The Scottish Executive's name was enshrined in an Act of Parliament which it has no authority to amend, and legal experts have noted that the legal name remains the Scottish Executive until the Act is properly amended - as you note, this amendment is now being proposed. If the Scottish Executive's change of name were valid, that amendment would be redundant. (In rather the same way the British Railways Board accidentally out-lived BR itself for a while) Gaelic is indeed foreign to England, where the Act in question was passed, and indeed is not spoken natively in most of Scotland either. If you follow such matters closely, you may recall the complaints when the government was asked how it would handle an enquiry sent in Gaelic: the answer was that it would be forwarded to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for translation, in exactly the same way such a letter in Urdu would be handled. How do you draw the line on "foreign" languages to include Gaelic, with less than 60,000 native speakers in the country and was actually introduced to Scotland by Irish immigrants, but not Urdu or Polish which are also spoken by people born here?

(Gaelic, or rather the expenditure of public funds on propping it up, is a long-standing bugbear of mine, as well as being tightly entwined with the SNP and independence, which is why I doubt the mistranslation to Gaelic was inadvertent.)

Incidentally, as a matter of pure fact, the body in question is actually an executive one, rather than an entire government, since the legislative and judicial functions are vested elsewhere. Again, trying to puff itself up into something bigger, in the way you deny it does...

You seem to have missed the main point there: the pattern of exercising powers they do hold, and influencing powers they do not (like requesting a special Scotland-only visa, despite visas remaining a UK-wide system in law), in order to exert indirectly more authority than they have been granted. Partly this is in the nature of governments everywhere, and part of this is their stated desire to become a full sovereign government. Since they have openly and repeatedly stated that they seek to secure all power - full independence - I'm surprised you even question the existence of that agenda!

As for currying favour, I was actually pointing out another motivation entirely, that it enabled Salmond and his defence-lawyer "justice" guy to posture on a bigger stage, to exercise a bit of power they don't normally get to use, to have a little bit more of that independence from Westminster they have said they crave - and yes, it brought financial benefits as well, as my Libyan colleague said it would the day this first hit the news - exactly the international investment you said yourself they would seek to obtain. Or they could just have let the mass-murdered die in jail as sentenced, and nobody outside Libya would really have noticed or cared. Which option would you expect politicians like that to take?