Bridge in a Spin - Eddie Barnes

The row over the building of the Forth Road Bridge has highlighted what we might call the SNP's diversion strategy, one patented by messers Mandeslon and Campbell. In order to remove attention from one issue you really don't want people to focus on (in this case, your failure to guarantee the building of a bridge and other related capital projects) you simply kick up a media-friendly scrap elsewhere (the Treasury's "refusal" to pay for it all).

John Swinney isn't a mug so he will have known that his request for an advance from the Treasury to the pay for the Bridge was going to be unsucessful. But getting money wasn't the point of the letter. The point was to put the Treasury in the position of saying "no". In other words, the intention was to change the political frame within which this row developed - from a story about the apparent failure of the SNP's Scottish Futures Trust to a story about the "London's" customary negative attitude to "Scotland".

The UK Government - in the guise of Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy - has cottoned onto this strategy. They has realised that it depends, in part, on them playing up to their role of the arrogant London bully-boy. So now their tone has changed to one of obsequious politeness. Yvette Cooper's letter to Swinney, telling him to go swing, expressed a desire to be constructive, it offered meetings, it was free of any lecturing tone. In its cloying insincerity, it could have been written by Uriah Heep.

So what will happen now? A meeting will take place. Salmond and Swinney will attempt to characterise their request as a common sense request for cash. Murphy and Cooper will regretfully shrug their shoulders and say they can't help. The strategic battle being fought will be about who can come across as the most reasonable.

What we don't know is what the reaction of the public will be - who will get the blame for the impasse? Labour or the SNP? In these unchartered times, with two governments running one country, no-one really knows.