LIT Chilled, Council Tax Frozen, Labour Overheated.

So the Local Income Tax is postponed.

And up to 2011, Council Tax will be frozen, for a total of 4 years in all.

To no one's surprise, this has got the opposition parties very excited, none more so than the normally calm (at least when he hasn't got the scent of a no confidence motion and the First Minister's job in his nostrils) Iain Gray.

Let's summarise, shall we?

Yep, LIT was a core aim in our manifesto.
No argument there.

We're a minority government, so we'd have needed support to get it through.
Again, no argument.

And now we've dropped it.
True.

So you can see why the more obtuse of the opposition parties might get a little aerated about this.
But in doing so, they miss several salient points.

The plan to get the LIT properly funded was based on the Treasury's handing over £400m of tax credits.
The Labour Chancellor said naw.

Again, with £500bn of cuts in the block grant next year and the year after, it's going to be very tight, and our hands will be quite full enough trying to mitigate the incompetence of Brown and Darling.

Finally, could the SNP have got the requisite support in the Parly to push this through.
It seems that the answer to this might well have been 'no'.

So, the responsible and painful thing has been done.
Further, no one's going to be any worse off than they are at the moment, because the Council Tax will be frozen.
So, no problem there, except for the standard political points scoring, of which we will doubtless have an ample sufficiency in the near future.

It would be illuminating, however, to look at Labour's position on this.

Iain Gray accuses Salmond as having lost credibility.
(I think that, coming from a supporter of the Prime Minister, he might want to cast an eye over the broken promise of an EU referendum before going any further down that route.)

How, because as a minority government, suffering cuts due to the incompetence of Labour's UK government, we have to postpone a measure?

This is indicative of the fact that Iain is still living in some archaic past when proportional representation was nothing more than a gleam in the eye of the body politic.

The fact of the matter is, that if a minority government can't get the support of the wildly varying interests in the opposition parties, then these parties may well take the negative way out (as we saw in the first budget vote) and vote the measure down.
As it stands, Labour and the Tories are opposed to the LIT.
They don't know what they want, but they know what they don't want.
The Greens don't like it, and neither does Margo.
The SNP and the Libs are for it, but it isn't enough to carry the day, so would it really be a mature thing to put it to debate and the vote if it was a sure loser?

Iain stated tonight that Labour has a group 'working' on their alternative to the Council Tax.
But that we're going to have to wait until 2011 to hear what it is.
That's two years of meetings and doing nothing, whilst we're at least freezing the Tax.
I wonder if Iain really thinks that this is a responsible approach from his party.

Finally, I understand that Labour has come out tonight and advised without a hint of irony, that this is "no time for amateurs."
A pity they didn't take their own advice two weeks ago when they voted down a £33bn budget to prove a point, then turned chicken at the last moment.

If the comments from Labour tonight prove one thing, it is that, at an almost molecular level, they are incapable of escaping their negative and adversarial approach.

If the announcement by John Swinney proves anything, it is that we have a government of pragmatic realists who don't let dogma get in the way of the common good.