Publish and be damned.

The Scottish Conservatives have highlighted the fact that the Scottish Executive spend the equivalent of £9,000 a day producing publications which in the main actually never get read by anyone, disclosing that "The Scottish Executive put out 430 publications in the year to the end of May this year at a cost of £2.4 million."

Now Mr Smith doesn't doubt that many of the aforesaid publications actually have some sort of value, but would suggest that the bulk of these costs come from physically printing and distributing copies of the publications unrequested to those who could very easily access them online.

So, perhaps the solution is to publish them on the Executive's mammoth website and if people want to access them, then those that are interested can do so virtually, with the results that we can save several hundreds of thousands of pounds ... which will then no doubt disappear into the spending black hole that is the Scottish Executive only to be spent on something else just as unnecessary and meaningless.