Two-faced politicians offer blood, toil, tears and sweat. And milk and honey.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. But nae jist noo. Which seems to be Alex Salmond's latest offering to the Scottish people on public spending.

The SNP's current message seems to be slightly more nuanced than the constant carping about 'Westminster cuts' that was, until fairly recently, the Nationalist response to the need to trim public spending to help reduce the UK's increasingly unsustainable national debt. Now there seems to be a greater recognition of the need to face up to painful cuts, but this is qualified to the extent that it's claimed the economic recovery is too fragile to risk with a fiscal squeeze at the present time, thus spending reductions for Scotland must be postponed for a year or two. (But no doubt Mr Salmond's £60,000 golden handshake from the Westminster Parliament would have survived even if it was a couple of years down the line.) As the SNP leader said in his valedictory speech to MPs yesterday: "Put simply, you can’t cut your way out of a recession, but you can cut your way into a double-dip recession. Yet despite this is precisely what the Chancellor proposes [sic]."

Which is all very politically convenient for the Nationalists, because they either get brownie points by wringing concessions from Westminster, or they revert to the 'Westminster cuts' mantra.

However, the SNP leadership seems to be a bit two-faced about their approach to debt and public spending, because John Swinney recently referred to "bankrupt Britain", thus if that's the case then how can action to reduce the deficit be delayed?

Which seems a bit like the contradictory stance of the Tories, as outlined by Anatole Kaletsky* in this morning's Times, where the party's stance on facing up to the hard choices entailed by Labour's 'economic Dunkirk' is contrasted with George Osborne's promise to at the same time protect public spending while also cutting taxes.

Of course, all the mainstream parties are having problems reconciling their desire to sound fiscally responsible with the near-universal political imperative to be seen to protect 'frontline services', which presents them with a perennial difficulty, but currently exacerbated by the nexus of the precarious economic recovery and the equally uncertain debt situation, and made more urgent than usual by the proximity of the General Election.

But these policy contradictions and constant toing and froing ensure that despite weeks of wall to wall coverage between now and polling day, by the time it comes for voters to mark their ballot papers they're unlikely to really know where the parties stand on these fundamental matters. Worse still, the politicians themselves probably won't know either.

*Whose reference to Churchill's famous wartime speech provides the inspiration for my headline.