of speed cameras, had been caught breaking the law. Yeo talked as if the law were something to be neglected or set aside, as if people who broke the speed limit were not law breakers, which quite clearly they are.

At least at the time Yeo was merely a Member of Parliament (if a spokesman for the opposition.)

But Michael Gove…..

Michael Gove is the UK Secretary of State for Education.

Yet on Sunday he incited parents to take part in a mass act of law breaking by volunteering to keep schools open during the proposed strike tomorrow by teachers. (This does not affect Scotland – and Northern Ireland I expect. I’m not sure about Wales but I think education is a devolved power there too.)

Quite apart from the fact that Gove thereby declares that teaching is easy and anyone can do it without training and so demeans those who are effectively his employees (he should perhaps try it sometime) teachers are not only trained but thoroughly vetted before being allowed near children. The procedure is known, in Scotland at least, as disclosure and is specifically designed to protect children from potential danger or harm. (As some recent cases have shown it does not always work, but it is a sensible precaution.)

Gove has in effect incited parents, and any Head Teachers who permit this to take place, to break the law, since, if an undisclosed person is placed or places her- or himself in front of the children an offence has been committed.

As Secretary of State Gove ought to be aware of this law. If he was, then he has deliberately encouraged an act of law breaking – become an accessory before the fact. If he was not so aware then the law does not hold ignorance as an excuse and he is still guilty.

But then what else can you expect of a man who has conned thousands of pounds of various monies out of the taxpayer via MPs’ expenses but has got away with it – like many of his cabinet colleagues, including Mr Irresponsible himself – because, being a millionaire, he could afford to repay it? (Or some of it.)

We took a stroll around North Queensferry last week. It wasn’t much of a stroll because it’s not very big. It must be the best location in the world for viewing iconic bridges, though. It lies slap bang between the two famous ones over the River Forth.

The following two pictures were taken from the same spot. The angle between the photos is about 60⁰.

They’re doing some repair work on the Road Bridge which, thankfully, you can’t see from the road.

The next time I drive over it will be more scary than usual now I know all that is going on below.

Pictures of the northern cable anchor point and a support pillar are on my flickr site.

Looking west we could see the trans-North Sea ferry berthed at Rosyth.

There was an aircraft carrier at the Royal Navy base too. I had thought we no longer had any of those, or was it just the new ones the Coalition Government planned to scrap? My camera isn’t quite good enough for the distance involved but it was definitely an aircraft carrier. It had that upward sweep at the bow.

I’ve been puzzling over the quite stunning result of the Scottish Parliamentary Election yesterday. How to explain the sudden deluge of votes for the SNP? An overall majority which the structure of the parliament was expressly designed to forestall?

Partly of course it’s the uninspiring nature of Labour’s Scotish leader, Iain Gray, a man with little charisma or presence. Also the lack of big Labour names on the ballot papers – though this did not prevent them taking the usual swathe of seats at the last such election four years ago. There may too this time have been a feeling that Labour took its vote for granted. The minority SNP administration also made a reasonable fist of its past four years in power, with not too many cock-ups.

The major difference, though, might, for the first Election since the Scottish Parliament was set up, be the fact of a Conservative led government at Westminster (which Scots by and large voted against – as did most of the rest of the UK, to be fair.) The Labour vote in Scotland at the UK General Election last year, as in all General Elections since the 1970s, was about attempting to protect Scotland from the effect of Tory depredations. In this it signally failed – as did the “safe” option of voting Lib-Dem – whose MSPs (and English local councillors) paid the first price for the deal with the devil their UK Parliamentary Party made on going into coalition with those loathed Tories.

At least until the next UK General Election (due in 2015) Labour will be unable to fulfill that protecting role as their UK Parliamentary presence is an irrelevance; and so too could their Scottish hegemony be ignored.

An SNP majority in the Scottish Parliament, an unfettered SNP administration, is a statement of another kind. The calculation may have been that the SNP will fight for Scotland more, or better, than Labour – or that it will be able to secure more concessions from the Westminster coalition than Labour could ever hope to achieve.

Whatever else the vote was, it wasn’t a vote for independence. Most Scots do not wish to be separated from their neighbours and friends – in many cases families – and are happy to remain part of the UK so long as said friends and neighbours don’t shaft us too much.

There is a warning there for the Westminster coalition – but also for the new Scottish Government.

For what it’s worth I’ll be voting for a change to the alternative vote in the referendum tomorrow.

Not that I think it’s a perfect system, there isn’t one – and there’s not a snowball’s chance that anyone but Labour will win in my parliamentary constituency, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, anyway, under any system – but simply that it’s a (tiny) bit fairer than the so-called first past the post method which I have blogged about before.

[To see just how perverse the FPTP system can be see doctorvee's excellent post on the subject here.]

