Thanks for reading it. But it's not finished - far from it.

As with other BBC journalist blogs, it is flitting to a new home, and appearing in a new format.

I'm assured it will be easier for you to use, with enhanced e-bells and i-whistles to cover a wider range of BBC Scotland's business coverage.

You can follow me here.

First, this might seem a tad insensitive at a time when many of us are facing falling real earnings. The trade union backed High Pay Commission today published a report saying FTSE100 chief executives are earning 145 times more than the median full-time wage of £25,800.

But this is great news if you're a shareholder in two of Aberdeen's oil services giants, and not so bad if you're at the top of Scottish financial companies Standard Life and Alliance Trust.

First, let's turn to RBG, based in Aberdeen and specialising in inspecting and maintaining oil platforms and rigs.

Its corporate roots go back to 1975 when Rigblast started out. It's been announced today that RBG is being bought by Stork, a Dutch company already in that field and backed by Candover investments. The value and structuring of the deal isn't being disclosed.

It was reported to be worth about £200m last year, and it's been expanding fast. Being in the business of extending the lifespan of ageing oil and gas assets, power stations and chemical plants, and getting into the business of decommissioning at the end of life, it's very well placed to grow.

So if that reported figure is true, it's particularly good news - worth about £80m - for its chairman John Ray, majority shareholder of Ashley Group, the Aberdeen company with a 50% stake in RBG.

£31m failure

It's good news for RBG and its 4,900 employees - 3,000 of them in Scotland - if it's being taken over for its strengths rather than targeted for its weaknesses. But it means yet another major corporate headquarters is leaving Scotland.

And it's a much bigger payday for Sir Ian Wood and his family, 22% owners of Wood Group, with confirmation of the £1bn-plus shareholder return - based on a buy-back shares - now that its well support division to GE has been finalised.

There was a failure to agree terms for Wood Group and GE to work together on other projects, but the breakdown in those talks last week delivered another £31m from GE. Some failure!

Very nice for the Rays and the Woods, but there's a bit more discomfort for those earning slightly less colossal sums at Alliance Trust and Standard Life.

Alliance Trusted

This Friday in Dundee, Katherine Garrett-Cox, chief executive of Alliance Trust, faces a challenge to company strategy from activist hedge fund investor Laxey Partners.

It has been pushing the investment company to buy back shares as a means of reducing the discount at which it's been trading - which means pushing up the share price closer to the valuation of its portfolio. To some extent, it's already being successful, with buybacks under way.

Laxey has made it rather personal, raising questions about Ms Garrett-Cox's earnings, which have done rather better than the company. Last year, she secured 69% of her potential bonus, raising her total earnings by a third to £843,000.

Perhaps that was one reason why her promise last month to "come out fighting" against Laxey led to a strangely silent period. Alliance Trust seems to have figured out that Laxey was going to lose its resolution at the Dundee AGM, and has chosen to take a low-key approach to winning the hearts and minds of investor shareholders.

What marks this company out is the wide base of retail investors who have a say. Ultra-conservative Dundonian publisher and investor DC Thomson owns nearly 6% of Alliance Trust, Legal & General has 4%, while there are 44,000 retail investors each wielding a vote, many of them Scots who have stuck with the Dundee investment trust down the generations.

It's not an easy place for activist investors to stir things up, but it does raise questions - which aren't currently being answered - about the progress of the Garrett-Cox turnaround project at Alliance Trust. Maybe she'll have more to say after the AGM.

Raising the Pay Standard

As for Standard Life, it's changed its remuneration for senior executives, and the Association of British Insurers has issued an alert to its member organisations that they might not like the implications of shifting to 90% of the bonus being based on share performance. A similar warning had already come from PIRC, which advises pension fund managers on shareholder issues.

It's all the more embarrassing as Standard Life is itself among the more activist institutional investors when it comes to questioning others' pay packages.

At its AGM in Edinburgh tomorrow, it may face some of the same questions that it puts to others, particularly on the top two men at the pensions and life assurance giant.

David Nish, in his first year as chief executive, earned £720,000 basic salary. With his bonus, the 2010 package reaches £1.97m. The previous year, his predecessor, Sir Sandy Crombie, was on £1.76m

The head of Standard Life Investments, Keith Skeoch, has a salary of £369,000, and his bonus is a whole lot bigger, taking him up to £1.87m.

Who will have to take the flak on that? Possibly Crawford Gillies, chairman of Standard Life's remuneration committee - and when he's not doing that, he's chairing development agency Scottish Enterprise.

Bank bonuses for a 13-year-old

Another AGM in Scotland this week that's facing a rocky reception from shareholders is that of Lloyds Banking Group. Its corporate rules state that AGMs have to be held in Scotland, for historic reasons to do with the Trustee Savings Bank that are almost certainly exasperating Lloyds' new chief executive Antonio Horta-Osorio.

What's exasperating his shareholders - which, remember, includes all of us in the British public - is his "golden hello" or "hola dorada" of more than £13m.

And that brings to mind a challenge I've been set by a 13-year-girl from Edinburgh. She's doing a school project titled: "Do Bankers Deserve Bonuses?"

She read The Ledger from some weeks back and wrote to me with disarming bluntness: "I found it quite hard to understand. I was just wondering if you could help explain it for me in more simple terms".

I've been pondering this, and it's a challenge I've decided... to hand over to you.

So in no more than the length of a text message - that's 160 characters - the question is not whether they deserve big bonuses. That's far too easy.

The challenge is to explain, for the benefit of a 13-year old Edinburgh girl, why bankers get such big bonuses

You can add your entries to the Ledger below, or email me: business.scotland@bbc.co.uk

UPDATE: 17/05/2011

Twelve percent against the may not seem much of a revolt, but it's a significant warning shot to Standard Life bosses.

That was the share of the shareholder vote rejecting the remuneration committee's report at today's AGM - saying 'no' to those big bonuses and changes to executive pay.

While 32% of shareholder votes were in play, a further 4% refused to give the board its backing.

But as they arrived at their offices over recent days, they've been presented with a rather different distillation of the challenges ahead.

This is in a 60-page briefing from the officials, analysts and statisticians in the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe), ranging across justice reform, same-sex marriage, climate change and personal debt.

Most of the briefing keeps coming back to government spending.

The Scotsman has this morning highlighted the big numbers.

This includes a bill of more than £3bn for freezing the council tax over nine years, assuming the SNP fulfils its promise to keep council tax in the cool box.

That's a cumulative number, and it's big. But it's not all that meaningful, at least until you consider that Holyrood's budgets over that time will add up to more than £250bn.

