FREQUENTLY, I read fellow columnists in this newspaper and journalists writing about “culture wars”. The phrase is rarely defined and often employed to avoid addressing the detailed arguments of feminists who want to defend rights based on biological sex and LGB people who wish to defend their legal right to be same-sex attracted. If you are sick of this issue and want to stop reading at this point, please don’t and instead try to conjure up a picture of how you would feel if your right to discuss and campaign for independence was under attack and you were stopped from speaking out to defend it or from meeting with others who are like-minded.

First the good news. Devolution is not under as big a threat as some fear. When David Frost, the arrogant unelected right wing Tory peer who messed up the Brexit deal, used current SNP difficulties to say it should be rolled back, even the Scottish Tories disowned his opportunist intervention.

It goes without saying that anybody under suspicion of criminality is entitled to the presumption of innocence. It’s a cornerstone of the rule of law in a democratic society and it also makes good sense. In recent times we have seen commentators ending up with egg on their faces when they assumed that a leading political figure was guilty only for a jury to acquit him of all charges after actually hearing the evidence.

As Easter approaches, I found myself thinking about Alastair Campbell’s famous advice to Tony Blair – “We don’t do God”. Our new FM changed all that in Scotland when he posted a photo of himself and his family praying in Bute House at the end of their daily Ramadan fast. It was an arresting image illustrating the diversity of modern Scotland although some people did wonder whether Kate Forbes leading her family in Christian prayer would have met with a similarly positive reaction.