Scotch Independence - the countdown

Oh dear - I do believe the forum's resident grammar and spelling / typo Nazi has just done a Mindy fail.

 

Ahem - you can chalk it up another one of mine instead

 

You rang?

 

Naw he's no .

 

Coming soon...

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Wallet Porn - ER Style

 

That ****s uglier than the face on a real note, has less talent too.

Spiders from mars ffs

 

David Bowie was and is a musical genius .

However he should shut the **** up about Scotland.

 

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Classic

 

Our new currency, coming in 2016:

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Poll in the North East - 17% Yes and 65% No.

Get ****ed Fatso, time and again you have let this region down and now you're paying for it.

 

Aye, cause the oil revenue goes to Edinburgh eh?

 

It will do in an independent Scotland. All of it will go to the Central Belt you cretinous oaf. And the Oil companies don't want Independence.

Still you can rely on shortbread and kilts in Tweetown.

The Yes vote is decreasing all the time and Fatso is running out of lies. Intelligent people in Scotland can see through the fat oaf.

 

So you're happy to send it to London , hundreds of miles further away than Edinburgh from the North east .

Your logic is as f**ked as your memory capacity ya senile auld prick .

 

Something to think about ER . Even as much as you hate the central belt we all know you hate immigrants even more . The oil revenue just now goes to Westminster and is used to subsidise places like Bradford etc .





@Dilemmafortheauldnazi.com

 

It does not matter where it goes.

It will not benefit this region either way.

That is FACT.

Scummy Work shy Central Belters will need subsidising as much as Westminster.

Now **** off junkie and try and earn a living instead of sponging off everyone else in Scotland.i

 

Where does the oil money go?


Oil has long been at the heart of Scottish politics. Forty years since the North Sea first
came on stream it still infuses the debate on Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom. Oil
was at the centre of Alex Salmond’s address to the SNP party conference last week. BP’s
£4.5 billion investment west of Shetland, announced earlier this month, prompted a
predictable bout of verbal sparring between the SNP and the Prime Minister.

The oil boom has underpinned the nationalist case and fuelled their rise to prominence.
It’s Scotland’s oil. If only the country could claim independence, the black gold would
guarantee a new prosperity.

Yet North Sea oil has had a more profound effect on Scotland than just the argument
about sovereignty. It has coloured the very nature of our economy and how we have built
our society. It has changed the attitudes and values of the nation. The discovery of oil
always has a deep impact on a country. The sudden, new-found wealth can be a great
boon. But, like an unexpected inheritance, it can prompt unlooked for change with
uncomfortable consequences.

Like many a political controversy, the debate about oil and Scotland’s public finances is
wilfully skewed by those with a political axe to grind. It is time to debunk two myths that
have become current in the more extreme wings of our politics.

The first is peddled by those on the Unionist right, often based south of the border, who
state that Scotland is subsidised by England. Nothing makes Scottish blood boil more
than this blithe assumption, arrogantly asserted. For though public spending is higher
north of the border, the Treasury in turn benefits from the taxes from North Sea oil, most
of which is in Scottish waters.

Michael Moore, the otherwise harmless Scottish Secretary, blundered into this trap earlier
this week with his claim that Scotland had spent £197 billion more than it contributed in
tax since 1980. Not so, retorted the SNP. If you include oil revenues, that deficit was just
£41 billion, less proportionately than the UK’s.

The flip side of this is the second myth – that if only Scotland were independent, it would
be able to enjoy its oily birthright. This seductive tale has been told by nationalists ever
since oil first squirted out of the North Sea. As Salmond said to his delegates in
Inverness, “Scotland’s vast energy reserves can power our future as an independent
nation.” But this is equally misleading. For Scotland already gets its oil money via the
Barnett Formula which sets government spending in Scotland at a higher level than in
England.


The numbers show a remarkable coincidence between North Sea revenue and the
‘Barnett premium’ that Scotland enjoys. Between 2005 and 2010 oil revenues from
Scottish waters amounted to £40.5 billion, while the cumulative premium of public
spending over that in England was £40.8 billion.

In other words Scotland gets its oil money, and what’s more, it receives it in a stable,
predictable form that irons out the inevitable fluctuations in revenue caused by volatile
oil prices.

