It's good to talk. Or so we must hope, given the number of parallel conversations set up this week to examine matters constitutional and the meaning of life. As our elected representatives rush around with their toolboxes trying to fix a sustainable future, it strikes me, not for the first time, that politicians as a breed are mighty slow on the uptake.

It's good to talk. Or so we must hope, given the number of parallel conversations set up this week to examine matters constitutional and the meaning of life. As our elected representatives rush around with their toolboxes trying to fix a sustainable future, it strikes me, not for the first time, that politicians as a breed are mighty slow on the uptake.

Up for discussion by the Labour/ LibDem/Tory commission/review chaired by Professor Sir Kenneth Calman will be what more might be rendered unto Holyrood and, much more contentiously, what Westminster might fancy reclaiming by return post. Up for dissection will be the latest phase of the First Minister's serial chat with civic Scotland, unveiled in a speech today and continued in meetings with the various bodies that make the component parts of the country tick. Up for debate will be a raft of possible reforms of the Lords and Commons, and of the UK voting system.

And do you know what? The public looking on with varying degrees of interest, engagement or plain bemusement are already way ahead of most of these games. It's in the nature of the political beast to hold meetings about meetings and then spend most of them arguing the toss about the terms of reference, the agenda, the membership and who buys the sandwiches. They can't help it, the souls. But out there in real life, opinions manage to get formed without much constitutional handwringing.

This latest flurry of activity smacks of the country's leaders running behind the led, trying hard to catch up. Take the commission. In the run-up to the election, Labour in Scotland proclaimed the public not remotely interested in building Holyrood's musclepower. The public begged to differ, and the cold shower provided by opposition found the party suddenly anxious to explore the devolutionary boundaries. Or take Gordon Brown's firm pre-election assertion that devolution was a done deal and there would be no further powers on offer. Now he's extensively briefing that everything, including who taxes whom, is in the melting pot - though, tellingly, he envisages a two-way street, including Scottish cabinet secretaries ceding certain controls back to Number 10, a prospect endorsed by Wendy Alexander. Here, you suspect, Ms Alexander's finger is poised over something other than the public pulse.

In the current climate, nobody remotely interested in regaining power should be trying to sell Scottish voters a product labelled "made in London". The story goes that the areas where the UK government should take and keep full control are major-league matters, such as dealing with terrorism. Let's just unpick that scenario for a moment. One of the running sores affecting Anglo-Scottish relationships in recent years has been the alleged use of Scottish airports as fuelling stops for American flights taking terrorist suspects to Guantanamo following their incarceration in foreign jails none too fussy about how they conduct interrogation. This is the practice, in today's offensive use of euphemism, of "extraordinary rendition".

Public opinion, I would safely guess, is not in the market for letting the Home Office determine how human rights are delivered at Prestwick Airport. Full cross-border co-operation in times of emergency is surely a given, but that needn't translate as a blank cheque offered to UK government departments with a dubious track record in establishing the veracity of American assurances. More in tune with the Scottish public mood would be an acceptance that devolution, to borrow the words of that nice Mr Blair, does not have a reverse gear. Rather, it is an organic process that requires to be re-shaped in the light of experience. Should immigration continue to be an entirely reserved matter, for instance, when it is self-evident that the pressures it has exerted on English public services in certain areas simply don't translate to underpopulated parts of Scotland needing to attract skills and new blood?

The standard riposte to this is that you can't have two different systems operating on either side of the border. But we do already, across whole areas of policy such as health, justice, local government and education. And what of fiscal autonomy? Most citizens would buy the premise that having to raise the taxation you spend surely encourages responsible government - as even the Scottish Conservatives have acknowledged. The added bonus would be an end to tedious rows about subsidy-junkie Jocks. There is no one-size-fits-all-Britain, as the administration in Wales - where Labour shares power - has demonstrated. A UK government that is keen to celebrate diversity in terms of religion and ethnic communities seems strangely reluctant to apply the same logic to its indigenous minorities.

Also on the table this week are plans to consult on the shape of future democratic arrangements at Westminster. Among the ideas floated would be the transformation of the House of Lords into a 400-strong senate elected by proportional representation. Yet again, it is a measure the politically engaged public would welcome as an overdue reform that has stuttered badly since it was first begun with the partial cull of hereditary ermine. While the Commons has come under more beady-eyed investigation of late, the gilded life of the lords and ladies has continued largely undisturbed by public scrutiny.

Yet the current arrangements in the upper house offer many opportunities for petty corruption. It's not just attendances that stretch no further than signing on for the daily allowance; it is, for instance, flagrant manipulation of the rules so that holiday and second homes are cited as "principal residences", thereby funding overnight stays in London, where you live anyway, and financing first-class travel to your leisure pad of choice.

Where else but the Lords could you find such a repository and variation of wisdom and experience, cry the defenders of the status quo? Which assumes there are not 400 intellectually gifted would-be senators in the length and breadth of the land, and that the much-vaunted "government of all the talents" would cease its current practice of recruiting externally.

Finally, still simmering on the back burner, is the suggestion of a form of PR for the Commons itself. It may be that enthusiasm for ditching first-past-the-post rises in direct correlation to that system ceasing to favour a Labour victory in a General Election. Still, repentant sinners are always most welcome. Not least in the court of public opinion, which long ago concluded that governments of any hue elected by barely more than a third of the voting populace lack a certain legitimacy.

"When I haver," sang the Proclaimers, "I'll be the man havering to you." Those boys should get into politics.