Only three weeks ago the price of petrol was hovering around 120p a litre, now it seems to have fallen to about 110p. The effect of supply and demand in a free market.

It's easy to blame the oil companies for expensive fuel – although most people are aware the reason we have nearly the most expensive petrol in the world is due to our taxing politicians rather than oil firms.

Still, when BP announced recently a big increase in profits it was not long before it and others became a target for a windfall tax that could be used by politicians for all sorts of electorally pleasing schemes.

But why a windfall tax – are there not both good business years and bad?

On a smaller scale, imagine you had an ice-cream van as a business. You know what the British summer is like, unpredictable, often wet, but the British public has an appetite for ice cream and tends to buy it at a steady rate. You make a decent living out of it, pay your taxes and might look to invest by expanding your number of vans. Then along comes a stonker of a summer and your profits are far better than you expected, you pay your larger tax bill and you weigh up the options of how to invest what's left.

Of course it could have been the other way round. The year might have been the wettest in living memory, your van might have been put off the road by someone driving into the back of it – any number of circumstances of chance.

Does it make sense then to face an extra, so-called windfall tax in the year of a brilliant hot summer, but be given no respite in the wettest, worst, trading conditions?

Some politicians like Alex Salmond, and various left-wing Labour backbenchers, support a windfall tax. I'm not sure if Salmond supports an oil company windfall tax because he thinks it will appeal to the atavistic side of motorists who are paying for expensive petrol and despise the oil company profits, or if he really believes it makes good economics – or both. The idea, however, that the SNP can ever again be called a pro-business party – when it would punish the very industry that it relies upon for the economic future of an independent Scotland – is nothing short of laughable.

I'm glad the SNP is in power. With every passing day the evidence from its actions in government illustrate how it would run an independent Scotland – right into the sands of economic stagnation, ironically dependent on England as its largest export market.

Nuts to Michael Gove
THIS week, Michael Gove, the Tory shadow education secretary at Westminster delivered a speech about the family in which he railed against lads' magazines such as Nuts and Zoo. He blamed lads mags for "a very narrow conception of beauty and a shallow approach towards women" by today's youth.

Why he said this remains unclear, as he didn't propose banning the mags, placing them under the counter or requiring them to be censored in any way. Not so much a dog whistle campaign as a wolf whistle to the priggish prudes that would censor or ban them, and no doubt close down Ann Summers, that Tories want their support.

It's a dangerous game he's playing. I've never bought Nuts, Zoo or any other lads' mag, but I suspect they are less shallow and harmful than all those mags that tell girls that they're too fat and should go on this week's diet, and if that doesn't work, then there's always next week's.

We can all find faults in most people's reading material, but the last people I would ask for an opinion are holier-than-thou Tory politicians. Frankly, Gove displays a very narrow conception of freedom and a shallow approach towards the electorate – that comes with reading the mags with no pictures that he usually writes for.

Officially out of touch
SO our council can only afford to install three pedestrian crossings a year – meaning that it will take as much as 85 years for the last one on the list to be tackled.

For me, there are three things that this story identifies. The first is how our local council is disconnected from the people it serves in that it has its priorities (trams) while the public has it own (safer road crossings). The second is the council has to lose its love of big monuments to municipal power (trams) and run better its existing services (schools, roads, street cleaning). The third is that whoever is in power, the council never seems to change.

Maybe the answer to these three observations is that it's the officials that really run the show?