What it reminds us is that the council tax freeze comes at a cost, because the amount being spent on compensating councils for the freeze, rising to more than £600m in 2015-16 (and councils say that still won't be enough), is money that obviously can't be spent on other priorities.

Heading south

Other numbers should be familiar, at least to those who followed the BBC's election campaign coverage.

The budget from last year to 2015 is falling by more than 12% in real terms, and capital spending is heading down very much faster.

The cost of open-ended commitments to free services is highlighted.

The cost of health and social care for older people is rising steadily, but the cost of free bus travel for older people is increasing fastest of all - up from £180m this year to £286m by 2014-15.

There's that gap in university funding - somewhere between £93m (the SNP's preferred manifesto assumption) and £286m (university principals like to cite the bigger figures).

It's pointed out to MSPs by SPICe that, while they've been out campaigning, that gap has moved to the upper end of that very wide margin.

That's because many English universities are pushing to charge the maximum level of fees, and the more they charge, the bigger the gap the Scottish government will have to fill.

In addition, the SNP's manifesto assumptions included the gap could be partly filled with £22m of 'service charges' to students from other EU nations.

Officials at the parliament politely point out that charge may not be legally possible.

Squeezed out

So far, so familiar. But then there's some interesting discussion about the direction of travel for the Christie Commission - the group considering options for the future delivery of public services, headed by former trade union leader Campbell Christie, and due to report by the end of June.

On public service reform, one of the more senior Holyrood officials, Stephen Herbert, is pretty blunt about cutting back on 'back offices'.

He points out it's not so easy to see what constitutes a back office as distinct from a front-line service.

And that spending on the administration of services is quite a low share of the total, so savings may be limited.

And he points out that if you want more efficiency from aggregating procurement contracts for public services, that can mean smaller companies, typically with higher unit costs, can get squeezed out by larger national firms.

The Federation of Small Businesses is already expressing its alarm at this, and SPICe says: "The aggregation of contracts or service delivery mechanisms at a national or regional level can result in a significant negative impact upon local economies, particularly rural economies, whilst the savings which can arise from such measures may not begin to accrue until the medium term".

This is backed by evidence from the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE), which has sent a submission to the Christie Commission that skewers the assumption that merging authorities (police forces, for instance) will have the desired effect:

"There is no evidence supporting the view that simplistic exercises in redrawing boundaries - organisational or geographical - will achieve the necessary cost savings, meet demand or improve outcomes to the public. Experience is that structural reforms are costly, time-consuming and fail to deliver anticipated benefits".

Capital priorities

Two other aspects of the SPICe briefing caught my eye.

One is the clear steer, citing official and academic watchdogs, that the new Holyrood administration needs to prioritise its capital programme.

The chances of delivering all the desired projects when last listed, back in pre-crunch 2008, "are now slim".

The briefing points MSPs and ministers towards the criteria used by the Irish and UK governments to prioritise, including those with the highest return on investment - oddly enough, something that's been far from obvious in St Andrew's House thinking.

And here's the other thing: economic growth.

One of the targets set by the last SNP administration was to get Scottish growth performance up to the level of the UK.

But what MSPs are being told is that that had already been achieved by the time the SNP first took office: "Between 1998 and 2007, the growth in GDP per capita in Scotland and the UK were identical at 2.3%".

The other growth target was to get Scottish growth figures up to the same level as similar, small European nations by 2017.

That was before the financial crisis and economic crunch, and before calamity in Ireland and Iceland made that target rather easier to achieve, and those countries became rather less appealling role models.

So what growth targets will SNP ministers choose next?

For all his breadth of choice, the re-elected First Minister would be hard-pressed to find someone with as much energy and enthusiasm for the task. Business leaders may be slightly less bamboozled by mind-maps and laden with reading lists than they were by Mr Mather, but they knew he was on their wavelength.

Looking at the list of endorsements from Scottish business figures that the SNP built up over the campaign, business seems to have liked what it saw in the last SNP administration, particularly its competence and its open door to corporate Scotland.

But then, what it saw was a Scottish government that was unable to push through its minimum pricing of alcohol, or its £30m supertax on supermarkets, and which was unable to call a referendum on independence. Being constrained in minority and with few taxation powers, it was unable to do much to alienate the business lobby.

Mandate

That's all changed. If the SNP had a majority over the past year, it would have introduced the minimum pricing that the drinks industry fought ferociously to block. The proposal is coming back to Holyrood, so will that fight start again? Or will the drinks industry do as the opposition parties will surely have to do, and give way to the power of a democratic mandate?

If John Swinney had a majority last winter, he would also have imposed that extra tax on large retailers to balance his budget. He, or his successor as finance secretary, is facing yet more tight budgets, for sure.

So will the supermarkets be back in his sights? They won't be able to rely on opposition parties in the Parliament or in committees to block such a move this time.

Liz Cameron, of the Scottish Chambers of Commerce, has an interesting observation when she says: "Minority government delivered a great deal of welcome consensus over the last four years, and the Scottish government now faces a real challenge to deliver a Scottish consensus from a majority position".

Export priority

There are other proposals in the SNP manifesto for the new business minister and colleagues to implement. It points to tourism becoming more integrated with the international outreach work of inward investment agency Scottish Development International (SDI).

Exports are to be one of the priorities, with a target for increased exports to be set. When the manifesto says "we believe Scottish businesses can deliver a 50% increase in exports over the next six years", it's not clear if that is the target itself, or something less binding - merely a belief.

Small-scale manifesto commitments range across an expansion of social banking, support for near-market research and development for smaller companies, and a strategy on something called agri-renewables.

There are plans to help sole traders take on their first employees, and to introduce four new enterprise zones. Some may be 'low carbon' enterprise zones. I'd guess that Moray might be one, in response to the closure of at least one air force base.

But then, with so many constituencies won, it's less clear if or how the new administration looks after such SNP heartland seats - will the pork barrel now be rolled out in more marginal, newly-won seats?

With ambitious target on renewables, there's a lot planned. It's not just about encouraging big companies to invest big money on wind and marine power, and facing down local opposition to planning applications. The new government also has to get on with adapting infrastructure for electric cars and the move to district heating.

Risky business

And those commitments are only dealing with the powers the Scottish Parliament already has. What about the powers its new SNP majority wants?

Top of the list are the changes Alex Salmond wants to see to the Scotland Bill, currently going through Westminster. Among them are more power to borrow and control of corporation tax in Scotland.

