Conservatives have a clause 4 moment - no, really!

Scottish politics grows daily more bizarre. Here, for example, in The Scotsman is an instance of the Tories seeking to municipalise a function of government presently supervised by local private sector interests:

"SCOTLAND'S local economic development companies should be scrapped and "the bulk" of Scottish Enterprise's functions handed to councils, the Scottish Conservatives said yesterday.
Murdo Fraser, the party's deputy leader, said the quango should "at least for now" retain responsibility for Scottish Development International, its overseas arm, and the "co-investment fund" - which invests in new businesses.
But in a speech in Edinburgh, Mr Fraser asked whether the 12 local enterprise companies across Scotland should be abolished, leaving local authorities "to adjudicate on their own needs". He concluded: "I suspect the answer is yes."

Tory Secretary of State Ian Lang set up the local enterprise companies in 1990 in an effort to bring local private sector disciplines to bear on the previously monolithic Scottish Development Agency. Now the Tories - of all political parties - want to deprive local private sector business interests of their inflluence on local economic development and hand it over to local authorities. Even Scottish Labour did not dare suggest such a course of action. Scottish local authorities, with their long traditions of Labour domination, have not usually been regarded as business-friendly, but perhaps Mr Fraser lives in a different world from the rest of us?