THE chair of the British Medical Association in Scotland said yesterday that he did not believe political guarantees on patient waiting time should have any place in law.

This is no doubt sound advice, with which we can only agree, but it is like a tradesman painter shouting from a doorway to an apprentice who has trapped himself across a wet floor in the far corner. Fine sentiments, but a bit late.

Indeed we would go further and say that the whole culture of targets and possibly even waiting time statistics in general are not the intelligent way ahead. The trouble is, like it or not, politically this is where we are and where will continue to be. There is no going back on this.

We got ourselves in this bind back in the bad old days when Westminster ran an NHS which was theoretically different across our nations but in practice homogeneous in operation. Then the running of the NHS diverged, as was appropriate to the age of devolution and true to the history of the NHS, but the political culture of targets and blame remained the same.

Among the biggest culprits were the SNP and a bright young shadow Health Minister at the start of the millennium by the name of Nicola Sturgeon, who hounded the Labour-LibDem executive relentlessly on waiting times and missed targets. This became the political way, and remains so. The SNP, cynical and focused in their targets in Opposition, cannot now get out of this in Government, even if we all agree it's not the best way to run our health system.

Alex Neil found that to his cost as Ms Sturgeon's successor as Health Secretary and now Shona Robison, both a personal and political friend of the First Minister, is finding the same. If you live by the sword you die by it.

To some degree targets are a good and necessary thing, a mechanism to judge performance and to create yardsticks. Turn them into the political Holy Grail as fixed "targets" and you are asking for trouble. Convert these into legislation with guarantees and you are putting a political gun to your own head.

You can argue that Labour, should it harbour the ambition to return to government at Holyrood one day, might want to ca'cannie in using this line of attack on the NHS as it will face the consequences one day. But that would be crediting politicians with long-term thinking and no-one would be as silly as to think that.

Will Ms Sturgeon's Government succumb to pressure and scrap their flagship law enshrining the right to swift treatment in law? The Government made a half-decent fist yesterday of arguing that the latest figures were not that bad over a winter in which the 'flu jab appears to have been blindsided by the wrong strains striking. Percentages in the case of some targets were off by a fraction of one per cent.

The Government cannot say it but we will: Health statistics, waiting times, treatment times, accident and emergency figures, bed blocking evidence - all of this is rightly in the public domain and should be matters of legitimate accountability. But strict targets or, worse, legislation, may actually be a National Health Disservice.