The new apartheid
by EDWARD HEATHCOAT AMORY
16th June 2007
Daily Mail
A wealth of benefits that the Scots receive but are denied to the English (Click to enlarge)
The Scots get lifesaving drugs denied the English,payno tuition fees,provide free care for the old andwill soon have free prescriptions. Could this explosive divide shatter 300 years of union?
Fancy a better life? Then move north of the border.
Awash with cash provided by English taxpayers, Scotland now provides a range of public sector handouts and perks for its citizens that are not available in the south - no tuition fees, free personal care for the elderly, free central heating, free bus and train travel for over 60s, and a range of life-saving drugs denied to patients in England.
This week it was announced that the sight- saving drug Macugen would not be available in England and Wales for treatment of the most common form of blindness, wet agerelated macular degeneration.
This means thousands of pensioners will go blind every year - but not in Scotland, where the drug will be prescribed on the NHS.
The list of differences lengthens by the week, and the burning question for Gordon Brown and David Cameron is how long the English will put up with it.
The formula which allocates cash between England and Scotland has always been biased in favour of the Scots.
While we were all part of a Union with one parliament, and Scotland a smaller, poorer and wilder part of the whole, the English were happy to put up with this subsidy.
Without a Scottish parliament, the disparity wasn't nearly so obvious.
Yes, average public spending per person in Scotland was £1,500 a year more than south of the border, but no one rubbed English noses in this unpalatable fact.
Yes, one in four Scots worked for the state, compared to one in five in the rest of Great Britain, but the English didn't really mind.
Now, however, the parliamentarians at Holyrood are only too keen to boast about all the goodies they are handing to their electorate, and so the underlying unfairness has become increasingly obvious.
After devolution, the size of the Scottish Executive increased by 18 per cent and of associated quangos by 40 per cent. Inevitably, the waste got worse.
This is all exacerbated by the fact that MPs for Scottish constituencies can vote on provision of health and education in England, but we have no reciprocal rights in Scotland: the so-called West Lothian question.
So the Scots not only take a disproportionate share of our money, but also have an unfair say in our democracy as well.
The Scottish Nationalist response to this argument is to point to oil revenues.
Scotland, they say, receives about £10 billion more every year in spending than it pays in taxes, but the tax revenues to the Exchequer from North Sea oil are about £10 billion as well.
In addition to a tax on each barrel of oil, the companies also pay exploration and licensing fees to the government.
This money all goes to the Treasury in London and - the nationalists argue - as this tax belongs to Scotland, the two cancel each other out.
But this argument doesn't stand up. Oil revenues may be £10 billion a year now, but as recently as 1992 they were £1 billion a year.
They've risen as oil prices have gone up, they can fall back again just as easily, and anyway, North Sea oil reserves are gradually being depleted. The oil bonanza is coming to an end, perhaps as soon as 2030.
Nor is it at all clear that the Scots would be entitled to all these oil revenues. Depending on how you draw the maritime boundary between the two nations, up to 50 per cent of the oilfields could end up in English territorial waters.
So there's no excuse for the handout, but the really tragic aspect is that all these subsidies have actually damaged Scotland.
So comfortable have they become sucking on the teat of English subsidy that our northern cousins have lost their way economically.
With 50 per cent of GDP in Scotland spent by the state, compared with less than 40 per cent in England, the Scottish economy, cushioned by welfarism, has in recent years grown far more slowly than England's.
Scotsmen are less healthy as well; they live three years less on average than Englishmen.
That's why an increasing number of hard-nosed Scottish businessmen favour independence. They believe that only by cutting their country off from English handouts can they regain the entrepreneurial vigour of their forebears.
At present, in a country of five million souls, there are only 163,000 people paying more in tax than they receive from the state. No wonder their economy isn't growing.
There is ample scope here for political mischief-making, and the new Scottish First Minister, the SNP leader Alex Salmond, is going to make the most of it.
He knows that a mere one third of Scots at best want independence, so he must have been profoundly relieved that none of the other parties would agree to a referendum on going it alone. He would have lost it.
Instead, his best chance of an independent Scotland is to make the English angry, so that the push for splitting the Union comes from south of the border.
And one sure way to provoke that is to spend the next five years emphasising how much cushier life is in Scotland than in England.
This gives Gordon Brown a huge political headache. Apart from emphasising his roots, as an MP from a Scottish constituency, every argument about subsidy or independence damages his standing with English voters.
On top of this, any attempt to give Scotland less money would destroy Labour's political base in Scotland and hand the initiative to the nationalists.
Meanwhile, David Cameron and the Tories face a terrible political temptation. They are supposed to be the party of the Union, but there's only one remaining Tory MP from north of the border.
Scottish independence, wiping out all those Labour seats at Westminster, would give the Tories a far better chance of governing what remained of the United Kingdom.
Their current proposal - only English MPs voting for English laws - is a fudge that can't possibly work.
If the Tories look like they might lose the election, playing the English nationalist card may become irresistible.
The result may be that the final push for Scottish independence comes not from the north, but from the south.
