Politics

Alex Salmond is back in Bute House, refreshed and chippered by a much-needed holiday. If 2012 was a year in which the Referendum Guns were first deployed it was still, in the end, something of a phoney war. At the risk of exhausting an easily-exhausted electorate, 2013 should see more action. This week’s column at Think Scotland argues that the SNP need to broaden their vision and approach the campaign with a greater sense of generosity than is sometimes seen. At present they depend too heavily – in my view – on the idea that independence is a way to Tory-proof Scotland. That’s a negative, not a positive, case. Moreover

The Coalition’s decision to publish a Mid-Term review reminded some of Tony Blair’s ill-fated annual reports, which strangely stopped appearing after 2000. Blair’s last report embarrassed him because it contained mistakes: the danger of this document was that while lauding the government’s progress to date, it might also have to accept a number of failures. That wasn’t the case on Monday: in fact, the report itself was largely a paraphrase of every government policy announced so far, which was quite Blairite in itself as it sought to dress up old announcements as new plans. There was no admission of failures, or at least not until David Cameron’s adviser Patrick Rock

Ill prepared, ill suited and irrelevant — that’s the conclusion a new report on Britain’s cyber defences. In a scathing analysis, the House of Commons Defence Committee’s demands the government take the cyber threat more seriously: ‘The Government needs to put in place — as it has not yet done — mechanisms, people, education, skills, thinking and policies which take it into both the opportunities, and the vulnerable, which cyber presents. It is time the government approached this subject with vigour.’ The constantly evolving threat from hackers has left the government struggling to stay one step ahead of hackers. Their last initiative — the Cyber Reservists — is less bringing in highly