Setting out the unpalatable truths we will have to face

CRAWFORD Beveridge occupies an enviable position in Scottish political life. He has the ear of Alex Salmond, first as a member of the First Minister's Council of Economic Advisers and more recently as chairman of an independent review of public spending in Scotland. He is thus able to command attention and utter the politically unthinkable in the public domain at one remove from the government and with the virtue, from Mr Salmond's view, of deniability.

In a public interview, Mr Beveridge has, indeed, uttered what many politicians regard as unthinkable. We face the biggest government deficit and debt in our peacetime history. Everyone knows public spending will have to be cut. Yet in the bizarre, Alice-in-Wonderland universe that is Scottish politics, the SNP is demanding yet more money from Westminster while Labour is holding out against any significant cuts for now.

In what some may regard as an outburst of iconoclastic fantasy and others as no more than a statement of the obvious, Mr Beveridge has questioned the wisdom of universal entitlement in some areas such as free bus travel for pensioners, asserted that it would be wrong to ring-fence an individual service such as healthcare and has even posited the privatisation of Scottish Water as an option.

With only weeks to go before the Westminster election, such ideas are bound to be pounced on by the SNP's opponents. Labour has lost no time in seizing on them as evidence of a plan to sell off the state-owned water company.

For those not infantalised by the election campaign so far, Mr Beveridge has merely set out some obvious if unpalatable truths we will have to face; if not now, then certainly in the lifetime of the next parliament – and probably the one after that.

Why does Mr Beveridge's intervention matter? Since the onset of devolution, Labour and the SNP administrations have vied with each other on spending giveaways and "free" concessions and entitlements. This style of politics – of government as an auction of benefits – has come to the end of the road. Serious politics is about – as, historically, it has always been about – the ordering of priorities. In the real world of finite budget resources, tough choices have to be made. This is what his advisory group has been tasked to set out.

Searching questions need to be asked as to whether Scotland's budget can carry on as a welfare dispensary, with commitments such as free personal care made almost oblivious to cost, or if more attention should be paid to capital projects to lift our infrastructure and our economic performance. Yet Scotland has not even begun to have this debate. Indeed, it sometimes seems as if the election campaign is determined to avoid it.

But reality will assert itself soon enough. Mr Beveridge has been careful not to advocate specific reductions as such, but to put some uncomfortable options up for discussion. He is absolutely right to do so. Far from his remarks being peripheral or maverick, they are central to what the election battle should be about.