Has the First Minister been raiding the Ukip wardrobe?

THE Scottish Government’s ­legislation to introduce minimum unit pricing (MUP) for alcohol is a high-profile controversial policy that has generated much debate in Scotland and beyond.

ASK Ali Abbasi how much he spends on petrol in a year and he will roll his eyes, hunch his shoulders, and wearily recount the sacrifices he and his family have been forced to make. A father-of-two, it costs him £83 to fill his Vauxhall Vectra.

The Farage stushie in and around the Canon’s Gait pub has already entered Scottish political folklore. Shortly after it was over and the Ukip leader had been escorted off the premises in a polis meat wagon, thirsty hacks retreated to the Holyrood bar to swap “war stories”.

WITHIN weeks of being elected to the new Scottish Parliament in 1999 I learned the hard way how fraught issues of identity politics could be. I found myself on the front pages of most newspapers twice in one week for a stance on opposite sides of the same identity coin and managed to irk nationalists and unionists in equal measure. Nice.

THE case of Kermit Gosnell, the abortionist convicted of three charges of first degree murder in America, has brought home to some people a few of the ­realities of abortion, which is now a ­global holocaust promoted pre-eminently by the same government whose laws incongruously condemned Gosnell.

H&M is not, for me, a happy place. I associate it with fruitlessly searching for a school skirt acceptable to a teenager and getting up very early in the morning to queue for a Marni jacket.

SINCE the mid-1970s an important tenet of our system of law has been the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act.

IT WAS Otto Inglis I felt sorry for. Nobody cared about Otto, with his bright smile and his “wows”. While Ukip leader Nigel Farage held court, Otto bounced around, working the edge of the room.

WHAT now unites Alex Salmond, the CBI, Sir Mervyn King, the OECD and the Federation of Small Businesses? It’s the economy, stupid.

THE expected retirement this week of Martin Gilbert as chairman of transport operator FirstGroup follows similar announcements over the last month from Lord Smith at Weir, Sir Win Bischoff at Lloyds Banking Group and Richard Findlay at STV. The guard is clearly changing.

DIANE Abbott MP, is a woman I have some trouble taking seriously since my retinas were scarred watching as she and Michael Portillo writhed together, OK sat, on the This Week sofa, and also that time she said private schools were bad before promptly sending her son to one.

OK, TIME out. Given all the nonsense in golf right now – Vijay Singh’s use of antler spray and subsequent propensity for litigation, slower and slower play, the rumbling aftermath of Tiger’s Masters drop and the banning or not of so-called “belly” and “anchored” putters – the time has come to ask the obvious question.

I have never met Sir Alex Ferguson, so what you are about to read will probably rate as mere crumbs in the great feast of words dedicated to the man.

Deadlines have passed and votes have been cast in the end-of-season awards merry-go-round with the humble scribblers soon to dish out their gongs after the players did so last weekend.

THERE are three dates between now and the end of the season that are of huge importance to the future of Pat Fenlon and Hibs.

Gordon Brown’s role in the Better Together campaign is the focus of today’s cartoon

PREPARATIONS for the by-election in Aberdeen Donside to replace the late Brian Adam are up and running.

BARRISTER Barbara Hewson’s approach to tackling crime is so obviously effective, I’m surprised some vote-hungry politician hasn’t mooted it before.

AMONG the ragtag-and-bobtail of Jurassic socialists, fading Blair babes and public-teat sucklings that calls itself “Civic Scotland” it has long been an article of faith that Britain’s nuclear deterrent is “immoral” and the fact that it desecrates Scottish soil is “obscene”.