Hooray for Humza Yousaf for backing the four-day week

Answer: No … but are you nuts?

Incidentally, Ms Gosal has shares in a property letting agency.

Still, given "Marxist", "zealot", "groomer", "quisling", "yoon", "Nat-zi", "traitor", "scum" et al are now just dandy as part of our political lexicon, why not throw in the Holocaust too? It was only a matter of time. One imagines we’ll eventually drop all niceties and in future debates refer to each other as "murderers" and "paedophiles".

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If that’s the level of crazy over regulating holiday homes, may the gods pity us when it comes to the reaction to trialling a four-day-week in Scotland. What could the insults be? "Terrorist", maybe? That’s obviously demented, but then "pogrom" hardly fits regulatory oversight of landlords.

Little wonder Mr Yousaf barely mentions the four-day-week scheme. It wasn’t in his address to parliament earlier this week, but it is in his legislative programme. If the Scottish Government invented a cure for cancer, there would be outraged claims it was putting the Grim Reaper in jeopardy.

However, if we calm the am-dram and have a proper old think (remember that?) about a four-day week, it seems rather decent - if done correctly, clearly, as an opt-in, not a matter of compulsion.

First, things change, society moves on. Once upon a time, most of us were serfs. Our liege lord would ride into our village, give us a damn good thrashing for not picking turnips fast enough, kidnap our children and burn the rest of our family just for the craic.

After centuries living as human scarecrows in fields and pigsties, we eventually shifted from serfdom to earning some money for our labour. We obstreperous peasants would still be swiftly executed, though, if we asked for a few groats more to feed our now non-kidnapped children.

Then we made it into factories. We earned slightly more but were either worked to death or mangled in Spinning Jennies. Average working times in Victorian Britain were 14-16 hours daily.

Finally, the weekend was invented. Or rather fought for by that old-fashioned thing, "organised labour". Our ancestors mostly still lived in squalor, but at least they got a lie-in come Sunday.

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The key to all this? The rich get richer by exploiting the poor; and the poor have to fight like hell for the tiniest improvement to living and working conditions.

Which brings us to the four-day-week: reducing work to around 32 hours with no loss of pay. The Scottish Government pilot will involve civil servants and start by the end of the year.

Currently, you can’t be made to work above 48 hours a week. That’s a lot of "non-you time". A lot of hours away from your family. Is change due? Shouldn’t society evolve in the 21st century?

Let’s chow down on some of those rare, tasty treats called "facts". Recently, the largest trial of the four-day-week in Britain released its results. The findings are interesting and sobering. It was held over six months, involving 61 organisations and businesses and 2,900 staff.

Industries involved included financial services, animation, brewing, chippies, consultancies, housing, IT, skincare, recruitment, hospitality, marketing, healthcare - a flotilla of sectors. At the end, 56 of the firms, that’s 92%, decided to continue with the scheme, with 18 making a permanent shift.

Klaxon: productivity wasn’t harmed. Cambridge University reported that crucially, “revenue barely changed during the trial period - even increasingly marginally by 1.4% on average”.

Here are more findings from Cambridge social scientists - those forgotten rarities once respected as "experts": 71% of employees reported lower burnout levels; 39% were less stressed; sick days were reduced by 65%; 57% fewer staff quit. Employees coped better with care responsibilities for children, elderly parents and sick partners. Mental and physical health improved. Staff stopped "killing time".

“Before the trial, many questioned whether we would see an increase in productivity to offset the reduction in working time - but this is exactly what we found,” said sociologist Professor Brendan Burchell, who led the Cambridge research.

Whisper it: perhaps the "wellbeing economy" ain’t so bad, eh? If it doesn’t harm business and it makes workers happier, what’s the problem?

One doesn’t want to fall back on that old rhetorical trick "argument from authority" (well, okay, I do), but let’s turn to Bertrand Russell, mathematician, philosopher, global polymath and genius, so hardly someone dedicated to doing naff all. He said: “The road to happiness and prosperity lies … in the diminution of labour”.

Work is important - vital for the human creature. It brings dignity, self-respect, the means to improve our lives and our children’s lives, but we should work to live, not live to work as we do now. How many of your friends and family are mere ghosts reduced to social shadows, sucked dry by a corporate world which cares not one damn for you once you leave, die, or get made redundant?

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Work should bend to the will of the people; the people should not bend to the will of corporations.

Our lives are damn short, maybe 80 years if you’re lucky. Most of that time should be spent with the people we love; most of that time should be spent on that most special of projects: enjoying ourselves.

Yes, we need to work, not just for self-esteem but for the money we require to live happy lives in our free time with those who matter to us. But no, we do not need to be cogs in a machine, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, a beast crucified by industry and commerce.

I’ll give the closing word to Kurt Vonnegut, perhaps the greatest novelist of the 20th century and, as a man who seldom stopped writing, evidently not someone you could characterise as lazy: “We are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.” Amen.