Bru-ra-hroom! Don't be hasty!

Brian Taylor is writing of an 'emerging deal' between the SNP and Tories over the budget. He has a point in that the SNP backed a Tory amendment that called for any Barnett consequentials that emerge during the life of this Parliament to be used to accelerate the Small Business Bonus scheme.

I think he may be reading too much into it. After all, it's not really much of a story to say that the SNP backed a call to implement one of their own manifesto proposals more quickly if more money became available in the mean time. Perhaps the selection of Small Business Bonus is interesting. Watch out Tories, if you make that a condition of the budget passing, and £50m a year extra appears in a puff of Barnett-flavoured smoke in twelve months' time, the higher education buck may quite convincingly pass to you.

Generally though the Tories have been the most constructive of the opposition parties. Hence they are the ones with whom a deal is likely to be forged as the cost of government. The Lib Dems, who were supposed to be the leading proponents of the 'new politics' and the realities of a parliament of minorities just haven't adapted. Today's parliamentary jiggery-pokery had three amendments to the SNP proposal. It was only the Lib Dems who used the kind of vitriolic language common to Labour party election campaigns. The Lib Dems may be seen by some as generally harmless sandal-wearers, but these days in Scotland they seem more like a party of the eccentric wing of the landowning gentry, with a pathological hatred of the SNP.

It's a shame the other (allegedly) left-of-centre parties aren't willing to work with the Government more constructively. Or at all. I guess they're still too busy haranguing the SNP for not delivering on policies they themselves with their blocking majority are responsible for preventing. Ah, politics. On a different note, am I the only one who thinks Jeremy Purvis's beard is ill-advised?