Bernard Ingham: Beware of big Scots spenders at the helm

UK plc has had two Scots – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – as chairman for the past 13 years and, for the same period, two Scots – Brown and Alistair Darling – as financial directors. And look where they have got us. Rather than smothering Government spending ambitions they have presided over one long binge at the taxpayers' expense, with precious little improvement to show for it.

Budget day finds national public debt around 800bn and the budget deficit at best 165bn, or getting on for 12 per cent of the wealth we annually create as a nation.

The EU is calling on us to honour our obligation to get that debt back down to its limit of three per cent of GDP far more quickly while various credit raters offer dark hints from time to time about downgrading the UK's creditworthiness. If they do, interestrates will soar

If this is what putting Scots on the board does for prudence, then they should keep them locked up in Edinburgh Castle in the interests of public safety.

I would like to be able to say that dour, cynical Yorkshiremen would be more use, but the Halifax and Bradford & Bingley long ago blew out of the water the idea that Yorkshiremen are Scots shorn of all charity.

Today is the day the big Scots spenders run out of room for manoeuvre. Alistair Darling doesn't have even a spare copper he can spend

honestly. Whatever he does in his budget – or Brown allows him to do – will leave him open to ridicule.

He could aim to go down in history as a responsible Chancellor. "The cupboard is bare," he might say. "The overriding priority is to cut the deficit, staunch the flow of cash out of the country in interest on borrowings, bring speedy order to public finances and get the UK back on an even keel as soon as possible. Until we do that we are not masters of our own fate."

But can you hear him saying that? After all, he is already pledged to

halve the deficit in four years, though that will still leave us borrowing a cool 80bn a year in 2015. And Labour has repeatedly lectured the Tories that to go any faster would prejudice the recovery, jobs and front line services.

This, of course, ignores the monumental waste in Brown's Britain but six weeks before an election Labour are not going to admit their "investment" produces anything other than total value for money.

It is also idle to suppose that, with an eye on his reputation, Darling will come clean about the true state of Britain's finances.

He is not about to write a longer suicide note than Michael Foot's manifesto in 1983 by telling us how much on top of all this the

Treasury has to guarantee in the form of PFI spending on Brown's pet projects; how we are going to finance pensions for Brown's bloated bureaucracy; or how much we are going to have to find for infrastructure – schools etc – to cope with Labour's open door immigration policy.

These hidden costs of Labour's profligacy amply justify Tory reluctance to set out their stall in detail before they have seen the extent of the red ink in the nation's ledgers.

Instead, Darling will make the best of a bad job – or the best Brown allows him to make – by pretending he is in command, perhaps not ruling out further cuts or tax rises, as he judges necessary, but generally eschewing detail, except where it serves his short-term electoral purpose.

We shall gauge his responsibility not by what he does – since he won't do much more in the face of the crying need to reduce debt – but by how little additional spending he proposes in the face of Brown's terminal irresponsibility with our money. If he can hold Brown to spending less than another 1bn he doesn't have, he will do well.

In short, today's Budget will be largely irrelevant to the nation's welfare.

It will merely seal the fate of arguably the worst British

administration in Cabinet history. The real budget will come in the form of George Osborne's emergency measure before the end of June.

Only then shall we really discover what kind of a mess these damned Scots have got us into.