Next Year's Budget - Eddie Barnes

I realise everyone has had read quite enough about the SNP budget negotiations, but here's one final word as the parties look ahead to next year's round.

As Alex Salmond said in the chamber yesterday, the budget for 2009-10 is going to involve real cuts in the Scottish Government's coffers. This is an entirely new development for our MSPs who have only had to decide since 1999 on how exactly they are going to eat their way through an ever-bigger cake. It means that the focus of opposition parties needs to change from what they can get from the SNP government to what they can the SNP Government to save.

The LibDems look signed up for this, and it is clearly fertile territory for the Tories (if they are prepared to risk looking nasty). Who knows, even Labour might have the courage to do what it knew it had to in government but lacked the political will.

They should start work now on what bureacracy and waste can be hacked off in the next 12 months so that, when the axe falls this time next year, it isn't our schools and hospitals that suffer.