A healthy dose of scepticism should always be applied to any government spending announcements – especially when the accompanying spin machine hits the afterburners to push messaging about supposed winners while ignoring the inconvenient losers. Indeed, such was the attention on this particular spending review that Rachel Reeves’s seat hadn’t even warmed the green benches before the number-crunching began.

Following some catastrophic early missteps – where the Labour Government played on the dire state of the economy and the need for tough choices – it was inevitable this review would be as much a test of presentation for the Chancellor as a fiscal one. The U-turn on scrapping winter fuel payments for pensioners was widely expected and serves as a textbook example of why we should always look beyond feel-good distractions to the boring details in the balance sheet.

Undeterred, spinners claimed that tough decisions had created the fiscal headroom to restore the payment – despite the arithmetic suggesting otherwise. Removing the benefit may have been economically sound, if politically naïve; restoring it is undoubtedly the opposite.

Defence was always going to be a “winner”, as Donald Trump’s jaggy stick on the need to up the shekels is being felt in Whitehall, as it is in all other Nato nations. And the predictable sacred cow of the NHS was also on the positive side of the messaging as there is no sum of money big enough to be poured into this national institution, regardless of the actual cost of doing so.

As with all things Treasury, there are consequentials for Scotland – and........

© Herald Scotland