We can do what by ourselves? Leaf' it out...

Election leaflet time is always a rather comical couple of weeks if you can allow yourself to properly look beyond the five main parties running for Holyrood. The SNP, Labour, Lib Dems, Conservatives and Greens all aim to make their efforts on track, on message and fairly friendly and safe. They can fail in some of these areas, but rarely do the leaflets include anything worth writing about other than, if you're in a particularly nippy mood, spelling mistakes.

The same cannot be said for the fringe parties. Two standouts from this campaign to have come my way are those from The Liberal Party and The Scottish National Front. The former promises to legalise all drugs, give grants to every student over 16, and prevent criminalisation of internet downloaders - no, a first year undergrad isn't responsible for the pledges - and the latter, from the NF, calls for an immediate halt to all immigration, a process of "humane" repatriation and reintroducing capital punishment for terrorism.

Now, I could spend hundreds - hell, thousands - of words explaining just why so much of the above  is so detached from reality; how you argue the merits of heroin for sale at the off-license or go about deporting every immigrant from a country that has it's entire history based on, yeah, you guessed it: immigrants, are just two of the questions I'd have to ask.

But what is also interesting, if not more so than the bizarreness of the politics, is that these parties seem to have forgotten they are standing for the Scottish parliament when producing these leaflets.

The Liberal Party talk about the UK banking system, foreign policy and EU membership, while the Scottish National Front are focussed solely on immigration - all policy areas over which Holyrood has no control. Where the NF candidate says "If elected, the NF would..." what he really means to say - or rather needs to - is "If we were standing for Westminster, the NF would..." But he doesn't. The leaflet gives the impression Holyrood can do these things - as does The Liberal Party's effort.

Either these candidates know this, but include the material because they think it sounds good and will appeal to a general strand of public opinion that will overlook the technicalities of whether any of this can be done - a Westminster protest vote of sorts (you know, the same appalling idea Ed Miliband tried again today to adopt on different grounds) - or they themselves are ignorant of the powers Holyrood holds. I wouldn't like to presume which is which.