Who's spoiling for a fight now?

WHO'S a naughty boy, then? Who's to blame for disturbing the harmonious mood music duetted by the governments in Holyrood and Westminster? There were no petted lips to be seen when the main men were McConnell in Edinburgh and Blair in London, were there?

Leave aside the ignored "Concordats" (meetings between both governments and officials, devised to make devolution work efficiently, in the best interests of the people affected by it) during Jack McConnell's time at the top – even if he was the last to know about the G8 Summit at Gleneagles, and had to battle behind the scenes for money to pay for it – didn't the machinery of government purr along sweetly on both sides of the Border? By deduction, therefore, Alex Salmond must be the spanner in the works.

It's the current gossip amongst the anoraks. The general population, with more important things like inflation or debt on its mind, is only just becoming aware of the games being played, fights being picked and noses being thumbed by politicians in Holyrood and Westminster.

Until a couple of days ago, conventional wisdom was that the SNP was to blame for the umbrage being taken in Westminster at the demands and comments from Holyrood on everything from the cost of the London Olympics to nuclear power. It was fairly widely assumed that Alex Salmond spent a lot of time thinking about the best ways to provoke fights with Westminster.

Even people who thought his government was making a fair fist of running Scotland were quick to voice their disapproval of his pugnacity towards Westminster – what did they expect from a government that says, up front, that it will do a better job of representing, and protecting, Scotland's interests than one that is constrained as the previous coalition governments that deferred to party leaderships in London?

But the worm turned when Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, the Westminster Home Secretary, high-handedly brushed off the suggestion for a cross-Border conference on gun control put to her by Kenny MacAskill, the Holyrood Justice Minister. In knocking back MacAskill, the Home Secretary bit off her nose to spite her face.

Although the most pressing worries about the higher incidences of crimes that feature gun use are different on either side of the Border, the gap is narrowing. At present, air guns are the primary worry in Scotland, as opposed to the heavy-duty pistols and shotguns used in England in drive-by shootings, commonly drug-related. But increasingly in Scotland guns are beginning to play a part in thefts, extortion and murder.

People know this, and responded positively to the Scottish Justice Secretary's initiative, this being a good time to get to grips with a potentially devastating criminal development before it gets a grip on us. In this case, the Holyrood minister is the man in the white hat.

But the row over local income tax is much more confused, as I prophesied during the election. Firstly, it's not local. John Swinney has already said what every council will charge – 3p in the pound. Secondly, that amount per payer won't raise the amount needed by local councils to maintain, let alone improve, facilities and services. And thirdly, it could well prove impossible to bolt on a tax on income without being able to adjust the tax take from all our different forms of taxation.

There's also the disputed £400 million, paid as a rebate from Westminster, that filled the gap left by people who're too poor to pay council tax. Westminster argues that if the council tax is dumped in favour of local income tax by Holyrood, there's no need for a rebate. Holyrood says the £400m is part of the Scottish block grant, needed by the Scottish Government for distribution to councils. The SNP were daft to propose such a distorted form of local income tax, but Labour in Westminster is being cruelly bloody-minded in making people in Scotland pay for the SNP's ill thought-out manifesto promise.

Not kids' stuff
TO paraphrase the Neil Sedaka golden oldie, growing up is hard to do. What with treacherous hormones, mood swings, plooks, frizzy hair, exams and exasperating parents, the best years of your life can be lonely and confused.

In my young days, this ended somewhere in the mid-teens. According to a survey published this week, kids are all but grown up by the age of eleven.

Better diet and pre-natal care result in earlier physical maturation . . . but where's the proof of faster emotional development, or better judgement in coping with the pressures of the consumerist society?

Advertisers, leave them kids alone!

Andy at our service
FANTASTIC Andy Murray! To beat the world's number one with such aplomb lifted the spirits of his fellow Scots in much the same way as Jim Baxter did when he and the rest of the Scotland team showed the World Cup holders how to play the beautiful game . . . and let's hope that's the only similarity.