Scottish Budget: painful times ahead

Am in Edinburgh for the Scottish Budget. It looks as though we are in for a re-run of the UK General Election of 2010 in that the SNP administration will be going into May 2011 elections without a spending plan beyond that year. To spell out the pain might be too painful. Painful enough to outline the public sector pay freeze and other cuts expected in this afternoon’s announcement by John Swinney, the Finance Secretary.

So it looks like we get something a bit more “salami-like” and less strategic in the cuts programme coming out later. The big defining political gains of devolution, free university courses, free personal care and home nursing, the prospect of free prescriptions, free bridge crossings and much more, sit there untouched but with a sword of Damocles hanging over them.

The independent review on spending that reported to the SNP administration in July suggested most of the post-devolution policy gains that define Scottish politics needed to be looked at again. Scottish universities are pleading louder than most for more cash raising of some kind to put them closer to parity with their rich, virtually de-nationalised southern cousins. But all this will have to wait until the other side of the May elections for serious consideration.

How will those elections go? The guess has got to be that voters will be asking, “Who can best stand up to London?” That must benefit Labour, and that’s where the polls, for now, suggest opinion is switching. But you wouldn’t bet the house on a majority Labour administration right now and the SNP’s experience of minority government over the last four years is that you don’t get much for your legislative trophy cupboard to show off to the voters come election time.

The Lib Dems, looking very battered right now in Scotland (posters of Nick Clegg with a Pinocchio nose from a demo last month still plastered round the city here), would love to get into bed with Scottish Labour to prove their politically ambidextrous credentials and detoxify their brand. Labour would be understandably wary, though Scottish Labour’s leader Iain Gray is refusing to rule out such a link-up.