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In newspapers, it's called a "reverse ferret" - argue one thing with great vigour and panache one week, and when public opinion turns, follow the herd by arguing the precise opposite the next week, with similar vigour.

This is not quite hypocrisy, which involves holding conflicting views at the same time.

This is more a U-turn in response to changing circumstances, and it can be a noble art.

Several reverse ferrets are going to be required at Holyrood.

Budget pressures are going to force Scotland's political parties to prepare the ground for cuts from next April, and the Holyrood election in May.

By next summer, there should be some sacred cows getting barbecued.

The pressure is financial, and the difficult bit is managing the politics.

Time-honoured tradition, and good practice, requires outriders to prepare the ground for difficult and unpopular decisions.

That's why I'd expect George Osborne to set up a number of independent reviews as part of his Budget statement next week.

In Scotland, we got two of these outriders at work today.

CBI Scotland set out its manifesto for the parties, hoping to influence them when they're struggling to figure out a way of constructing manifestos for austere times.

The employers' organisation doesn't seek to go with the grain of Holyrood opinion. It prefers to challenge it, which is making the CBI more of a political football.

It's calling for a wider range of public services to be commissioned from private firms, and says it's no longer sustainable to avoid compulsory redundancies.

Publicly-owned companies from Scottish Water to Highlands and Islands Airports would be sold off.

While there's a call to tackle pay, pensions and absence rates, an intriguing proposal is to put more incentives into public sector pay as reward for outsourcing and sharing services across organisational boundaries.

That looks like introducing more of a bonus culture into the public sector, when it's under much criticism in the private one.

Then there's something called "re-evaluating student contributions to fees".

This is an unusually mealy-mouthed wording from CBI Scotland. What it means is fees or a graduate tax.

Much clearer is the call today from the Reform Scotland think tank.

It shares the bosses' belief that the state's got too big. It also thinks it only fair that graduates should pay a contribution to the cost of their tuition - above all, if the same money could be used to sustain essential public services elsewhere.

How, for instance, would you choose between nursery school provision or student fees, if one of them has to take a squeeze?

But as there's concern that fees could put people off going to university - and particularly from low-income families - the Reform Scotland proposal is to defer the fees to the point at which graduates start earning more than average earnings.

At present, that's £23,000. Only above £35,000 would the re-payments rise to a top rate of 5% of income.

The argument is made from a fairness point of view, rather than the pressure on public finances.

That may be one of its weaknesses, as the cost to the government of covering that tuition up-front, and only getting repayments starting six or seven years later, doesn't deal with the challenge of balancing books in the short term.

But the fact that the argument is being made at all is important for forcing Holyrood politicians to start addressing the issue. There was a widespread consensus when they voted in 2002 to abolish student fees and replace them with a graduate endowment.

The consensus continued in 2007, when the graduate endowment was abolished. The rhetoric was about making education "free", though it's obviously not free to the taxpayer.

And is that consensus holding three years on? No. The reaction to the Reform Scotland proposal saw three of the four main parties today showing signs of looking to reverse the ferret.

Lib Dems are showing few signs of changing their tune. At Westminster, they've got got an agreement to abstain if Tories want an end to the £3,300 per year cap on English students' fees.

Scottish Tories have been calling for an independent review of all aspects of higher education.

Labour has joined that call, though it's more limited to the question of finance. Spokeswoman Claire Baker said today she's against student tuition fees, but that doesn't rule out the Reform Scotland idea of deferring them for graduates to pay.

The SNP's education secretary, Mike Russell, is similarly against a "kneejerk reaction" of piling the government's financial pressure onto students.

But the administration is now beginning to acknowledge there's a challenge on university finance that needs to be met, and it's opening up to new thinking.

It's worth noting that universities are doing likewise. Today's report says nearly half of their income comes from sources other than block grants for tuition.

That includes grants from UK research councils, commercial research finance, commercial spin-outs of their research, conference income and student rent, along with tapping alumni for donations.

Dependence on core public funding has fallen in 20 years from 80% of combined budgets to 51%.

That partly reflects the high quality of what Scottish universities can offer their commercial partners. Significant parts of the sector represent a world class resource.

If the knowledge economy is the future, and if universities will help create it, then they'll need long-term funding stability.

After four fundamental changes to student finance over the past 12 years, leaving no direct contribution to tuition from students or graduates, that stability is now very much in doubt.