Foot in mouth disease - it's catching!

There's a certain irony about Robert White's Herald letter (4 October), in which he accuses Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray of "hilariously contrived distortions" and excoriates a "Labour-led UK government negligence that allowed Scotland’s banks to self-destruct and, as a vassal state [sic], Scotland could only stand by and watch in horror, legally powerless to avoid it".

However, amid Mr White's rather colourful language, the following rings a particular bell: "An independent Scotland could have avoided the mess by following a path of its own more traditional financial probity and rectitude,"

Which echoes the words of no less than Alex Salmond, who on the eve of May 2007's Holyrood elections - thus not much more than a year before the near collapse of Scotland's major banks - said: “We are pledging a light-touch regulation suitable to a Scottish financial sector with its outstanding reputation for probity, as opposed to one like that in the UK, which absorbs huge amounts of management time in ‘gold-plated’ regulation.”

I'm inclined to agree with Mr White's assessement regarding Iain Gray having one or even both feet in his mouth, and about reappraising his intelligence, but clearly none of us is perfect.

(Published as a letter in today's Herald, minus the final paragraph.)