How did we get here?

Well, we're Budget-less. I could go on about what now won't happen as a result of this, but there's no point. The debate has been held, the vote has been taken and there is currently no Budget, and no financial plan for next year.

Bugger.

Anyway, what can we say about the parties tonight?

The SNP is, in fact, in a similar position to where it was last year - it's the other parties whose positions hae changed and in a far more aggressive direction. Nevertheless, that does necessitate a change in approach from the Government. Some might say it needs to adopt a consensual approach so as to secure deals with other parties. Others might say that deals are probably less likely than they were a year ago, so it falls to the Government to be more robust, and meet attack with attack. I'm not comfortable with either: the former approach relies on the goodwill of the opposition parties - which is not available at this time - while the latter doesn't generate the goodwill needed to get things done. Catch-22.

That said, where we did goof was with the Greens. A deal could have been done, but the approach we took was familiar to all Rangers fans. A smaller SPL club, say, Kilmarnock, has a star striker who is absolutely fantastic. Rangers want to buy him. Killie expect a seven-figure sum for him. Martin Bain tables the Gers' offer: 50p and a refillable lighter. John Swinney managed to find £22 million, then a further £11 million. When it became apparent that a deal with Labour wasn't possible, surely there could have been a further £67 million from offers to them that could have come into play? The Greens still wouldn't have supported it while we were planning to build roads that would at least get Scotland's cars moving faster rather than being stuck in queues belching out emissions at traffic jam hotspots, but they could have abstained, letting the Budget through. That was our miscalculation: £67 million and two votes.

Labour's position is odd. Firstly, it's a reversal of last year, where they basically sulked through the Budget, went on about how terrible it was and how they didn't want any part in it, only to abstain at Stage 3. This year they engaged, had negotiations, put their point across and, most importantly, gave us an idea of Labour's priorities only to vote the Budget down. Last year's approach was barmy, and this year's? Well, I can't begrudge it. After all, Oppositions oppose - it's what they do. If they don't like what's in the Budget, then in theory, it stands to reason that they can't vote for it.

However. The basic tenet of the Labour opposition has been that the SNP Government isn't doing enough to combat the recession. However, today we learned that Scotland has managed to avoid recession this quarter. Of course, this means that there's a likely six months to the beginning of the recession and it's going to be an utter bastard, but SNP policy clearly has some merit if it's staved the real troubles off for six months longer than Gordon Brown could achieve. Also, if it's in the Scottish Government's power to fight recession, then that inadvertantly damns both Iain Gray and Andy Kerr: Scotland's last recession was in 2002, when Gray became Enterprise Minister and Kerr was Finance Minister - the two economic portfolios. If it's down to the SNP to deal with the recession now, they were at fault then, and Gordon Brown is at fault for the wider UK recession at this time. If they can't admit responsibility for those then their reasons for opposing the Budget are bogus, and so I'm left with the feeling that their main beef with the Budget wasn't what was in it, but who was presenting it.

And of course, as Brown himself said today, the worst thing we can do to fight the recession is nothing. That is precisely what they voted for tonight.

The Tories are still playing the game: talking to the Government and winning concessions. They got something they could be happy with today and so stand apart as the only opposition party able to do that. And they didn't do it through temper tantrums. The only other political force capable of doing that was Margo MacDonald.

The LibDems? They've showed themselves up in fine style, haven't they? Remember their demand for a 2% cut in income tax, and sending the Chief Whip to negotiations instead of the Finance Spokesman, coupled with the inevitable flounce-out when everyone - even the Tories who normally jump on tax cuts - went pale at the thought of an £800 million black hole in the Budget, a black hole which the LibDems themselves offered no methods of filling? Well, it's now a bit rich for Liberal Democrat bloggers to accuse the SNP of arrogance, and blame the Government for the felled Budget. I'm willing to accept that miscalculations were made, but the idea that a party that made only one demand and refused to talk to anyone until it was met (a re-hash of their approach to Coalition negotiations in 2007) can sit on a high horse and damn others for their arrogance is little short of rank hypocrisy, particularly when they accuse the SNP of not negotiating, despite the fact that the LibDems were the only party not to enter into serious discussions. The LibDems increasingly remind me of the annoying little snotbag that everyone knew at Primary School, who would run around hitting people then whining, "Why are you hitting yourself?". That should be the title of the next LibDem manifesto.

This is what I don't get about them: they made a massive demand that they surely couldn't expect to be funded - they'd have had some ideas about where the money would have come from if they were serious enough to actually think about it - they refused to negotiate, they made no other suggestions and yet are still surprised and offended when they come away with nothing.

As for the Greens, they feel aggrieved and have every right to: they made a constructive suggestion, a weaker-than-acceptable alternative was put forward. What else could they do?

So the Government made one single error, and it was in the treatment of the Greens. The Tories and Margo got what they came for and supported it. Of those in opposition to the Budget: the Greens opposed the Budget out of principle. Labour opposed it out of politics. And the LibDems opposed it out of petulance. They're fit only for the playground, not for Parliament.