Saving The Union.

Mr Smith will be intrigued to see if political pacts between the SNP and the Scottish Conservatives come to pass.

"THE SNP is to pave the way for a historic coalition pact with the Conservatives by scrapping a 20-year old ban barring it from working with the party. In a move which will be seen as a totemic shift in Scottish politics, the Nationalists will agree this week to allow their elected members to enter government with the party of Margaret Thatcher."

Surely this will not happen? Unionists propping up a Nationalist administrations. Welcome to the "new politics," but Mr Smith has his doubts about the veracity of this story.

English votes for English MPs.

So the Conservatives have finally come up with the answer to the West Lothian question and will propose ending the right of Westminster MPs from Scotland to vote on matters only affecting England.

Mr Smith says about time too.

The only justification for allowing Scottish MPs to vote on English matters after devolution for Scotland was that it was a less anomalous contradiction than existed (from a Scottish perspective) under the last Conservative Government when hundreds of English MPs got to vote on matters only affecting Scotland. And that anomaly ended eight years ago with devolution for Scotland.

No democrat could argue other than that the current position is untenable and probably explains why an opinion poll suggests that a third of English voters now support Scotland becoming independent.

Making political history.

It's not every day that a lowly councillor makes political history, but that's what happened last Thursday when the SNP's John Corall was elected to the Midstocket/Rosemount council ward on Aberdeen City Council, becoming the first councillor ever to be elected in Scotland using the new Single Transferable Vote in a multi-member ward at a by-election.

Congratulations to Councillor Corall and commiserations to the Scottish Conservatives who also became the first Scottish political party to lose a council seat under the new voting system, with a gain for the SNP, albeit at a very late stage in the iterative voting system.

Mr Smith suspects the result will have ramifications for all political parties, because it probably means that unless a candidate manages to get themselves elected with a majority of the vote at stage 1 of the ballot process, It makes it virtually impossible to predict what then happen when the second, third and fourth stage voting preferences of the rest of the voters come into play, and there are no prizes for coming second in a by-election.