Those business figures who endorsed the re-election of Alex Salmond seemed to assume that devolved corporation tax would be lowered. Can they be sure, given what happened with the proposed supermarket tax?

What's for certain, says CBI Scotland, are the business costs of creating separate tax accounts, and it's not convinced those costs are outweighed by the benefits to business.

And now that an independence referendum is very likely within the next five years, where will Alex Salmond's business endorsers stand on that? Several of them are clearly against.

More immediately, what will inward investors make of the uncertainty that now hangs over the future management of the Scottish economy, particularly if it hangs there for most of the five-year parliament.

There's no evidence that four years of SNP administration has in any way harmed inward investment. On the contrary, there have been significant successes, notably in the renewable energy sector. And the abolition of England's regional development agencies can be an opportunity for SDI to press its advantage with foreign companies.

But with independence now in play as never before, that represents uncertainty about future tax rates, change to regulation, and even a switch of currency to the euro.

Change adds risk. And business attaches a price to risk.

That's the view from the headquarters of Weir Group in Glasgow, as he sets out a rudely healthy set of first quarter results, fuelling a 6% uplift in profit expectations for the year.

Of the three divisions - supplying engineering equipment and valves for the mining, oil and gas and power utility industries - it's the hydrocarbons that are taking off explosively.

It may not be on the scale of the Glencore float, but it says much about the same booming raw materials and commodities markets.

Two years ago, the oil and gas division was doing $200m (£120m) of business. It's already risen to $400m (£240m), and it's heading towards $700m (£420m). Following record figures in 2010, the latest numbers show orders in that division up a staggering 129% on last year's first quarter.

Getting the supply chain right and maintaining quality, while taking on another 500 staff and investing $40m (£24m) on expanding its Fort Worth base is a big management challenge. It's probably tougher for a company with such a widespread global footprint, in 70 countries, with 26 manufacturing sites and 100 service centres.

Horizontal drilling

The Clydeside company has market leadership in the kit required to "frack" shale rock for gas, and increasingly for oil. In America's drive for new sources of domestically-produced energy, fracking, or hydraulic fracturing of rock, is where it's at.

And it's moving fast. The technology now relies on horizontal fracking. That means drilling a well into a rock seam 10,000 or so feet underground, then drilling the borehole horizontally along it.

Blasting it with water, sand and chemicals forces gas and oil out of the rock formation. Weir Group's pumps then get it to the surface.

The idea's not new, but it's been expanding rapidly in the past few years, revolutionising the gas market in the USA. It's had a global impact in depressing prices for gas worldwide, while decoupling it from its link to crude oil prices.

Now, the focus is on oil reserves, and not only in the Texas basin but with huge potential in the Dakotas. With the technology being rapidly adapted to double the level of pressure being exerted, the potential reserves are growing.

But with that pressure - up to 15,000 psi - comes a lot of wear on the equipment, which is where Weir Group has been cashing in on selling spare parts and after sales from its 26 services centres across North America. Through the downturn, the industry cut back on capital expenditure, but now, it's taking off again.

Ground water

One other factor that might flag up some concern is that environmentalists believe fracking is not only energy intensive, but it could be damaging to ground water. Under the Bush administration, it was barely regulated, but with the US media pursuing concerns about health impacts, there's now a review by the US Environment Protection Agency, which is due to report next year.

Keith Cochrane sounds relaxed about the possible threat to this boom industry. However damaging to the environment, the logic of delivering a domestic supply of oil land gas to meet America's energy security desires is hard to argue with in Washington.

With US growth rates slowing up to about 7% per annum, the next big prospect for fracking and shale gas is in China, with the potential to unlock reserves as big as North America. Weir Group recently formed a joint venture there, and has made its first sale.

He's equally relaxed about problems in the nuclear industry, where Weir Group does only about 2% of its business, supplying safety valves.

Following the Fukushima disaster in Japan, the industry's taking a pause to review safety. But at Weir Group, they don't anticipate that lasting much more than a year, before new projects get under way again. This is a three-year supply cycle, so while orders may be down on 2010, it may not make much difference to Weir Group operations.

The pledges being made are towards the margins: Lib Dems want more efficient medicine procurement and capped pay, and there would be a small increase in income if Tories re-introduce prescription charges for some.

The biggest difference between Labour and the Scottish National Party on health is between Labour's promise to speed up the maximum wait to see a cancer specialist, while the SNP says the priority is to get Scots with cancer to their GPs at a much earlier stage in the disease's progression.

What they all agree on is protection of the NHS budget against cuts being imposed elsewhere. That makes perfect political sense, as the NHS is hugely popular, and cutting it would be hugely difficult.

It makes a bit less financial sense.

Ring-fencing one part of Holyrood's budget gives an incentive not to make efficiency measures that might be possible or desirable. It allows those within the service to expect continuation of the rapid rise in pay that several groups have seen over recent years.

But look at it another way. While the cash going into NHS Scotland keeps rising, the rise in real terms spending power has come to an abrupt stop.

Spending pressures have not.

Spending power

With the current financial year barely a month old, I'm reliably told that health boards reckon they face an overspend of around £100m because of ring-fenced money within their budgets and cash that's already allocated.

That may be modest, judging by an interview given by the chief executive of Greater Glasgow and Clyde health board.

Robert Calderwood told The Herald earlier this year that he's getting a 1% increase in spending power this year, but it's quickly wiped out by commitments already in the pipeline, amounting to between £45m and £51m.

Part of that is in the drugs bill going up, by between 6% and 9%. Unlike other sectors, the more you invest in health technology, the more your costs go up, and the more people's expectations rise of having access to it.

Audit Scotland recently reported the VAT bill is adding £23m to NHS Scotland costs, plus an increase in employers national insurance contribution.

It said there are "major challenges to find significant savings", even if the budget is protected from the cuts being felt elsewhere.

Older people

The pressure it highlights strongly is the demographic pressure on services.

That comes particularly from the growing number of older people, who use health services more, and the particularly rapid rise in the very old. Scots aged over 85 are due to rise in number by 144% by 2031.

Audit Scotland cites Scottish government analysis showing that the bill for health and social care for those aged 65 and over is around £4,800 this year, and will be up by about 15% by the end of the next parliament, in 2016.

By 2031, it is on track to rise by 62%. Simply keeping pace with general inflation isn't much of an answer to that kind of cost pressure.

Since Professor David Kerr's report into the future shape of NHS services in Scotland, his recommendation of centralising some services to improve their quality has been dumped in favour of protecting local hospital services. That's now common ground for the major parties.

