Feeling blue over a badge of dishonour

EBAY is the greatest marketplace since the beginning of life on our planet. Anyone with access to the internet can offer to sell whatever they want to anyone almost anywhere in the world.

Entering the word "Edinburgh" yielded 4389 items, of which the more pricey was a pair of Westlife tickets for the Castle concert for £350. There are also tons of Scottish Parliament scarves for £1. Some people make their living from eBay retailing, including the writing of books on how to make your living from eBay retailing.

The limits to what can be sold are defined by eBay, which says "sellers may not list items that promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial or religious intolerance, or items that promote organisations with such views", along with items from certain countries with which trade is prohibited under United States law, e.g. North Korea, Libya and Iran.

So if your uncle from Tehran decides to auction off that trendy coffee percolator he's had since the 1970s, it's back to the classified ads.

Over the years many odd things have been bought and sold on the site, including the right to permanently tattoo an advertisement on a woman's forehead (sold! For $10,000), a single cornflake for £1.20, a round of golf with Tiger Woods ($425,000) and a resort in Kentucky for $4.2 million. Shortly, the ranch-style Memphis home of Elvis Presley will hit the eBay hammer.

Various attempts to sell organs for transplant have been thwarted by the eBay authorities, but only after the listings first appeared. It is because the system generally acts after items have been listed that naughtiness arises, from art students attempting to sell their virginity to pay for their course of study, to parents trying to sell their children.

EBay wins all round because each such highly publicised controversy is an advertisement for the $54 billion company.

(It is worth noting that no-one has as yet taken the unscrupulous step of placing the Scottish Parliament building on eBay; you can imagine the details: "One large modern high-school type building, not currently in use, would benefit from repairs, 129 less-than-careful owners".)

For all the oddities that have cropped up on eBay, none seems to have provoked as much controversy as the recent lot of Blue Peter badges.

Apparently, people were manufacturing the little decorations, thus allowing almost anyone to masquerade as one of those types who write clever letters to children's television programmes and/or collect 17,000 aluminium cans to help save the panda. I had no idea that a Blue Peter badge had any benefit attached to it whatsoever, other than making you a readily identifiable target for school bullies.

It turns out that one of these badges gets you access to all manner of attractions, from Edinburgh Zoo to Madame Tussauds. So any parents with sufficient children can see how £50 is not a bad price for a never-ending supply of days out.

That is to say, it is easy to see how parents could see that taking part in a criminal act - fraud - has its benefits. They were even happy to convince their children to sully their souls.

Let's face it - the children must have known that they weren't entitled to wear the Blue Peter badges, unless they were somehow convinced by their already corrupt parents that they were receiving their badges for something trivial like getting to school on time, or eating all their yoghurt.

So not only were these online mums and dads participating in a fraud themselves, they were quite happy to convince their children of the benefits of crime as well. Here you are Timmy, put this badge on and we can pretend You're Worth It.

It might be round about now that the sound of the Poor Put-Upon Parents Drum can be heard, beating out the trad.arr tune of Do You Know How Difficult It Is To Raise Children Blah Blah Blah. That tune may have a ring of truth to it but it should not extend to facilitating a dance of illicit behaviour.

If people wonder where big criminals come from - you know the type, people who think it's OK to sell peerages, or allot themselves public funds - then you need look no longer than the way that little people are brought up and how they are taught to recognise right and wrong.

EBay has shown itself more than happy to co-operate with the authorities when confronted with evidence of wrong-doing. The suppliers and buyers of the counterfeit Blue Peter badges should be tracked down and - if prosecution proves difficult - at least publicly outed. Encouraging children to participate in fraud is not something that should be smiled upon, regardless how trivial such behaviour appears.

MSPs should be barred from running licensed premises

IT sometimes seems that the Scottish Parliament is so dumb it is almost pathetic to attack it. Yet on a weekly basis there seems good reason to.

Having allocated themselves first a subsidised bar and then money for an appalling and totally ineffective revamp, MSPs now seem willing to admit that maybe, just maybe, the running of licensed premises (let alone a country) is beyond them. Their arrogance in thinking that they are entitled to a private bar and that it should be subsidised by ordinary taxpayers is stunning.

Edinburgh has demonstrated that it has a number of highly qualified, intelligent and entrepreneurial pub owners who have changed the face of Auld Reekie. Whether one agrees with much of what they have done - and some of the so-called designer bars could most charitably be described as "regional-looking" in their smoked glass, pine and brown leather mediocrity - there can be no doubting that these business people know what they are doing. With all due haste the running of the parliament's bar should be handed over to any one of these figures. The prices of the bar should be the same as everyone else has to pay in Edinburgh. Surely MSPs have better things to do than worry about absolute trivia like this.