A SCOTSMAN’S home is his hutch, at least if it’s a new-build. Tory MSP Alex Johnstone fulminated this week that the teeny-wee hooses built these days are making the lieges physically and mentally ill.

This is grim news indeed. Alex himself is a burly – reliable newspaper reports have actually said “bovine” – agricultural fellow who needs the turning space of an aircraft carrier.

Used to galumphing aboot on a farm, it’s difficult to imagine him stuck in a wee egg-box hoose, with his big, sonsie face jammed up against the window where a message – “Help, I’m stuck” – is written in the steam from his breath.

But, in a rare departure for a Tory, he has spoken up for the masses, urging builders, architects and planners to draw up a voluntary code setting out minimum sizes for rooms. The builders have already told him to go and take a running jump. Though they might have added: “Unless he’s in one of our houses, where just the jump will have to do.”

Mr Johnstone bellowed bullishly in Holyrood: “Rabbit hutch and shoe box are just two of the terms I have heard used to describe the size of modern homes.” That’s right. Barely room for a rabbit to swing a cat as it barks out the motto of the British house-building industry: “If the shoe fits, live in it.”

There are all sorts of sizes to back this up. The average newbuild in Britland is 76 square metres. If you’re having trouble cramming an image of that into your head, think of it like this: it’s rubbish.

It’s down there at the bottom of the scale, along with Hong Kong (45), Russia (57), and China (60). At the top of the scale are Australia (214), the United States (201), and Canada (181). And, if you start warbling that these are big countries with outbacks and whatnot, then consider some of the joints nearer home: Denmark (137), France (112), Germany (109).

Long after the sun set on the British Empire, we have become used to this sort of thing: the UK among the worst in the world for anything, and Scotland the worst in the UK. Perhaps it’s karma, but I don’t want to go there, particularly as what goes around there comes around there.

But all the same, it just goes to illustrate a worryingly typical trend: Britain cramming them in, doing everything on the cheap. Taking the lead from our popular shops, we should just rename the place Poundland. Or maybe, given the subject-matter, Cramland.

Research by one of Cramland’s top educational establishments, the University of Cambridge, found that overcrowded homes can cause physical ailments such as asthma and mental illness such as depression.

Alex mentioned this during his thundering oration at Holyrood though, arguably, he took things too far when he suggested that Scots can’t take advantage of buy-one-get-one-free offers (the hallmark of our something-for-something society) because our kitchens don’t have room for the second item. Agricultural Alex is a big eater, mind, and was probably thinking of a whole cow.

He was more on the ball when he instanced the little rooms in care homes, where old people have no room for treasured possessions, or when he spoke of “the single person being offered a flat with a so-called mezzanine deck as a bedroom”. Been there, lived that. And before you say it must have been right metropolitan, it was in Lerwick.

Despite the denials of the building industry, we all know what is going on. We’ve all seen modern blocks of flats built next to Victorian tenements and noticed that the former have an extra floor in the same space. It’s particularly galling when you remember that folk were only about four foot high in Victorian times.

What can we do about this? Well, clearly, we can’t rely on the building bosses, who don’t believe there’s a problem and, like the architects, don’t actually live in the hutches they build.

A voluntary code won’t work because it relies on human nature to do the right thing. Exhibit A: any history book you like. Nope, we need to change the planning regulations to ensure rooms meet better minimum sizes.

I propose Alex’s Law, by which the minimum size of rooms is, say, three Mr Johnstones in length by two Mr Johnstones in width. That way, there should be at least enough room to swing a cow.