So if hospitals are protected, what about jobs?

Compulsory redundancies

The political desire to avoid compulsory redundancies is described by one very senior health manager (they tend not to talk both candidly and publicly) as "completely unrealistic".

So if both hospitals and jobs are protected, then watch out for pressure being brought onto the relatively soft and less politically sensitive options of public health or mental health.

Or there could be a significance to the moves for health and social care to be merged. There are variations on that theme on offer in party manifestos.

In England, one way the government is handling the protection of NHS spending while others suffer is to give it more to do, such as taking on the healthcare elements of immigration and detention.

That might also be what comes out of a merger with social care, forcing the NHS to take more of the squeeze while making it look like a sensible piece of efficient management.

Inside the NHS, and away from the political consensus on protecting the total NHS budget, there's a lot of questions being asked about how sustainable the current model and expectations can be without big and difficult changes and reforms being required.

That's where Campbell Christie's commission on the future of public services, recently set up by the SNP administration, may provide some answers - when it's safer to debate these things, after the election.

The SNP target of achieving 100% of Scotland's electricity needs from renewable sources by 2020 has been met with disbelief from its principle opponents. It's also been warmly welcomed by many in the energy industry.

Two words of warning: Labour is targeting 80% of electricity from renewable energy by 2020, and it hasn't said the point between 80 and 100% at which a realistic target becomes unrealistic, and why.

Also, it's wise to treat endorsements with some scepticism.

The renewable energy industry is delighted when politicians set ambitious targets. It knows promises later have to be backed up with the regulatory, planning and pricing regimes that ensure they're kept.

Electric vehicles

So how realistic is it to aim for 100% of electricity from renewable sources?

Well, one of the more influential reports into Scotland's renewable potential came from an environment consultancy called Garrad Hassan.

This was commissioned by Scottish Renewables trade body and published last autumn.

Others have produced much less favourable reports on wind power, commissioned by those who are less favourable.

But Garrad Hassan seems to be the one that's making the running with pro-renewable politicians.

It set out different scenarios for Scotland's energy mix, including some assumptions it believes to be quite conservative.

Two of them don't seem at all conservative, in that they think the shift of home heating to electricity and to electric-powered vehicles won't make a significant increase in demand.

Their scenarios boil down to two variables making four outcomes.

One variable is the extent of renewable power generation, and the other is the extent of demand reduction.

Giving a fair wind to investment in new renewable capacity, and adding in a significant cut in energy use, the reckoning is that 123% of Scotland's energy needs could be renewably sourced, with the excess being exported.

If you're a bit less ambitious about reduction of demand for power, Garrad Hassan says its higher level of investment could deliver 106% of Scotland's needs by 2020.

With limited cuts in energy demand and a lower development of renewable capacity, it's reckoned 81% could be achieved.

Spoiled views

And what would that mean in onshore turbines?

This is where the later stages of the Scottish Parliament election campaign have hit turbulence from those who don't like their views spoiled.

SNP leader Alex Salmond was asked how many turbines will be needed during the BBC leaders' debate in Perth.

His answer: the onshore target would be 7 gigawatts, or 7,00 megawatts, which happens to be a mere 500 megawatts behind Garrad Hassan's assumptions.

Scottish demand sits at around 6GW, but onshore wind only produces around a third of its capacity, depending how hard the wind blows, so lots more capacity would be needed.

The consultants also say their 106% figure could be reached by allying that onshore wind expansion with 13% more hydro, up to 1,700MW, offshore wind would have to grow from very little to 5,000MW by 2020.

Biomass and energy from waste would have a capacity of a further 680MW, and reach a far higher share of that capacity.

Tidal and wave power, yet to be commercially proven, are given modest ambitions of around 300MW each by 2020.

If you're not sure how that translates into onshore turbines, then consider this: According to Scottish Renewables' figures dated 18 April, there were 1,367 turbines in 117 onshore wind projects in Scotland, with a capacity of 2.4MW.

Another gigawatt, or a thousand megawatts, of capacity should be delivered from the 450 turbines under construction.

The planning process currently has 2,200 more turbines being considered, with a further 1,600 possible turbine sites being scoped for possible planning applications in future.

Total potential capacity if all that were to be developed - around 13 gigawatts, or more than double Scotland's needs.

But they don't all get approval. Garrad Hassan reckons it can assume that 26% applications do so.

For the clearest picture, it's best to go back to the installed capacity. That way, we're looking at nearly tripling the number of onshore wind turbines to reach that 100% target.

Rising power bills

Of course, none of this explains where the investment capital is to come from.

There's a telling assertion in one of the weekend newspapers that the UK government's £2bn per year tax raid on oil and gas production in British waters - the third such sudden increase in 10 years - is putting a chill on renewable investment as well.

Investment in renewable energy is based on the market signals and cross-subsidies from other forms of generation that the UK government and its regulator put in place.

Martin Falkner, energy banker at consultancy Gleacher Shacklock, told the Sunday Times: "The risk for companies is that this scale of investment will lead to rising profits just as consumers are experiencing large increases in their utility bills.

"While low-carbon investments may represent a good return for the consumer in the long run, will a future government honour the rules put in place today? The recent rise (in oil and gas tax) is a reminder that expected returns can prove illusory".

So targets can be reached - but only if there's a willingness to build a lot more turbines, on a lot more hillsides, and a willingness to fund them.

And it gives our politicians a warm glow too. LibDems are offering at least 40,000 by the end of the decade. Labour's offering 60,000.

While Tories and Greens are not putting a number to their hopes and plans, the SNP trumps them all by saying it wants to create 130,000 jobs by 2020, though it sometimes says it only hopes to reach that figure in total.

That may because the reckoning these parties are using starts with the assumption, dated 2009, that Scotland already had 73,000 green and low carbon jobs.

So how realistic is the target?

It depends on a report commissioned by Whitehall's energy department and provided by environmental economic consultants Innovas.

That shows that Scotland is under-performing, despite its obvious strengths in renewable power, with London and the south-east of England, doing far better.

Job replacement

Why? Well, perhaps because the report chooses to define green jobs very broadly.

If you're in the business of waste-water treatment or drive the truck that collects bottles for recycling, then you're already in a green job.

Likewise if you're making an energy-efficient design of window or door. But bear in mind that someone else's inefficient design of window or door is not going to be made, and that could mean jobs lost elsewhere.

There's quite a lot of replacement going on as well as job creation.

More than quarter of these low-carbon and green jobs are in alternative fuels, and that includes nuclear energy - not always seen as green but counted in because it requires relatively low carbon emissions, mostly in construction.

