It’s very, very easy to take the mick out of your local councillors, puffed-up panjandrums lording it about their communities like the big bloke in the white outfit at the start of The Godfather.

And in authorities like Edinburgh and Glasgow, there are opportunities aplenty to play up to the stereotype, particularly in Edinburgh where, as Scotland’s capital city, no meeting of councillors would be complete without the urgent need to send a message of solidarity/condemnation/hugs and kisses to whatever worldwide cause, conflict or commotion may be du jour.

If the tiniest, most tenuous sinew can be found to link such vital global messaging to local services so much the better. I suppose I was once possibly guilty of such indulgence, in 2018 proposing a motion which effectively threatened to defund the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce because a rush of blood to someone’s head had led to it accepting a membership application from Sputnik, the Russian Government’s Canning Street propaganda outpost which posed as a news agency, because they wanted the subscription dosh.

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This was unacceptable because, I said, Putin’s regime was authoritarian and anti-democratic and the Chamber shouldn’t be offering up its access to the council, and by extension us councillors, as a member benefit. It did the trick and Sputnik got the boot, but did it make any difference to the council’s operations? Not in the slightest.

This was around the time of the Salisbury Poisoning, but four years before the Ukraine war and as world politics has since heated up, so too has the temperature in Edinburgh Council steadily risen, to the point where Thursday’s full council meeting was packed with items with little........

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