A Scottish tragedy? Blame the Tories

ANYBODY else puzzled by the use of the term "bail out" to describe the EU supporting the Greek economy? You bail out when a boat is sinking; the aim is to remove as much water as possible. In the Greek crisis, the EU is trying to pour as much money as necessary into the vast amphora that is the Greek treasury. It's not so much a bail-out as a bail-in.

THE snag is that the Greek-treasury amphora is actually a colander. And the reason for that is that millions of Greeks think it is their divine right to get as much as possible out of their system without paying a euro in. Take the reader who calls himself "Lucky Man." He lives in Greece and emailed me a couple of days ago, declaring "Greece is a great place to live." He defends the Greeks' reluctance to pay tax on the grounds that they have no tax-free earnings threshold like the £10,600 allowance we enjoy in the UK. If Britain had the same rules as Greece, he says, "you might choose to 'lose' some of your income." What Lucky Man is actually saying is that Greece is a great place to live - so long as you don't pay your taxes. If that is still the mind-set in Greece, the sooner the EU bail-out / bail-in is stopped, the better.

TYPE "Alphabet Ltd" into Google and you get tens of thousands of entries which suggests that Alphabet is a very popular name for companies. This week, mighty Google announced that it has created a new holding company - to be called Alphabet. BMW, the German car maker, has already pointed out that it has a company of that name. The trademark implications are enormous. I foresee endless legal challenges. The lawyers, as always, will have a field day.

SCOTLAND is a foreign country: they do things differently there. From the outset, the Glasgow bin-lorry disaster was, to English eyes, very odd. Six pedestrians perished when the lorry hurtled into the festive crowds three days before Christmas. But immediately there was a strange consensus that this was a communal tragedy and not a single Scottish person could be blamed. Indeed, the very idea of seeking blame was somehow an affront to the community and deeply unScottish. Those who went online to demand answers were shouted down and told that everything must be left to the Fatal Accident Inquiry. But in February, before the FAI had even convened, the Crown Office, seemingly swept along in the no-blame mindset, announced that there would be no criminal prosecutions. Since then, at the inquiry, it has been alleged that the driver suffered numerous dizzy spells, visited his GP 300 times and lied on job applications. There seems plenty of culpability. So whom will history blame?

GIVEN Scotland's febrile political atmosphere, I can see this ending with the blame being put on inadequate driver vetting owing to that old chestnut "lack of resources" which is, of course, all the fault of those wicked Tories who hold the purse-strings in Westminster. Do not be surprised if it passes into Scottish folklore that the guilty man in the Glasgow disaster was David Cameron.

JULIET Blaxland lives in a cliff top cottage in Suffolk which, as the cliff erodes, is doomed to tumble into the sea 10 or 15 years from now. Asked on iPM (Radio 4) whether the prospect alarmed her, she replied: "We have all got a cliff coming towards us anyway." Sobering stuff.