Hustings claims

Only around a tenth of the UK total of 880,000, according to Innovas, were in wind energy. And although there's growth potential there, with Scotland one of the parts of the UK that's best placed to get them, jobs growth in that report is not looking quite as spectacular as you might think from the claims made on the hustings.

The growth rates being projected suggest growth of 33,000 green jobs by 2015. Keep that rate up to 2020, and you get more than 40,000.

What that then requires are the skills to fill these roles, and lots of finance - of the private, rather than the Holyrood variety.

It's in raising that capital investment that the biggest obstacle lies to all these campaign green job targets.

The unionist argument used to be that Scotland couldn't possibly survive on its own without running up enormous deficits.

Given the UK's fiscal incontinence over the past three years, the force of that attack has been somewhat blunted.

The next bit of the argument was that Scotland with oil revenue might have some good years, but the black stuff is too volatile a commodity price on which to base your economy, and output is inevitably going to decline.

The state of the oil and gas markets has certainly backed up the volatility argument. But the trends of international demand, allied to the prospect of peak oil as global supply goes into long-term decline, tend to look like volatility is to the upside. In short, the terms of this debate have changed a lot since the first Scottish Parliament election, and most of all since 2007.

We've got some updated figures, from those hard-working number-crunching folks at the Centre for Public Policy for Regions.
They've worked through the implications of the sharply raised oil price in recent months, and added in George Osborne's surprise £2bn Budget tax raid on oil production companies.

Taking assumptions used by the UK Treasury, and throwing in that extra £2bn per year, they allocate Scotland its geographic share of the £64bn in tax expected to flow from under UK waters over the next five years.

Politically explosive

Unsurprisingly, it doesn't look so bad when Scotland's projected deficit is set alongside the UK's fiscal overspend. This year, the two would be at their widest margin - the UK facing a deficit of 7.9% of GDP, while Scotland would face a 5% deficit.

That gap in Scotland's favour then closes in each of the next four years, to reach a UK deficit of 1.5% in 2015-16, while Scotland would have a 1.3% gap.

In cash terms, the help of £12bn in oil revenues this year would leave a Scottish Treasury with £7.7bn to find, compared with the UK's £135bn. By the end of the Osborne Squeeze in 2015-16, that would be down to a £2.5bn Scottish borrowing requirement, while the UK Treasury is on track for a £29bn spending gap that year.

Between 2005 and 2009, Scotland's estimated deficit as a percentage of GDP, when oil revenues are included, was smaller than the UK's in each of the four years. It was also within the 3% limit set (though now blown apart) as part of the eurozone's rules for prudent fiscal management.

That assumes that a fiscally autonomous Scotland would take a similar approach to cutting the deficit that George Osborne is taking. That's a bold assumption. The consensus seems to be that the major Holyrood parties, apart from Conservatives, would take any opportunity to slow up the cuts.

That also assumes that Scotland would implement the same tax raid that the Chancellor is mounting, as his way of avoiding the planned and politically-explosive 5p per litre increase in petrol duty. But as the hypotheticals grow, that also seems unlikely, as there is growing evidence that it will discourage vital investment in offshore production.

As the CPPR authors point out, the prospect of any kind of deficit, even the most manageable one, requires politicians to decide how it's handled; spending cuts, more borrowing or higher taxes?

Without that tax take, and if spending were at a higher level than currently planned, it's not possible to say that Scotland would be running a smaller deficit than the UK. But nor is it possible to say that it would be any more in the red than the UK.

You can hear a Newsnight Scotland special on the constitutional aspects of this year's campaign, tonight at 2300 BST on BBC 2 Scotland.

Update: On the subject of that Treasury tax raid, it's worth noting another strong attack from the industry, this time from Conoco-Phillips, third biggest oil major in the US. It points out it operates in 30 countries, and now counts the UK as "one of the more unstable investment climates for our business, and like others we are re-assessing future investments".

Chairman and chief executive Jim Mulva cites three major tax increases in the past ten years, raising tax on UK production from a minimum 30% to at least 62%, and this is now "a difficult place to invest".

That's a lot of warnings coming from North Sea operators. We should start to find out soon if the investment really is going to slow up.

Antonio Horta-Osorio has already got 600 branches on the market, as required by the European Commission in exchange for approval for the massive wad of state aid that was the bailout.

Nearly a third of them are Lloyds TSB Scotland, and one of his first announcements after moving across from Santander was to acclerate that sale process.

The Independent Commission on Banking has vaguely warned in its interim report that that 600-branch sell-off should be "substantially enhanced", as a means of boosting the amount of competition in Britain's retail banking market, nearly a third of which is in Lloyds' hands.

No-one can say quite what that means, and when it might be required.

The bank is facing requirements for higher capital buffers.

And add to that the UK Government wondering when and how it might sell its 43% stake, to which end it would rather like Lloyds' stock price to rise comfortably above its paper profit threshold.

That's a long way off, at 123 pence, while the bank closed last week below 60 pence.

Market conditions

That's just the political and regulatory environment, before the new team at the top of Lloyds get to grips with the market conditions it's facing, and its strategic direction.

This, after all, is a company still working through voluminous amounts of integration of Lloyds TSB with Halifax Bank of Scotland.

And there are those who reckon it's still got some way to go before the full value from the integration of Lloyds Bank with TSB and Halifax with Bank of Scotland are realised.

It doesn't have much chance of being allowed to grow its share of Britain's retail market.

It doesn't seem well placed to get any more international, while it remains chastened and under the eye of the government, which owns 41%.

So what does it do? According to one report today, it sells Edinburgh-based Scottish Widows for more than £5bn.

Why would it do this? That's not quite so clear from the press report, and Lloyds Banking Group isn't commenting.

It's not apparent that Scottish Widows is under-performing. Indeed, it's contributing rather handsomely to Lloyds' profits.

A big mouthful

It would be a significant retreat from the model Lloyds and others have developed of offering (and sometimes hard-selling) a full range of retail services - including, in the case of Scottish Widows, life assurance, pensions and investments.

The merger of Lloyds TSB and HBOS has already seen off the former HBOS asset management division, Insight Investments, with a part of it sold and the rest integrated into the rest into Scottish Widows Investment Partnership.

That's the operation that handles Scottish Widows assets, but which is run separately from insurance as part of the wealth division.

It's in that division you'll find another HBOS legacy, St James's Place wealth management, which is also being named as a possible billion-pound sell by Horta-Osorio.

