The Scottish public has been invited to send in their suggestions for a series of meaningful phrases, sayings or quotations that will be carved for all time into the very fabric of the new Scottish Parliament.

The most popular submissions will initially be displayed on hoardings around the site while construction work continues, and selected phrases will eventually be incorporated into the building and surrounding area, the idea being to "let the building speak".

Current frontrunners for the phrases/quotes, which will be engraved into stonework or glass or on pavements around the new complex, include;

"Give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another."
Robert Louis Stevenson

"Oh wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us!"
Robert Burns

"Breathes there a man with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said, "This is my own, my native land!""
Sir Walter Scott

All very laudable and stirring sentiments we're sure, but oh so predictable, parochial and typically romantic. Sentimental Scottish tripe, in other words.

Let's get real. We're talking about the building which will house our politicians after all. The most expensively constructed nest of vipers ever built.

Here, then, are a few suggestions which FirstFoot believe to be more in keeping with the realities of 21st century politics, and which we have duly submitted in the nonsensical hope that they will receive fair and democratic consideration before the final choice is made.

"Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges even when there's no river."
Nikita Kruschev

"If you can't convince them, confuse them."
Harry S. Truman

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
J.K.Galbraith

"You can't fool all of the people all the time."
Abraham Lincoln

"The only good government is a bad one in a hell of a fright."
Joyce Cary

"This building cost fucking HOW MUCH??!!!"
A Taxpayer