I, for one, am grateful it is almost over. Being a bit of a political anorak, I usually enjoy the hurly burly of an election campaign. But this one has been totally ruined by the plague of TV "debates" which seemed to proliferate exponentially like microbes in a petri dish. It's now official! Polish has taken precedence over the politics. All substance has finally been sucked out of the serious business of electing the government to be replaced with the political equivalent of mechanically recovered meat bulked out with surplus dairy fat, pumped full of artificial sweeteners and contrived to look like... well... whatever you want it to look like.

The next UK general election will be an iPhone app.

Conservatives: Scottish seats are not needed to rule - The Scotsman

The unionist cabal is insisting yet again that Scotland's voters are irrelevant in the context of a UK parliamentary election.

Echoing arrogant assertions made by Scottish Blue Tory leader, Annabel Goldie, the Scottish Conservative election campaign director, David McLetchie, has stated that his party has the right to rule Scotland even if nobody in the country votes for them.

The sickening thing is that the unionists are right! In UK constitutional terms Scotland can be subject to rule from London by a party which has been comprehensively rejected by the Scottish electorate.

The SNP will be duly grateful to David McLetchie for highlighting this particular aspect of the "union dividend".

A perusal of the so-called Scottish editions of the Sunday papers reveals a striking, and somewhat disturbing fact. Not one of them supports the SNP. In fact, most are firmly if not fanatically opposed to the party that the people of Scotland elected to government.

These newspapers are, of course, perfectly entitled to express an opinion and support whatever party they wish. But the fact that in the mass circulation print media there is not a single voice that accords with the expressed will of the Scottish electorate has to at least cause a quizzical raising of the eyebrows.

Just how relevant are these newspapers to Scotland if, as has been the case with most if not all of them, they actively support the effort by the London-based parties to declare Scotland (along with Wales and Northern Ireland) "irrelevant" in this UK parliamentary election?

How is democracy served by a press which cannot even report accurately, far less sympathetically, on a major political party actively supported by around a third of the electorate and, in all probability, a far larger proportion of the whole population?

Alex Salmond pressed to divulge SNP's minimum pricing level for alcohol

One would have thought that the numpties posing as the opposition at Holyrood would have been keen to avoid this topic given their parties' very evident confusion on the matter. But apparently they feel bound to draw attention to their own ineptitude.

Basically, we have a position where the British Labour Party in England and the English/UK Liberal Democrats support the policy of setting a minimum price per unit of alcohol, while the British Labour Party in Scotland and the Scottish Liberal Democrats oppose the very same policy. A contradiction made all the more curious by the fact that both these parties readily agree that the situation in Scotland regarding alcohol abuse is in particular need of being urgently addressed.

And where are the Blue Tories on this. Well, they appear to be relying on a tired old mantra which was on this occasion dutifully recited by Murdo Fraser, deputy leader of the Scottish Conservatives. It goes like this, "SNP plans for indiscriminate blanket minimum pricing would penalise responsible drinkers, harm the Scotch whisky industry, cost jobs and are illegal."

I leave it to readers to sort out the unsupported assertions from the downright lies.

The SNP's bid to have the courts force the BBC to abide by its own guidelines on fairness and impartiality has failed. And, predictably, the ideological unionists are gloating in a most unseemly fashion over what they see as a victory. But what have they won? What has been gained by this extraordinary endorsement of blatant political bias? What has been achieved?

What was confirmed by the court's decision is that the establishment parties have been handed the power to collude with broadcasters in excluding any dissenting voice that might challenge the cosy two-party duopoly that has lately been shown to be the root of so much political corruption.

Those who gloat over the SNP's failure in this case are the same people who only a few weeks ago were demanding that this whole edifice of sleaze and corruption be pulled down. Now, perversely, they celebrate it being further buttressed by draconian, anti-democratic powers to marginalise those who call for genuine change.

Make no mistake! The entire polity of the UK is undermined by these developments. But it is certainly true to say that this diminishing of democracy is nowhere more strongly felt than in Scotland. Here, I defer to a man vastly better qualified than myself, Ian Hamilton QC,

Think on this.

Every political institution in Scotland has been created by the English Parliament. What it creates it can take away. This applies not only to Holyrood but to the whole framework of our local government. It applies to every function we hold jointly with England. They have the say. We have permission to agree.

We have just seen how it applies to the BBC. We are a democracy but the state broadcasting system elects to give a voice only to the Unionists. This is manifestly unfair. Yet the Court must administer the law as it is handed down from England. Our say is silence.

With these tacky TV shows we are accelerating towards a point where not only the candidates but the policies and even the parties become as irrelevant as the voters. A point where we choose, with minimal intellectual or physical effort, between a carefully calculated number of scientifically selected, endlessly coached, impeccably manicured and theatrically presented celebrity ciphers enunciating professionally scripted platitudes in voices drained of all but the intended synthetic identity.