The other part of the equation, of course, is figuring out where the buyer is and what money is available.

Clive Cowdery's Resolution is being named as the insurance industry aggregator most likely to bite, as it's been swallowing up bits of the industry that become available.

Scottish Widows would be a big mouthful.

But it's worth remembering that Royal Bank of Scotland is also out there in the market-place, selling off its insurance division.

With a lack of buyers evident, that looks most likely to be floated.

And any attempt by Lloyds to put its own insurance business into the market is likely to depress prices for both big banks.

A bit boring

So how will Antonio Horta-Osorio make his mark, with the strategic review we're told he'll deliver in June?

With a splash? Selling off businesses, and shedding market share - some of that in response to political pressure/requirements - while focussing the bank much more narrowly?

Or getting his head down with the continued business of integration, focussing on customer service, and getting the share price up to keep his dominant shareholder happy?

Only once that government stake has been sold will he be truly free to review and to set out a strategy of his own making.

Anyway, wasn't this supposed to be the time for banking to become a bit boring again?

Update: I stand corrected, which is the only time I've ever had reason to be grateful to a fruitmachine.

The break even point for the UK Government is lower than I stated. It originally stood at 122.6 pence, after the first tranche of bail-out capital. But under the terms of the Asset Protection Scheme and after the rights issue announced in November 2009, in which the UK Government took its 43% share, the average price at which the taxpayer had invested in Lloyds Banking Group fell to 63 pence.

The investment's still underwater, but in need of a snorkel rather than scuba gear.

With astronomical figures and unexplained gaps, drawing in mysterious political energy forces, the claim and counter-claim are intended to obscure the fact that none of the four main parties has come out of the analysis of their spending plans with much to feel proud about.

This comes from the Centre for Public Policy for Regions at Glasgow University.

And just as the Institute of Fiscal Studies in London has come to play a vital role in passing judgement on Westminster politicians' financial planning, so the CPPR is the best we've got in Scotland, and at a very small fraction of the IFS price.

What it can't do is say whether the estimated costs of policies are correct.

That's a massive undertaking, much of it subjective, and well beyond a unit of this size.

What it can do is say whether parties' sums add up.

One pound in eight

There's the headline conclusion that far too much wishful thinking is going on.

To listen to the campaign, you wouldn't guess that one pound in every eight of Holyrood's budget is going to disappear over the next five years.

That's £3.5bn.

The CPPR nails efficiency savings as being subject of the most wishful thinking.

Labour and the SNP have near identical claims on this, and the CPPR questions whether they can deliver, or whether we can ever know whether they have delivered.

By applying them across the board, it seems a lot to ask of the police forces to offer up £150m of efficiency gain from re-organisation and then another 2% per year on top of that.

Likewise, specific efficiencies that are being targeted in the NHS drugs bill, in addition to general efficiency targets. Can both really be achieved?

Have they thought through that?

The CPPR argues that a 2% annual efficiency gain would require not only a pay freeze, but a 2% pay cut.

The alternative is through productivity gains - for which there is little evidence that the public sector has a track record of delivering. Or job cuts.

Yes, those efficiency measures have a nasty habit of being people's jobs. Not necessarily the inefficient ones.

They're easily characterised as faceless penpushers, beancounters and bureaucrats, but many are far from that, and these are real people's jobs.

If independent estimates are any guide, the cuts in Scottish public spending will involve between 45,000 and 60,000 such "headcount reductions".

Radical re-design

That's just one of the CPPR's pleas about efficiency measures: be honest about what they mean in costs as well as in benefits.

Another is to look again at Crawford Beveridge's public spending commission from last summer.

It said the scale of efficiency that is now being targeted would require "radical re-design" of public services.

Not much sign of much radical re-design in the manifestos, though, or indeed, much attention being paid to that commission report, except where it confirms a policy that a party had already adopted.

Other problems arise with the numbers when they depend on powers that don't exist yet, or on reforms that may not be agreed.

Borrowing powers for Holyrood are required to make Tory sums add up, providing £438m from 2013.

But it's not clear how they'll work, or what costs they will pass on to future taxpayers.

Scottish Water is a source of much of Lib Dem and Conservative planning, but both larger parties are committed to keeping it the way it is, and one of those larger parties is near-certain to be leading the next administration.

So what then for the Scottish Water savings?

For Labour and SNP, what's far from clear is where £560m of promised capital funding for Scottish Water is going to come from after this year, when that allocation has been cut to zero.

Conservatives do their sums on the assumption they can cut that from future capital budgets, while leaving Scottish Water to raise funds in the private markets, when the money hasn't been put in those capital budgets in the first place.

Lib Dems go on to assume they can sell Scottish Water debt for nearly £3bn, and somehow persuade the Treasury to part with more than half the proceeds.

There are some big, bold assumptions there, and without that money, there's nothing to pay for a lot of the Lib Dems' plans.

Woeful capital plans

The CPPR finds comparison across manifestos creates some anomalies.

The SNP claims nearly £250m is freed up by the Forth Bridge coming in under budget.

But it hasn't even been commissioned yet, let alone had its budget allocated.

And if the SNP can lay claim to that money, so can the others.

The data available on other such capital projects is described by CPPR as "woeful".

Likewise, if Lib Dems can get their hands on £1.5bn of funds from selling Scottish Water debt, the same could release as much for Tory planning.

Then there's the higher education calculation.

The scale of the fees that English universities have recently declared they want to charge has the consequential effect of blowing apart the Scottish party calculations on the scale of the gap they will have to fill if fees are to be avoided.

With English fees averaging above £8,000, CPPR cites an estimate of more than £300m being required from the Holyrood budget by 2014-15.

So far, the SNP is committing £93m that year, and Labour £38m, in the hope that raised fees from English students coming to Scotland can bring its funding above £100m.

The consequence, say the Glasgow University economists, is that money will have to come from other priorities, or that higher education will suffer a slow, gradual decline in standards, and they fear it will probably be both.

The CPPR has done an important and useful piece of work.

It helps give some shape to what's not being said or admitted on the campaign trail.

But perhaps it's also guilty of wishful thinking, in that the major parties are all expected to cost their promises and balance their plans, yet none will be expected to implement them.

What we've learned from 12 years at Holyrood is that coalition partners can blame each other for a failure to deliver on pledges, and minority administrations can blame the opposition for thwarting it.

It might seem one of the lower priorities for a bank having an annual general meeting half way through its recovery plan, when it is reporting a £1.1bn loss.

And it's true that Sir Philip Hampton's speech to shareholders has other notes to hit.

