The best satire at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Politics is everywhere in Edinburgh. It’s embedded in the architecture of the streets. The New Town, built in the latter half of the 18th century, is a granite endorsement of the Act of Union, a stone pledge of loyalty to Britain’s new Germanic monarchy in London. The layout forms an oblong grid. The horizontals of George Street, Princes Street and Queen Street intersect at right angles with Charlotte Street and Hanover Street. This makes the approximate proportions of a flag. There are rumours that a scheme was proposed to dig two diagonal avenues, meeting in a central X, which would have turned the New Town into a colour-free Union Jack. My hunch is that this is a fantasy dreamed up retrospectively by ingenious nationalists.

Politicians love treating Edinburgh as if it were a train set in the attic. In the 1970s, the council looked enviously at Glasgow and its sunken motorway running through the built-up centre.