ENJOY THE NEXT FEW WEEKS BEFORE THE "EFFICIENCIES" START HITTING YOU

Thank you, Gordon Brown. Thank you very, very much indeed.

Scotland faces five years of real-terms cuts in public spending and may not get back to today’s levels until 2025.

According to a forecast made by the Scottish Government an incredible £35 billion of public spending could be lost over the next 15 years. That is more than the entire budget for a year.

The government’s chief economic advisor Dr Andrew Goudie estimated average cuts to expenditure will be 3% a year until 2014-15 and it could take between 12 and 15 years before spending returns to levels in the last financial year.

The Scottish Parliament officials are already preparing for 15% cuts over the next three years.

Of course no one wants to talk about that kind of cut before the election, do they? They’ll argue about all manner of other stuff but no one will tell us the truth about just how hard the axe will fall on May 7. But this time, I feel sure, we are going to really notice savage and swinging cuts. We will pay for the bankers’ greed, while their bonuses go up again.

The trouble with this kind of cut (for they can call it efficiency till they are blue in the face; it will remain a cut. Pigs and lipstick come to mind) is that it inevitably means vast numbers of redundancies, and that adds to already massive unemployment. A few more on the dole may not make too much difference, but large numbers on the dole and you have depressed areas. Shops close, pubs, sports and leisure facilities. That, in turn, causes more unemployment and it’s not hard to see the spiral of depression.

In this atmosphere Mr Brown says he is going to provide jobs for anyone who has been unemployed for a year. Yeah right. Let me tell you he hasn’t a hope in hell. It’s all talk. It won’t happen.

You can only make so many cuts to staff before the public starts to notice that the quality of service, not high at the moment, has become even worse. What will he do, replace all the sacked public sector workers with his new scheme workers on minimum wage and with attitude.

Cutting public services is all very well, but that means fewer libraries, fewer sports facilities for kids, just when old Tessa Jowell told us that we were going to benefit from the London Olympics with more sporting opportunities. It means longer waits for services already stretched and it means fewer things for kids to do; fewer facilities for pensioners.

The government report says, “While exact details of the size and composition of tightening in the UK are not yet known, it is clear that public spending will be subject to a period of significant constraint in the years ahead. Scottish Government expenditure will not be immune from these pressures.”

What a bloody future. An oil rich nation like no other. How they must laugh at us in Norway.