The suggestion that the Conservatives should split off the Scottish end of the party has been doing the rounds of the blogs recently. There's probably nothing in the story, which has the ring of an off the cuff comment which has been blown out of all proportion. This doesn't stop it being an interesting idea though. The Scottish end of the party is something of an embarrassment for the rest of the Conservatives - a constant reminder that they are almost completely impotent north of the border. The Scottish Conservatives are probably equally embarrassed by the UK party, who play the part of an all-purpose bogeyman for the other Scottish parties, to be wheeled out to frighten the children with stories of the Thatcherite terror.

But if we just stand back and look at this for a minute, what is this actually going to achieve? Are the Scottish people suddenly going to take up free markets and small government when they listen to an Edinburgh-based Conservative party? Of course they're not. The Scottish people are wholly wedded to the idea of socialism. They think that free markets are something that happen in England. It's just not done up here. That's why we have five parties (Labour, SNP, LibDems, Green, SSP) offering more or less socialist platforms and the Conservatives who might as well be standing on a platform of genital warts for all.

Scotland, the country, needs to be cut free. Then it can go through the pain that will cure it of its delusion. Try socialism. Try it again. Then try it some more, and if that doesn't work then keep on trying it just a few more times. The turmoil and despair that this will create will act as a kind of mask so that when a radical new free market approach is announced, nobody will recall that a long-forgotten party called the Conservatives were advocating just such a policy many years before, not that they were widely reviled for it by the very people who now declared it the road to redemption.