He's highlighting the cost of bank reforms, as outlined in the interim report of Sir John Vickers' Independent Commission on Banking.

Taking out cross-insurance and requiring separate capital buffers will cost customers and shareholders, he points out.

And the British public are, of course, the majority shareholders, which is one very good reason why the bank's bosses are, unlike others, not threatening to take their headquarters to other countries in pursuit of lower tax and less regulation.

The chairman highlights the payback to the public of getting the share price up, at a rate of £900m of value for each penny.

Hester trousers

While announcing that RBS is wrapping the former bits of ABN Amro into the plc's core, removing the legal legacy of a separate Dutch entity, Sir Philip Hampton is taking on the critics on executive pay.

And with his chief executive, Stephen Hester, trousering £7.7m for last year's loss-making work (OK, to be fair, some is sewn into a trouser pocket he's not allowed to unpick for a while), there's quite a lot of criticism kicking around.

UK Financial Investments, or UKFI, which represents the UK government's interests as shareholder, has already approved the remuneration report, so there's not much prospect of the criticism derailing executive pay.

But Sir Philip wishes to emphasise the role of pay in continuing to retain and recruit staff.

On that, he offers an astonishing figure: since the crisis hit in October 2008, while you might think RBS has seen a one-way traffic of exiting staff, it's actually recruited 46,000 people.

That's slightly less than a third of the staff total, and represents a colossal churn.

Distaff staff

Anyway, to women. Shareholders have been told today that RBS is looking for more of a female presence on its board.

The chairman didn't actually address the argument that the bank might have taken fewer risks if the board, in Sir Fred Goodwin's day, were a bit less testosterone-driven.

But it's implicit in his embrace of the drive for female recruits.

The message is also aimed well below board level.

"Female engagement" became a priority last year, we're told, focussing on recruitment, progression, development and networks.

"We worked hard" to ensure that at least one woman featured on the shortlist for executive vacancies, he said, and rolled out "a global diversity training module focusing on the subject of 'unconscious bias' to all employees internationally".

It's hard to imagine Sir Fred Goodwin taking this line in the RBS of yore.

Some may see it as that old chestnut of "political correctness gone mad", but it's also a bank trying to show it's in tune with the political and social environment within which it operates, rather than a purely and exclusively financial one.

That, and the financial calculation that a happy female workforce is good for the bottom line too.

In case you missed it, there was a telling observation close to this subject from Jayne-Anne Gadhia, chief executive of Virgin Money and a former RBS lieutenant of Sir Fred Goodwin, in the interview for Radio Scotland's Business Scotland last weekend.

She said Sir Fred Goodwin ran a company where it was clear what you were expected to deliver, whereas Sir Richard Branson runs Virgin as a company where people ask what they can do to help you deliver.

Perhaps a useful contrast and lesson for any business.

But at what price? It's a simple enough mechanism that has persuaded councils to freeze tax, as my colleague Jamie McIvor has explained.

They get offered a total of £70m each year, shared between them, on condition they don't increase council tax. If they refuse it, they lose out twice - first, their share of that money, and second, they have to charge more from local taxpayers.

But what is this costing central government? It's not simply £70m each year, because the costs of delivering services keep going up.

The second year of a freeze requires £140m, the third year £210m, and we're now in the fourth year of the freeze, so St Andrew's House has to hand over £280m to sustain services at 2007 levels.

All four main parties are committed to continuing the freeze for 2012-13, so that will require £350m that year, with Labour adding £10m extra to acknowledge extra cost pressures.

LibDems say they'll take the poorest pensioners out of council tax - those under £10,000 income per year, while Conservatives offer a £200 discount to all pensioner households.

The SNP is committed to going further into the next parliament, and continuing the freeze until 2015-16.

If that still means a £70m extra grant each year, that will come to £560m.

Passing the half billion pound mark is a reminder that this is becoming a sizeable chunk of Holyrood's budget - money that obviously won't be available for other priorities.

Unhealthy erosion

What we've heard today from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (Cosla) is an additional £70m each year isn't enough. Consumer inflation is now running at 4%, whereas the implied inflation rate within the £70m grant is about 2.75%.

That helps explain why Cosla say they would require more than £100m each year to keep up with their costs.

Behind it is an anguished cry about the relationship between councils and central government.

Financial autonomy is being eroded with each year of the freeze.

Only 25 years ago, councils looked to central government for roughly half their funding.

They now rely on central government for closer to 85%, and that share keeps growing the longer the freeze is retained.

None of the parties seems to be discussing whether this is healthy for local democracy, and at what point the share of local tax raised has become too small.

Moreover, none of them is willing to go near a revaluation of property.

We're still being taxed on the basis of what a house would be worth 20 years ago.

The top band starts at £212,000 in 1991 prices, for properties now worth somewhere north of three times that amount.

That wouldn't be a problem if all homes increased in value at the same rate, relative to each other.

But they don't, and they haven't.

Some people would lose out from a revaluation.

Welsh experience of it showed significant numbers moving up not one, but two bands, with bills to match.

And Scottish political memories look back with a shudder to 1985, when revaluation caused howls of protest in better-off areas, leading directly to the introduction of the notoriously unpopular community charge, or poll tax, as a means of getting Scottish Tories off the revaluation hook.

However, for all those who would lose out, roughly the same number of householders are being overcharged because the valuation of their home is now too high when compared with others.

It looks like they're being let down by political caution about alienating the losers from such a process.

Scarce cash

But let's return to the money, and ask who benefits from the council tax freeze.

There are two ways of looking at it. Scottish government figures, commissioned from officials by SNP ministers, found that a two-year freeze, this financial year and next, will save 1% of household income for the lowest-paid decile (10%) of Scottish households.

You may ask how many of those households pay anything, as poorer households often get council tax benefit.

I haven't been able to find out how council tax benefit is distributed across those deciles.

But put it this way: there are 2.4m households in Scotland liable for council tax, and 560,000 of them get council tax benefit.

It's a fair guess that they are loaded towards the cheaper end of the property range, and Band A for tax.

So for those who get council tax benefit, they don't see any benefit.

For those in the top-earning decile in Scotland, the benefit of the tax freeze will save 0.4% of household income.

So on that basis, it looks progressively fair.

But given this is a cash distribution, who saves most from the freeze? It's not the poorest, but those in the biggest houses who stood to have the largest increases without a freeze.

And as council tax is levied according to a fixed formula across the bands, the savings are substantially skewed towards those in the biggest houses.