I also see AV as an essential first step towards a more fully proportional election procedure. Consider: the coming of universal suffrage in the UK took nearly 100 years from the Great Reform Act of 1832 till women finally got the vote on the same terms as men – and one person one vote was not achieved (with the abolition of university seats) till after the Second World War!

If the AV referendum posts a no vote it will be taken to mean that, or represented as, there is not a wide desire to see a fairer system in place and the chances of any sort of PR system for UK parliamentary elections will thereby be lost for perhaps a generation, maybe even for my lifetime. Anyone who votes against it on the grounds that it isn’t the PR system they prefer is letting the worst (FPTP) take the place of the acceptable-for-now.

Did anyone else find the scenes of rejoicing in the US over the death of Osama Bin Laden a little premature? Not to mention a trifle unseemly?

In many parts it was greeted in much the same way a victory in a sporting contest might have been and whatever the “War on Terror” was or is it is far from sporting.

Yes he was a bad lot and totally against almost all that we in the West take for granted yet his demise came about in exactly the same way as his crimes were committed; in effect it was an extra-judicial execution. While there may have been no other way to remove his menace and his capture might have led to problematic scenarios involving the taking of hostages to be used as pawns in an attempt to have him freed – in effect President Obama had no choice – the fact remains that he was not subject to what ought to be our overriding principle; that a person has to be tried in court before being deprived of liberty or life.

It always bears saying; if we are no better than them then we are in fact worse. Or we are, at best, hypocrites.

And this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. It might not even be the end of the beginning.

The circumstances that led to Bin Laden taking up the cudgels against the USA in particular and its hangers-on in general are still in existence and his umbrella organisation will still act as a focus for disaffected individuals and those with an axe (or a suicide bomb) to grind.

Well, we may not have had much bread but today we had the circus.

I was glad of the day off but I can’t say I feel any better for it. The next few years are going to be rough economically. The Government has done the exact opposite of what was required to ameliorate the recession.

Still, nothing like a bit of pageantry to distract the plebs, eh?

I wish the couple concerned nothing but well for themselves but the advantages they have will (bar the revolution, and perhaps even in that remote likelihood) ensure they want for nothing. The bride in particular seems to be much more in tune with her new husband than her groom’s mother ever was. In the bits that I saw there was a perceptible warmth between them; a warmth entirely absent from Charles and Diana’s relationship. Their marriage might have a better chance of long term success as a result.

Diana was a lamb to the slaughter; a sacrifice to (some of) the British public’s appetite for figureheads and royal babies to bill and coo over. Her tragedy – if it was a tragedy – was that she didn’t realise it, at least not until it was way too late, and then she didn’t accept that noblesse oblige.

The purpose of a royal consort is to provide an heir – and spare. Once Diana had done that she became an adjunct, decoration, window dressing. Her personality couldn’t cope with that nor that Charles had never been interested in her beyond his dynastic responsibilities: before their marriage they had met very few times.

She did however carve out for herself a niche as an object of glamour, a celebrity.

I don’t think the new Duchess of Cambridge (and Countess of Strathearn) is as innocent, and there is no doubt that she has had a “normal” courtship with her husband. Ten years is enough to get to know anybody.

Doubtless the dynastically necessary babies will be along soon enough.

Our esteemed Prime Minister, Mr Irresponsible, showed himself in his true colours today when he tried to put down a Labour MP who was heckling him.

His phrase, “Calm down, dear,” is all very well for Michael Winner (he, after all, is only doing commercials) but ill becomes the head of the UK government. There’s a video on You Tube here. Note the glee too with which it was greeted by the MPs behind him and the insufferable George Osborne beside him.

This is the true face of “Call me Dave.” A person who thinks others are not worth a degree of respect in his dealings with them and who deploys casually dismissive, arguably sexist, language as soon as his guard is down.

One of the many people who have taken out super injunctions – that reprehensible state of affairs where the press is not allowed to publish, and hence the public is not even allowed to know, that an injunction against publication of certain material has been obtained – has turned out to be none other than BBC journalist Andrew Marr.

This is almost unsatirisable. A journalist takes legal steps to ensure other journalists may not publish something? Bizarre.

At least he seems to have come round to the realisation that hiding things is the opposite of the business he is in. It’s not as if he’s a politician.

But, to lower this to the level of the flippant, does anyone else think that a strange part of this story is that Andrew Marr has somehow managed to be attractive to more than one woman?

More than several fliers with respect to the Scottish Parliament election (upcoming on May 5^th) have landed on the doormat recently.

The usual suspects; Labour, Tory, Lib Dem, SNP, Green, UKIP. The last two of these were for the list vote only.

The UKIP one mentions their Scottish team; Donald, Brian, Mark, Mitch, Anthony, Otto, Bill.

Wait a minute. Otto? Otto?

Fine old British name; as the Pub Landlord might not have said.