Holyrood sketch: The First Minister returned to action yesterday after a nasty attack of something or other. Possibly a virulent case of Alistair Darling�s recession flu. A severe downturn is not supposed to make anyone feel chirpy.
The First Minister returned to action yesterday after a nasty attack of something or other. Possibly a virulent case of Alistair Darling's recession flu. A severe downturn is not supposed to make anyone feel chirpy.
Alex Salmond seemed to manage. We may be grateful, though, that he was not suffering a leg-related strain ailment.
According to opposition parties, he did not have such a limb to stand on.
Mr Salmond hirpled to the crease undaunted. The topic, if you can call it that, was local income tax.
The sub-text, and I will call it that, was minority government in all its glory.
To explain: Mr Salmond would like to replace the council tax. He knows the opposition won't let him. They know they don't have a better idea. They also know - and he knows they know he knows they know - that come the next election he will accuse them of defending a hated impost.
Better take a few swipes at the First Minister now, then.
The SNP administration has "consulted" on its local tax plan. The result, long-awaited, has turned out to be worth roughly 3p for every pound's worth of measurable Scottish opinion. This "overwhelming" (Mr Salmond) outcome fell into the world with a whisper just as the Chancellor was delivering "the biggest budget statement since World War Two" (Labour's Iain Gray).
Hyperbole: everyone's favourite Greek restaurant.
"He sneaks it out the back door of Bute House under cover of darkness and the PBR," thundered Mr Gray, of Planet East Lothian, formerly the Death Star.
Mr Salmond suggested in return that if Labour had offered a single idea to the consultation, and if it had even possessed that rare thing, Mr Gray would have known better.
This was, to be fair, a weakness in the Opposition leader's case.
The First Minister's own case was less weak than comatose, but the corpse refuses to succumb.
An awful lot of people see an awful lot wrong with councils raising tax from incomes, especially in these times, but Mr Salmond could make a cadaver tap-dance.
Give him a subject and he will give you an episode of Changing Rooms. You thought you were discussing the soft furnishings of local tax? Suddenly he's talking about Mr Darling's curtains.
That would be "the cut that's coming, the Labour cut that's coming", otherwise known as "the £500m bombshell", otherwise the tranche of your money you will have to return to the government in lost services in exchange for the tranche of your money now being disbursed. To you. Or to a bank.
"Barnett consequentials" - perhaps the medical term for Mr Salmond's indisposition - have everything and nothing to do with a local income tax. Nothing to do with the theory, that is, and everything to do with the next version of reality we might encounter.
In the First Minister's reality, meanwhile, decent jokes were not to be denied. Hand-crafted ripostes were to be inserted length ways, sideways, and if needs be with crowbars. Anything was better than a defence of the practical consequences (consequentials?) of local income tax.
"John Maynard Keynes to Milton Friedman with no intervening period," said Mr Salmond.
"New Labour to hard labour", he added.
Annabel Goldie, of the Know Nothings (one for our American readers), said the SNP's "assumptions have been smashed to smithereens".
Mr Salmond preferred to describe the Chancellor as "the Eddie the Eagle of tax forecasters". That must have saved a job or two, possibly among the First Minister's joke writers, but nowhere else.
I can't fiddle, but I can smell burning from here.
