Bankers. They come in two flavours, these days: Complete and Utter. The Sons of Onan jokes just write themselves. Still the little blighters turn up everywhere.
Bankers. They come in two flavours, these days: Complete and Utter. The Sons of Onan jokes just write themselves. Still the little blighters turn up everywhere.
Here, for example, we have a First Minister of Scotland being mocked by Annabel Goldie of the Tories as our "very own financial prophet" merely because he was once, in a misspent youth, a total b**ker.
So has British Conservatism, from David Cameron down, severed all squalid ties with financial "services"?
Was Ms Goldie alleging that Tories and b**kers have ended their long affair?
Thought not.
But what's this? Alex Neil, Nationalist, is unhappy because a possible Bank of China interest in HBOS somehow leaked into the public sphere ("allegedly") through the membrane of Robert Peston's BBC blog? Benign tartan Beijing b**kers defamed? Crivvens. Hand me the woad.
Alternatively, we could contemplate Labour's Iain Gray.
He wants it known that the SNP build no schools. ("If it took 20 Nats 15 months to talk about a Futures Trust, how many Nats would it take..." And so forth).
Any schools apparent in your area are the doing of Labour, according to Mr Gray. He may even demand a gold star for Jack McConnell's jotter.
In the meantime, he says the SNP have achieved next-to-nought and their naught-for-profit financing is a fraud. Bring back - as the Labour leader was at pains to avoid saying - PFI.
But this was a point that former b**ker Salmond failed to press. Who was making a bundle, with stupendous taxpayer bundles to come, from PFI, PPP and the other plosives? Banks, with the Scottish banks in the van. Labour's infrastructure alternative, on Mr Gray's telling, would involve further subsidy to those heroic enterprises.
Mr Salmond prefers to talk instead of "the People's Schools". They speak of little else in playgrounds of a morning. "Will he stop messing with his Futures Trust and start building schools?" demanded Mr Gray. Will he notice that the Treasury has thought again about PFI, retorted the First Minister.
These exchanges took place, I might say, on a day when Scotland was bleeding jobs and hope.
No participant failed to do his and her job in the Holyrood chamber, but the party leaders were less beside-the-point than not remotely in its neighbourhood.
Then Tavish Scott, for the Liberals, raised the tone, and Mr Salmond rose to meet him.
Westminster having disgraced itself, the First Minister dictated a sombre tone when the Liberal leader spoke of child protection in Aberdeen. Human instincts were evident, and edifying. Scottish systems are better than most (we hope) but there are, said Mr Salmond, "historic" reasons why the council in question is broke.
An "exceptional" deal is therefore planned.
Aberdeen will be allowed to "capitalise". For the sake of endangered infants, in other words, the bankers will be summoned to preside over a municipal bail-out.
Nothing wrong with that, as such. Mr Salmond was not boasting. He may even have been wondering why no-one was asking about his failure to act before. The fact remains that a crisis in child protection has triggered another pay day for people who are not, currently, well beloved. Is that a good thing?
There will be many more such episodes before, or if, we are rid of this crisis. A minority SNP administration may seem small beer in such global circumstances, but the sound of Mr Gray boasting of what Labour used to do, and of Ms Goldie harping on what Tories might do, failed to excite the pulse of the body politic.
And there are no jokes, none at all, in child protection.
