HOW does the notion that 17 members of a pipsqueak political party - an also-ran that came fourth in an election irrelevant to the majority of the county - could land taxpayers with a £350 million bill, equal to £12 for every worker, strike you as democratic?

Taking the biscuit for such insolence are the ludicrous Liberal Democrats, who are at last living up to Paddy Ashdown's soundbite about them no longer being a party of protest, but a party of power, thanks to them being the ones that Labour, nine short of an overall majority, have to accommodate in a coalition to rule Scotland.

Yet, even with the assistance at last of the supposedly more-democratic proportional representation that they have whined for all these years, the roundly-rejected Lib-Dems have just a handful of members in the new Scottish Parliament.

But they have no shortage of impudence or hypocrisy.

For their price for entering a pact with Labour at Edinburgh is the scrapping in Scotland of the government's plans for £1,000-a-head university tuition fees. But this is a move which, if agreed by Labour with this gun to their heads, would either trigger an unmanageable deluge of English students seeking places in Scottish colleges or, more likely, the remote-control forcing by these "foreign" politicians of the abandonment of plans for fees south of the border as well and a resultant £350 million burden on taxpayers UK-wide.

Fair? Of course, it isn't.

But it is a darned good illustration of how, in politics, nobodies are prepared to grab and abuse power, given the chance.

For ages the loser Lib Dems have rattled on about proportional representation. But even when they get it, and still end up losers, they have no shame about assuming power out of all proportion to their representation - and becoming arrant opportunists prepared to cost a fortune to the majority who reject them at the polls.

No longer a party of protest, but still one of humbugs!

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.