The C Diff outbreak at Vale of Leven has been a serious issue for Labour to test its mettle as an effective opposition. This is precisely the kind of 'event' that government ministers fear, when they need to be seen as having taken action, as getting control of a situation long after it's too late, of showing appropriate contrition and empathy for the bereaved, and all while there is a little bug wreaking havoc, over which ministers can't hope to have any control.

While pressing home the Scottish Government's discomfort on the issue, it was odd that Wendy Alexander opted not to ask about it at First Minister's Questions last Thursday - while Annabel Goldie and Nicol Stephen did. Perhaps she felt enough had been said when her colleagues accused the government of a 'sinister' role and the mother of all cover ups. The SNP was lame in its outrage at Labour for playing party politics with this issue. As if an SNP opposition team wouldn't have done exactly the same as Labour. The only difference is that they would have done it better.
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Scottish Labour has been filling some of the vacancies in its backroom team, particularly on the media front, but it is some way off being a model of message clarity. Gavin Yates, head of communications for the shadow cabinet (and MSP group?), was joined by Simon Pia, spokesman for group leader Wendy Alexander, and more recently Andrew MacFadyen has joined, from Channel Four News, as director of press and broadcasting, along with Rami Okasha, a former candidate and student leader, who is head of communications at party headquarters. Which of them speaks for the party? Take your pick. But on the evidence so far, it doesn't yet look a whole lot like joined up opposition.
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It seems one of our regular contributors to The Herald's politics discussion forums has been moonlighting as a script-writer for the Stone of Destiny, premiered to a stellar audience at the Edinburgh Film Festival during the weekend. A fine cast was let down by screenplay as clunkily subtle as a Hillman Imp cobbled together on a bad day at Linwood. For instance, we learn, from Billy 'Hobbit' Boyd that the reason Scots are not fired up for the cause of home rule is because we don't think, and we're too busy. Yes, it really is that simple.
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Labour has never been in the running for the Henley by-election, caused by Boris Johnson's departure for London city hall. But a new humiliation awaits if one high street bookmaker is correct in saying the Government's candidate is on course to lose its deposit.
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As ithers see us, in the Jamaica Gleaner, where David Jessop of the Caribbean Council has been reflecting on a visit of High Commissioners to Holyrood earlier this month:

"The Scottish Parliament is unusually accessible and transparent to the Scottish people; it is socially driven and has a membership that is almost one-third female. Its members do not have the remoteness or, for the most part, the confrontational political style that Westminster has. Its chamber is U-shaped and the process is more given to consensus. The language of Parliament is not archaic, and it is strikingly family-friendly with large numbers of schoolchildren visiting and sitting in the public galleries of the chamber.

"For the Anglophone Caribbean locked into the Westminster model with all of its formality, confrontational style, arcane practice and its implied remoteness from the people, Scotland's parliamentary system and style offers a model worth studying, not least to see whether there might be ways in which adoption of best practice could rejuvenate Caribbean parliamentary democracy.

"Clearly, Scotland is not the Caribbean, but if the high commissioners' visit to Scotland indicated anything, it was that there are important devolved and modern consensual and socially oriented models of governance in the United Kingdom that any nation which has inherited the British model might usefully learn more from."

Anyone for a twinning arrangement with Tobago?