Let us first dispense the negatives. There was much in this Scottish Government Budget to concern us.

The increased expenditure on the NHS meets Einstein’s (misattributed) quote: “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. This SNP Government is hardly the only one, north and south of the Border, from all parties, to debase itself by lauding and, worse, feeding the NHS with more taxpayers’ funding despite acknowledging that it is broken beyond repair. But it merits a rebuke nonetheless.

The Scottish/English chasm in income tax remains as wide as ever, despite the evidence that as a result of behavioural change it raises little or no money, and the anecdotal evidence, from the financial sector to the renewables industry to the NHS, that it inhibits the migration of high-value tax payers to Scotland. Whilst in the night we can be grateful for the small mercy of income tax not rising again, in the morning the harsh reality of the gap remains.

Building homes in large numbers will remain a problem, with the environment for institutional investment probably remaining too hostile to offer certainty. And there remains little evidence that the Government understands the sheer magnitude of the gap between Scotland’s transport and digital infrastructure, critical to the renewables revolution, and that of comparable nations.

Read more by Andy Maciver

But enough. Those of us who have expressed alarm after previous........

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