UNLESS you would like to live forever in a cave in some far-off wilderness, never seeing a soul or even reading this paper, we negotiate.

Even our interactions with other species are a negotiation of sorts, or at least they were at the point of domestication, with the notable exception of cats of course — they appear to dictate terms.

Part of my own domestication involved banding together with my sister to negotiate our pocket money from the Old Man. Having spent his working day negotiating, you’d have thought he just couldn’t be bothered — that was certainly our calculation. 

He, of course, relished it, and took inordinate pleasure in pitching extra jobs for us to do about the house in return. Back and forth it would go for days, sometimes for weeks, my dad telling us he was skint, and my sister coming up with tales of her classmates getting more.

Ultimately, strikes were averted and some sort of compromise was found.

The finest moment was my sister’s pitch for £3, a 100 per cent increase over the year, but one which reflected the inflationary pressures she was experiencing in buying Kylie and Jason records. I was happy to go along with it, even if it meant more ear torture, a compromise before we even started.

Things weren’t so rosy at home at the time, my dad’s bank account had been frozen and his wages arrested as the council set about recovering the poll tax he had refused to pay. Looking back, I do feel a bit guilty, but our hopes were that the outrageous demand would at least warrant a compromise. 

“OK,” he said.

That was it. Once the slight disappointment over the absence of a battle faded, we couldn’t believe our luck until it dawned on us that we went in too low.

“Should’ve asked for a fiver,” I told my sister, with not a hint of guilt.

“Should have,” said Dad with a toothy grin.

A lesson learned, but not one that seems to have been learned by very many MSPs (or indeed politicians in general) these days.

This week, the bedrock negotiation of Scottish public services concluded — the Budget. As I’ve noted before, other than the period of SNP majority rule, and a period after the 2007 Holyrood election when the SNP relied on Tory votes to pass Budgets, it’s been an annual game of when the Greens will announce their support — no-one with any semblance of intelligence ever really believes it to be an “if.”

The little annual dance would be entertaining were it not having such disastrous effects on our politics, and our public services. Every year we have a flurry of activity, tantalising us with “if the Budget doesn’t deliver X we don’t vote for it,” and every year it passes anyway. Don’t get me wrong, in most negotiations, you don’t get everything you actually ask for or want, that’s the nature of the beast, but it would be novel at Holyrood to actually see any real negotiation at all.

This year, the Greens managed to drag the SNP kicking and screaming into putting some cash into a pilot of a £2 bus fare cap across a region, and extending free school meals to pupils in the first three years of secondary school who are in receipt of the Scottish Child Payment, while the other Liberals extracted more funding for drugs services and hospices.

These are all laudable negotiating objectives, of that there can be no doubt. Capping bus fares could be transformative for travellers, but sadly the cash will almost certainly go straight into the hands of rapacious bus companies, which have already done rather nicely out of free bus travel for the over sixties and under-22s. 

Extending free school meals is no bad thing either, though using the Scottish Child Payment as the new barrier to entry is a matter of kicking the can down the road a bit rather than doing what is required. Nonetheless, it’s a negotiation, and it is clearly a step in the right direction.

As for the Liberals’ concessions, perhaps the extra funding for hospices is to assuage some inner turmoil they may be going through for their backing of euthanasia in the teeth of opposition from disability rights organisations who see their right to life fading before their eyes?

I can’t say, but it is to the good. As is the extra funding for addictions services.

If the political classes can learn one lesson from the past two decades, it should be that slashing funding for addictions partnerships was perhaps the greatest policy failure since devolution — and that’s already a low bar. Thousands of lives thrown away, year after year, because the cosy middle class that runs the country never had to come face to face with it, and when they finally did, they spent still longer shrugging their shoulders and deflecting.

The anger that that could happen while former first minister and the country’s longest serving health minister Nicola Sturgeon — who once batted off criticism by admitting her government had “taken our eye off the ball” on drugs deaths — looks forward to a gilded retirement should burn in all of us.

Sadly there are no time machines though, and we can see some signs that the tide has turned in terms of attitude, not least through the advent of a safe consumption facility in Glasgow.

That came after seven years of the Scottish government claiming it couldn’t be done without a change in UK law, and the UK government refusing to lift a finger — both managing to be outrageously wrong while the bodies piled high.

But being “critically supportive,” as they say, of these concessions, what exactly is my beef?

Well, the Scottish government tell us that the cost of those extra measures will be £16.7 million, a little more than the obscene £15m the National Lottery promise to pay out to some punter this weekend, and under two weeks spending for Glasgow’s social work department, now subsumed into the health and social care partnership.

It is also 0.026 per cent of the Scottish government’s £63.4bn Budget.

To hold the future of a government in the palm of your hand and walk out with that is, frankly, embarrassing.

If ever there was a sign that the Greens’ Ross Greer and the Liberals’ Alex Cole-Hamilton have never had to face an angry gaffer in their lives, here it is in a nutshell.

SNP Finance Secretary Shona Robison no doubt couldn’t believe her luck. That’s why, despite this deal, despite any good that may come of it, it is only the crumbs off the table.

That’s why the Greens, despite their members instructing their MSPs not to back a Budget that cuts local services, are OK with councils the length and breadth of Scotland preparing for another round of cuts.

Cuts to libraries, to refuse collections, to teacher numbers, to classroom assistants, and even the school day are on their way thanks to a collective political failure decades in the making.

Rather than being dictated to and once again acting as the Scottish government’s useful idiots, councils should demand real negotiation on budgets or refuse to set them until there is.

Like the strike ballot and strike itself, it might just shake the paymaster out of its complacency, after all what exactly is there to lose?

Until that awakening though, only the power of the people who have had no option but to negotiate all their lives can throw a spanner in the arm’s-length cuts machine — workers, our unions, our communities. 

Our services are too important to be left to people who couldn’t negotiate with a 10-year-old.