They were due to be held on 5 May 2011, but Scottish ministers heeded the advice of the Gould Report and split the Holyrood and local government elections - in order to avoid arepeat of the 2007 count fiasco.
The plan must still be approved by Judge Beckloff, who could put provisions into the custody order designed to prevent arepeat of this month's incidents.
You can imagine how unpopular it would be to add even minimally to our debt problems in order to help rescue Europe, even if in the process we saved ourselves from arepeat of 2008.