True, the Barnett Formula arrangements were never explicitly supposed to compensate
Scotland for its oil revenues. Such a direct link would have been a hostage to fortune,
limiting the government’s ability to respond to changing circumstances. Instead Barnett is
said to be ‘needs based’, reflecting Scotland’s supposedly greater requirement for public
spending. As such it was designed to bring about convergence between spending on in
the constituent parts of the UK as economic inequalities faded away

But politics has a way of finding balance between competing claims, and over the years
there has been no convergence as the UK government has consistently adjusted spending
in Scotland to maintain the premium.

So the idea that an independent Scotland could establish some kind of Norwegian style
oil fund as a cornucopia to fund our pensions is pie in the sky. We’ve already had the
cash and spent it, Mr Salmond.

And this goes to the nub of Scotland’s political economy. What do we do with our oil
windfall? Have we spent it wisely? Could we spend it better? What impact does it have
on the way our economy and society is structured?

This is the real question that Scotland’s politicians should be asking themselves. Not
‘Who’s Oil?’ but ‘Where did the money go?’

So how has Scotland spent its oil inheritance so far? Well, some of it is recycled as
benefits, such as free care for the elderly and subsidised medical prescriptions. But the
vast majority goes on higher spending on health, education and the other core public
services.

The problem is that Scotland does not have much to show for this largesse. The Scottish
Government’s two largest budgets are healthcare and education. In both areas spending
per head is much higher than in England, by 8% and 14% respectively, a combined
‘premium’ of £1.8 billion last year. Yet the evidence shows that healthcare and
educational outcomes in Scotland are no better than those south of the border. Indeed,
Scottish schools are falling behind their English counterparts in terms of exam results.

In other words, between a quarter and a third of Scotland’s oil money is wasted in these
two areas alone. The same story applies in other areas of public spending which as a
whole is 19% higher than England’s, amounting to £1,624 a year extra for every Scot.

The effects of this go deeper than a simple matter of waste, however worrying that might
be on its own terms. For we have to consider where this money has gone. In effect
Scotland has bought public sector capacity – in terms of buildings, equipment and staff –
that is not being used to the full. The end result is very similar to paying people to dig
holes and fill them in again. And this has a big impact on the wider economy and society.

If government floods the public sector with extra money but gets little in return, it causes
the price of what it is buying – labour, bricks and mortar, equipment – to rise. The
numbers of people employed by the public sector in Scotland is 25% compared to just
over 20% in England. As a result Scottish businesses have to pay a premium for staff
because the cost of labour has been forced up.

This effect – called ‘crowding out’ by economists - is one of the reasons why Scotland’s
historic rate of economic growth is lower than the UK average. Scotland’s economy,
titled heavily in favour of public sector employment, may be cushioned in an economic
downturn, but performs badly in the long term.

There are social consequences too. If the oil money is spent largely on paying public
sector workers, then that creates a powerful constituency that is hostile to reformed public
services and lower tax. This might explain why Scotland is dominated politically by
parties of the left.

In a sense, therefore, Scotland has similarities to many other states that have enjoyed an
oil bonanza. Instead of adding to the overall prosperity of the nation, the money is used
politically to bolster constituencies that support the regime.

There is no doubt that the oil money could be used more wisely. Last year’s Barnett
premium was worth £8.5 billion. Imagine if just half of this was returned to the Scottish
people in the form of tax cuts. There is enough there to abolish both council tax (which
costs households £2 billion) and business rates (£1.8 billion), boosting growth and
creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. Alternatively the money could be spent on
building a superlative transport and communications network, or we could focus on
getting bang for our buck in the public sector. There is ample scope here for a radical
agenda of change from any number of political perspectives.

Alex Salmond likes to conflate the story of oil with that of renewable energy, in a golden
seam of wealth extending into the future. According to the SNP, if Scotland controlled its
own energy resources it would be the sixth richest country in the world.

This is a nice image, but it misses the point. A better analogy is another of the First
Minister’s favourites, of Scotland becoming the new Saudi Arabia. No one would argue
that oil has made the Arab kingdom wealthy. But it suffers from high unemployment, low
growth and weak civic institutions, all overseen by a corrupt and bloated elite. That is
hardly a model worth emulating.

 

I'm quite happy looking after the likes of Bradford thank you very much.

People of all races there are actively seeking work unlike the scumbags in Central Belt Scotchland

 

Well if it doesn't matter where it goes why you greeting about ya dense **** ?