THE UK Government has difficulty understanding the meaning of the phrase “no detriment”. This was a key phrase in the Smith Commission report to which the Westminster Government signed up and, having refused to acknowledge that the voters of Scotland upped their expectations with the pandafication of the Unionist parties in last May’s Westminster elections, the Smith Commission remains the last official word in devolution.

However, Davie Cameron and the UK Treasury now want to redefine “no detriment” to mean £7 billion quid’s worth of detriment, and are upset that the Scottish Government isn’t detrimenting itself sufficiently. They want more mental detritus from Scotland.

I don’t know about you, but I had always thought that the first rule of traps was that you don’t advertise your trap with big signs saying TRAP all lit up in neon by yoonatic journalists. Now the UK Government is upset that the Scottish Government isn’t obliging by walking into the trap. This is unfair, especially after the Wile E Coyotes of the UK Treasury went to all the bother of painting a railway tunnel on a rock and getting a sign saying Free Birdseed from the Acme trap catalogue while they sat there on their rocket sled. And then that John Swinney just goes meep meep and runs off with the fiscal settlement while the express train of Scottish opinion flattens what’s left of support for the Looney Yoons British Government.

Having failed to get their trap to work on account of the fact that they’d forgotten that traps only work when the trappee doesn’t know they’re there, the UK Government is now begging the Scottish Government to meet them halfway. Instead of cutting the Scottish budget by £7bn on top of the cuts that George Osborne is going to impose on us anyway, the UK Treasury will still cut the Scottish budget by £2.5bn but will throw in a frayed Pokémon card and three pieces of bubblegum, one of which hasn’t been chewed. It’s still a trap, but with a small amount of stale confectionary as extra bait, followed by Type 2 diabetes and a sugar crash.

The not so cunning plan of the UK Government in its really-we-are-sincere commitment to further devolution was to offer the Scottish parliament a brand new shiny bicycle. Here, take this bicycle, then you can ride further into devolution than you ever thought possible, they said. Only the price of giving Scotland the bicycle was to cut Holyrood’s legs off, then Westminster could tut that Scotland had all these lovely new powers but wasn’t using them. What they’re now attempting is to give Holyrood the bicycle and they’re promising not to cut Holyrood’s legs off, they’re just going to break them in six places. This is what Westminster means by meeting Scotland halfway.

That’s those Scots and their grievances, what are they like? This is the Unionist definition of grievance which, like the Unionist definition of no detriment, doesn’t mean what everyone else thinks it means. In this instance grievance means that Scotland is opposing unfair Conservative policies that we didn’t vote for and refusing to cut our fiscal throats in order to placate Tory backbenchers from Kent.

Scotland shouldn’t be meeting Westminster halfway. The commitment to no detriment was all that was left after the watering down of devolution of the Smith Commission. Just about every other commitment that the Unionist parties made during the last days of the referendum has been wriggled out of, ignored, or voted down. Scotland’s MPs are excluded from voting on English issues, but English MPs dominate Scottish Questions. We still have control of traffic signs, but everything else gets a red light.

The stalling of the devo-deal came in the same week that scientists proved the theory of relativity with the discovery of gravity waves. The discovery came thanks to advances in the exploration of the cold distant depths of space, devoid of human life. There are two massive black holes locked in a cosmic dance sucking in all energy and matter until they destroy everything around them in a toxic burst of radioactivity. But enough about Labour and the Tories. Scotland can escape their orbit.

A Government elected by the people of Scotland to defend and further the interests of Scotland cannot agree to a settlement which is detrimental to Scotland, no matter how much Westminster complains.

The Conservatives are convinced that the SNP is so desperate for extra powers for Holyrood that it will accept a deal giving extra powers that only damage and diminish Scotland’s room for movement. But the only parties willing to damage Scotland’s interests in pursuit of short term political gain are the Unionist ones. If the Scotland Bill is detrimental to Scotland’s interests, it’s not a Bill that Scotland wants or needs. Let the Coyote get caught in his own trap.