The best satire at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Politics is everywhere in Edinburgh. It’s embedded in the architecture of the streets. The New Town, built in the latter half of the 18th century, is a granite endorsement of the Act of Union, a stone pledge of loyalty to Britain’s new Germanic monarchy in London. The layout forms an oblong grid. The horizontals of George Street, Princes Street and Queen Street intersect at right angles with Charlotte Street and Hanover Street. This makes the approximate proportions of a flag. There are rumours that a scheme was proposed to dig two diagonal avenues, meeting in a central X, which would have turned the New Town into a colour-free Union Jack. My hunch is that this is a fantasy dreamed up retrospectively by ingenious nationalists.

Politicians love treating Edinburgh as if it were a train set in the attic. In the 1970s, the council looked enviously at Glasgow and its sunken motorway running through the built-up centre. Plans were drafted for a copycat scheme in the capital. The most ambitious project involved a six-lane super-highway tunnelling through Calton Hill and soaring over Princes Street on concrete stilts. This ambitious folly might have been built had it not been vigorously opposed by a plucky young Labour councillor named Alistair Darling.

The latest scheme, conceived in 2003 and still unfinished, is a tramline with just 15 stops. Roadworks have snarled up the traffic for so long that the queues of angry, beeping cars have become a permanent fixture of the city. In 2009, with the project mired in delays and controversy, the council mounted a shrine on Princes Street — in the form of a motionless tram — which they hoped would inspire faith among the doubters and inculcate a belief that the promised trolleybuses would one day trundle upon the face of the earth.