The squeals of financial pain we are beginning to hear emanating from council chambers across Scotland are on one level deeply worrying for council taxpayers throughout the country.

Some council leaders are warning that the much-heralded concordat with the Scottish government, which gave us the first year of a would-be three -year council tax freeze and gave them the ability to spend their cash as they wanted to rather than according to central government diktat, is as good as dead. The freeze is melting, they say. Council tax rises are, they add, on the way next April. And it's all the fault of SNP ministers at Holyrood.

But the councils do protest too much. The truth is dawning on them that when they rushed to sign their individual agreements with John Swinney, the Finance Secretary, last year, they were buying a pig in a poke and giving away far more than they were gaining.

They are now realising that the £70million a year that Mr Swinney promised as subsidy for the council tax freeze was too little and that it has been, in the interim, sorely undermined by inflation, pay settlements and the extra burdens that a recession inevitably places on each of our 32 local authorities.

It seems that some, if not all, councils are also resiling from the pledges they made as part of that concordat, as if they had suddenly discovered to their horror that saying they will do something one day actually brings with it a commitment to paying for it on another day. Reduced primary class sizes and free school meals are, we are now told, too much for the government to ask councils to do when council budgets are under so much pressure.

The councils, then, have got themselves into a position where an individual authority risks invidious comparison with a neighbouring council when it comes to said free school lunches or smaller class sizes. Council taxpayers in their area will be entitled to ask why their little Johnny is not getting his free bowl of soup when little Johnny in another council area is tucking in every schoolday.

If a council tries to make out that little Johnny's soup problem is a direct result of Mr Swinney's council funding settlement, they can be asked, with some justification, why they were so keen to sign up to it.

In an act of some desperation, as they realise the scale of the hole they've dug for themselves, some council leaders are talking about getting their de-icer out and doing away with the council tax freeze.

That sounds like a real threat until you consider the political reality. Will they actually go to their council taxpayers and say that, in a fit of pique, they have turned down £70million from Mr Swinney and would prefer, thank you very much, that council taxpayers coughed up instead in the form of 5per cent higher bills? In Yes, Minister terms, it would be more than somewhat “courageous”.

The blunt truth for council leaders is that they completely underestimated Mr Swinney. They thought that having been around council chambers for so long, they would be able to run rings around a ministerial naif; that he was too new to the job to cope with their wily ways. How wrong they were. That squealing you hear is coming from councillors who have fallen into a booby trap of their very own making.

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