Maggie wields her axe

A fascinating story in the Herald last week about an attempt by the Treasury to cut the baseline Scottish Office budget by a seventh in the mid-1980s. The papers emerged as the result of an FoI request from an SNP researcher, but took several years to be published because the Scotland Office tried to block it. It reveals that the then Scottish Secretary, George Younger, threatened to resign if the cuts were implemented, although to be fair - and as Alan Cochrane points out in his Daily Telegraph column - Younger used to threaten to resign all the time.