The existence of Holyrood's secret "banning chamber" is only ever hinted at. When you bring the subject up, politicians tend to scuttle away, murmuring manically to themselves. And, like Auld Nick himself, just when you cast doubt on its existence, it appears behind you.

Last week, the sentinels who keep guard over the necromancy of the banning room handed down another of their strange and unusual edicts. From now on, there shall be no more killing of seals - ever. These cute and furry marine dwellers are very uncommon across vast swaths of Scotland, probably on account of there being no sea water. Either that or they have been beaten into oblivion by the nature-hating Visigoths of Calton and the Garngad. Hence the banning order.

Some of you may have felt that the impending global Armageddon of swine flu may be taxing the brains of all our MSPs, but you'd be wrong. It seems the injuring or killing of our seals has been deemed a matter of major concern for the nation just as Scotland is gaining enviable world headlines for saying wise and steadfast things about pig fever.

The welfare of seals is very high on the Green party agenda, and as the Green party has become the conscience of all of Scotland's politicians, on account of being cute and furry and of no consequence to anyone, their little idiosyncrasies tend to make it on to the Holyrood statute book.

There is a very noble tradition of banning things in the 10 years of the new parliament's tenure. Smart, successful Scotland has no peers in the practice of forbidding, forfeiting and classifying. Our MSPs wasted very little time in using their limited powers to insinuate themselves into the lives of their citizens. It started when Mike Watson, while representing the people of Castlemilk, brought forward a bill to ban hunting with hounds. It was Holyrood's first-ever private member's bill and it left the good people of this benighted and sprawling arrondissement to Glasgow's south in a state of bemused fascination. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Castlemilk are poverty, drugs, knives and alcohol; not once have the locals ever heard a huntsman's bugle. Yet the only equine menaces that Mr Watson could see were wearing silly hats, red coats and looking for foxes.

After that, it became a feeding frenzy as MSPs and councillors realised how easy it was to ban things. Soon there was a bill to ban fur farming. And only after the legislation was passed was it discovered that, er ... there were no fur farms in Scotland. Nevertheless, they harrumphed, it would serve as a warning to les autres ... just in case anyone was considering the establishment of these obscene rural charnel houses.

And when our politicians discovered what a fat little country we had become they became obsessed about obesity. Soon, every MSP and councillor in the land was trying to rid us of this national embarrassment. Fizzy drinks would be banned from schools and hamburgers would be replaced by couscous and guacamole suppers. Indeed, the selling of lemonade to impressionable youngsters almost became a capital offence. There was a proposal to rewrite Enid Blyton's Famous Five books to delete all references to the vile substance.

And not only were we the Fattest Small Nation in the World, we were also, according to Jack McConnell and his acolytes, the Most Sectarian Small Country in the World. And so an entire range of hate laws was arranged, sorted, packaged and sent to the four corners of the kingdom. Now the offence of chibbing a fellow citizen would not be deemed to be as serious an offence as chibbing him while calling him a Protestant, Catholic or Anabaptist bastard. Uttering any of those unspeakably sordid prefixes could see you do two extra years in the pokey.

The forbidders and their fundamentalist acolytes had the fire of righteousness in their gimlet eyes as they sought to place their fiery crosses all over Scotland. Emboldened by their astonishing banning successes they now sought out the big one: smoking cigarettes. Even when a nationwide public consultation rejected overwhelmingly an outright ban on smoking in all public places, they still went ahead and did it anyway, fortified by the conviction that, spiritually, they were right and that poor people would thank them in years to come for granting them another 10 years in the urban squalor that a generation of Labour government had bequeathed to them and their children.

Now no one is saying that the roots of the recession in Scotland started when hundreds of small pubs were forced to close as smokers began drinking at home. But do you think the Scottish government would have forced an outright ban in the first months of 2009?

Meanwhile, the denizens of Holyrood's secret chamber of the banned wring their hands and seek out other practices to forbid. Didn't someone hear of an Asbo being dished out to an English couple last week for fornicating too vigorously? A shagging curfew? Now wouldn't that be wonderful.