If you're in Band A (and don't get benefit), let's assume you are avoiding 2.75% inflationary increases for each year of a five-year freeze.

That means you're still paying £733 on average, and you're saving £106.

If the same inflation rate is applied to a Band H home, you're still paying £2200 per year in council tax, and you're saving £319.

That seems an odd priority for scarce cash in a country biased towards progressive politics.

Both Labour and Tories back versions of that policy, with at least six month mandatory sentences.

There's also popular support for ending the automatic, unconditional early release - at the half-way point in their sentence - of prisoners serving less than four years.

The four main parties in the Scottish election are agreed on that much, despite the fact that all four of them have, at different times, operated the policy while in government and in charge of the justice system over the past 18 years.

Then there's a move to bring back the handing down of short prison sentences. Labour and Conservatives favour that, while SNP and LibDems want more non-custodial sentencing for less serious crimes.

Three policies. All quite popular in their own way. Not much evidence that they have a deterrent effect. And rather expensive.

Over-crowding

As part of BBC Scotland's reality check on election issues, I've been looking at the figures on this.

Let's start with the state of prisons now. With a bit of rounding off, the prison population has risen from just over 6,000 ten years ago to 8,000 now. The crime rate has been falling, for a number of reasons, but some more serious crimes are on the rise, and average sentences have been getting longer. The expectation is that the prison population will continue to rise, without any policy changes being made.

That puts pressure on prisons. There's currently design capacity for around 7,300 inmates. The new Low Moss prison in East Dunbartonshire is due to open next year, taking that up to 8,000 - by which time the prison population will probably be north of that figure. So there's over-crowding already.

Meanwhile, resources are tight, to say the least. In the new financial year, the Scottish Prison Service is taking a 24% budget cut, much of that in its capital budget, which is down 66%.

That's one of the biggest cuts of any Holyrood budget, and provides a tough financial context for all these sentencing policies.

Deterrent effect

The official reckoning on the impact of ending automatic early release of prisoners is that it would require between 700 and 1,100 places. That explains why the legislation was passed back in 2006 to reverse the policy, but it's never been implemented.

The cost of jailing everyone convicted of knife crime is quite a bit more. Official statistics show those convicted in the most recent annual figures stood at 3898, which was a significant fall on previous years.

Roughly a third of those convicted already go to jail. So if you're going to jail the others for an average of six months, that's around another 1,300 prison places required.

Supporters of the policy suggest there could be much more rounding down once you take account of the deterrent effect - that is, the fear of prison will keep people from carrying knives.

But senior police officers say that deterrent doesn't work, and we've heard from other experts in the field who agree. Even the experience of being in jail or young offenders institution doesn't seem much of a deterrent, given that well over half go on to re-offend within two years.

Incarceration

So let's put that together. There's no spare capacity in prisons, and budgets are being sharply cut.

Between an end to automatic early release and the start to automatic jail terms for those carrying knives, it looks like 2,200 extra places.

There's a new prison planned in Grampian to replace Peterhead and Aberdeen jails. Although there's no money available for it - or any other replacements of older prisons, including Inverness - HMP Grampian's budget is at least £100m for 550 places.

If that's the going rate for building prisons, the bill for these policies looks like a capital cost of around £400m. That's before running costs, when the price of incarceration runs at more than £30,000 per head per year.

That's before you calculate the cost of reinstating short sentences, as it's hard to guage how that might work and how extensively it would be applied by courts.

Even without that element, it doesn't look like the manifesto pledges being made on crime will be possible to deliver when budgets are so tight.

Its interim recommendations, out today, prefer a form of slow tortured revenge, by increasing capital buffers and the banks' costs. The report has come down against the big break-up pushed by, among others, Vince Cable, when campaigning for the Lib Dems last year.

Now, the business secretary may have to make do with substantially bigger capital buffers and "subsidiarisation" - the hideous word that describes the creation of subsidiaries within a banking group in order to create firewalls between them.

In the part of the report tackling the lack of competition in British retail banking, Lloyds Banking Group is targeted for more of a sell-off than the 600 branches already being marketed as a European Commission condition for its bailout.

Sir John Vickers has not put a number on the "substantial enhancement" to that process. But one of the most immediate challenges of this interim report is whether the sale of 600 branches should be stopped, pending the requirement of a bigger sale.

And given that Royal Bank of Scotland already complied with European Commission conditions by selling more than 300 branches to Santander, there's now pressure on Lloyds Banking Group that it sells outside the Big Five high street banks, to enhance competition.

The RBS/Santander deal is now widely recognised as a missed opportunity for that, and as Lloyds has been slow to get moving on its sale, it could now find tougher conditions placed on selling to a smaller competitor.

Which bits of Lloyds Banking Group could be sold to increase competition? One relatively easy bit to split off could be Bank of Scotland, as it has retreated north of the border as the group's Scottish retail brand.

But as it's already selling off Lloyds TSB Scotland as part of the European Commission's requirements, there's not much logic in flogging both, as that would depress the price of both.

Royal sale

Sir John Vickers commission had a look at trying to undo the RBS sale to Santander, and stopping the complex process of disentangling branches, accounts and information technology, partly to see if it could also be enhanced. But it's judged that too costly and disruptive, and that RBS's market share is not as worryingly large as Lloyds Banking Group, so there's less need to act.

That is clearly good news for RBS, which had seen the Vickers commission as one of the biggest clouds on its horizon.

And if the interim recommendations turn to firmer ones with the final report in September, it means minds can turn to the next big issue for RBS and the bail-out process - the big sell-off.

Share prices still leave the UK government and taxpayer making a paper loss. But if we can assume that economic recovery should help the bank's recovery, the question is when and how its stakes in RBS and Lloyds are to be sold off.

A big break-up of the banks would have reduced the market valuation of those shares, meaning there has been, and remains, a conflict of interest for the British public between maximising shareholder value on one hand and, on the other, the appeal of reducing risk to the government while increasing competition for customers.

Capital buffers

Without a break-up of the banks, they may still lose profitability from increased capital buffers proposed by Vickers.

But it seems the biggest obstacle on the road to a big government sell-off has just been cleared.

And where the consequences of such major reform can be hard to predict, here's a thought about the split into distinct subsidiaries: if the divisions of the banks are to have their own capital bases, and to have firewalls required between them, doesn't that make them easier for future bosses to break up, rather than the regulators?

It has to be one of the possibilities for Lloyds and RBS that their eventual exit from government ownership and return to the market will leave them vulnerable to break up by new owners, just as RBS tore apart its Dutch purchase, ABN Amro, four years ago.