My dear friend, former parliamentarian and all-round good guy John Finnie used to tell me: if the police service was a restaurant and you complained about the food, the waiter would get the sack. For no matter how engrained the problems were with the management, kitchen, the chefs, staff shortages, or quality of ingredients to hand, the last point of contact could be sacrificed to disguise all other failures. As a metaphor for policing it was perfect. Some 20 years after John shared these words of wisdom our legislature, it seems, wants to make it even easier to sack waiters.

The Scottish Parliament will today do one of the things it’s become rather to adept at in recent years. It will have a motherhood and apple pie debate as the imaginatively titled Police (Ethics, Conduct and Scrutiny) (Scotland) Bill faces its final hurdles. The debate and votes of course entirely missing the point – but as is often the case – that’s entirely the point.

Fresh from her weekend sales pitch, the Justice Secretary will deploy straw man after straw man as she tells Parliament of the need to sack more police officers in pursuit of the impossible quest of perfection in public confidence in policing; neglecting of course to mention that the same promises have been made with every change to such rules since the beginning of time (including the last three under her current government).

Today’s debate will no doubt hear of Dame Eilish Angiolini who unsurprisingly agrees with her own recommendations from her earlier review of police discipline processes south of the Border that police officers should be held hostage in jobs they want to leave and aren’t wanted in, as sacking them feels more vengeful and in line with the public appetite for blood than “letting them resign”. The rather inconvenient truth this........

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