LET'S hear it for the big bad bogeyman he's finally won the day.

And a nice big round of applause too for education chiefs at East Renfrewshire Council and parents of Our Lady of the Missions School in Thornliebank without whom his success would not have been possible.

I mean, you just couldn't make it up.

Parents, including Catherine Palmer, below, who wanted to make sure their children used seatbelts on the school bus, boarded it to check and made the service run late - frequently.

Education chiefs, whose ideal world runs to clockwork . . . usually between nine and half past four, were a tad unhappy.

The upshot is parents can board the bus so long as they hold criminal record disclosure certificates - at a cost of £20 each - which they have to pay for themselves.

Dare I suggest that the solution, blatant misuse of a deeply flawed law, is merely a way of ensuring the bus runs to time.

The disclosure system is a con designed to appease unnecessary anxiety and protect officialdom: a hysterical rush to protect children from seen and unseen threats, no matter how unlikely.

The result is as perverse as it was predictable: innocents have to jump hoops to prove their innocence while the guilty carry on pretty much as usual.

It is a well documented fact that most children know their abusers - because they are related - and no mere legislation will ever solve that little conundrum.

Some evidence of official lip service in action? On Friday December 29, in the middle of the festive holidays, Disclosure Scotland sent out a letter explaining a new application form.

Few people would be around to read it, but I have.

To prove applicants are who they claim to be, three forms of identity, one photographic, are required. Occasionally though, Disclosure Scotland concedes, some applicants might not be able to come up with all three.

Here's the cop-out: "In such a circumstance it is for the organisation to satisfy themselves as to the identity of the applicant."

Pontius Pilate couldn't have washed his hands any cleaner.

The tragedy is that Scotland has become a country running scared for its kids.

Proud parents are banned from happy snapping at school events while paedophiles are free to take pictures in the street.

And pity the lone man who dares chat to a child because he happens, quite innocently, to like kids.

Paedophiles, murderers and abusers don't skulk on every corner and just about every human endeavour is fraught with risk.

While parental paranoia is entirely normal, maybe even healthy, dwelling on every conceivable risk or potential threat is more worry than it's worth.

Disclosure Scotland is not a solution but a consequence.

If I saw a lone child crying in the street I wouldn't dare intervene. And by the time I found a woman, or even less likely a cop, well blame the bogeyman.