Editorial: With the budget over Northern Ireland can move beyond populism and adopt a serious approach to finances

​​The budget has resulted in an additional £100 million for Stormont and has put £620 back into the pocket of NI workers, the government says.

The latter is due to the cut in National Insurance, which is a fair reduction because it is only paid by people of working age (a well paid professional who stays in work after the state pension age, as many people now do, is exempt from the tax).

For that reason, the cut costs the Treasury less.

Both the DUP and Ulster Unionists welcomed such aspects of the budget, but said it did not go far enough. The TUV leader Jim Allister rightly said that Sinn Fein had again shown that "whatever the largesse of the UK government it will never be enough".

Unionists have often seemed at one with SF, a party that wants Northern Ireland to fail, in its perpetual complaints about London's funding, both before and after Stormont came back.

It is past time to adopt a more serious approach to finances, including raising revenue. That the executive parties have baulked at generating a mere £113 million when NI is getting 33 times that amount in a sum to kickstart the assembly has been a bad omen.

This government is almost certainly on the way out. It has, for all the headline measures in yesterday's budget, major financial problems such as colossal national debt and the thorny question of how to fund the military properly in a time of global danger.

With the matter of a suspended Stormont resolved, London's focus will increasingly be elsewhere.

It now needs to be made clear to striking public sector workers, among other groups and organisations, that MLAs are capable of steel, not just populist pandering to every interest and sector.