If the English people get so fed up with subsidising benefits for the Scottish which are denied to them, then Scotland could indeed find itself becoming independent - and ironically no longer able to afford the benefits it currently enjoys.
The tragedy is that despite all the pious speeches Westminster politicians are currently making about Britishness, the future of the Union looks more threatened today than ever.
There is only one certainty. The current arrangement - financial and political - between England and Scotland is so unfair as to be unsustainable.
Unless a way is found to level the playing field, the United Kingdom will come under unbearable strain.
dailymail.co.uk
by EDWARD HEATHCOAT AMORY
16th June 2007
Daily Mail
A wealth of benefits that the Scots receive but are denied to the English (Click to enlarge)
The Scots get lifesaving drugs denied the English,payno tuition fees,provide free care for the old andwill soon have free prescriptions. Could this explosive divide shatter 300 years of union?
Fancy a better life? Then move north of the border.
Awash with cash provided by English taxpayers, Scotland now provides a range of public sector handouts and perks for its citizens that are not available in the south - no tuition fees, free personal care for the elderly, free central heating, free bus and train travel for over 60s, and a range of life-saving drugs denied to patients in England.
This week it was announced that the sight- saving drug Macugen would not be available in England and Wales for treatment of the most common form of blindness, wet agerelated macular degeneration.
This means thousands of pensioners will go blind every year - but not in Scotland, where the drug will be prescribed on the NHS.
The list of differences lengthens by the week, and the burning question for Gordon Brown and David Cameron is how long the English will put up with it.
The formula which allocates cash between England and Scotland has always been biased in favour of the Scots.
While we were all part of a Union with one parliament, and Scotland a smaller, poorer and wilder part of the whole, the English were happy to put up with this subsidy.
Without a Scottish parliament, the disparity wasn't nearly so obvious.
Yes, average public spending per person in Scotland was £1,500 a year more than south of the border, but no one rubbed English noses in this unpalatable fact.
Yes, one in four Scots worked for the state, compared to one in five in the rest of Great Britain, but the English didn't really mind.
Now, however, the parliamentarians at Holyrood are only too keen to boast about all the goodies they are handing to their electorate, and so the underlying unfairness has become increasingly obvious.
After devolution, the size of the Scottish Executive increased by 18 per cent and of associated quangos by 40 per cent. Inevitably, the waste got worse.
This is all exacerbated by the fact that MPs for Scottish constituencies can vote on provision of health and education in England, but we have no reciprocal rights in Scotland: the so-called West Lothian question.
So the Scots not only take a disproportionate share of our money, but also have an unfair say in our democracy as well.
The Scottish Nationalist response to this argument is to point to oil revenues.
Scotland, they say, receives about £10 billion more every year in spending than it pays in taxes, but the tax revenues to the Exchequer from North Sea oil are about £10 billion as well.
In addition to a tax on each barrel of oil, the companies also pay exploration and licensing fees to the government.
This money all goes to the Treasury in London and - the nationalists argue - as this tax belongs to Scotland, the two cancel each other out.
But this argument doesn't stand up. Oil revenues may be £10 billion a year now, but as recently as 1992 they were £1 billion a year.
They've risen as oil prices have gone up, they can fall back again just as easily, and anyway, North Sea oil reserves are gradually being depleted. The oil bonanza is coming to an end, perhaps as soon as 2030.
Nor is it at all clear that the Scots would be entitled to all these oil revenues. Depending on how you draw the maritime boundary between the two nations, up to 50 per cent of the oilfields could end up in English territorial waters.
So there's no excuse for the handout, but the really tragic aspect is that all these subsidies have actually damaged Scotland.
So comfortable have they become sucking on the teat of English subsidy that our northern cousins have lost their way economically.
With 50 per cent of GDP in Scotland spent by the state, compared with less than 40 per cent in England, the Scottish economy, cushioned by welfarism, has in recent years grown far more slowly than England's.
Scotsmen are less healthy as well; they live three years less on average than Englishmen.
That's why an increasing number of hard-nosed Scottish businessmen favour independence. They believe that only by cutting their country off from English handouts can they regain the entrepreneurial vigour of their forebears.
At present, in a country of five million souls, there are only 163,000 people paying more in tax than they receive from the state. No wonder their economy isn't growing.
There is ample scope here for political mischief-making, and the new Scottish First Minister, the SNP leader Alex Salmond, is going to make the most of it.
He knows that a mere one third of Scots at best want independence, so he must have been profoundly relieved that none of the other parties would agree to a referendum on going it alone. He would have lost it.
Instead, his best chance of an independent Scotland is to make the English angry, so that the push for splitting the Union comes from south of the border.
And one sure way to provoke that is to spend the next five years emphasising how much cushier life is in Scotland than in England.
This gives Gordon Brown a huge political headache. Apart from emphasising his roots, as an MP from a Scottish constituency, every argument about subsidy or independence damages his standing with English voters.
On top of this, any attempt to give Scotland less money would destroy Labour's political base in Scotland and hand the initiative to the nationalists.
Meanwhile, David Cameron and the Tories face a terrible political temptation. They are supposed to be the party of the Union, but there's only one remaining Tory MP from north of the border.
Scottish independence, wiping out all those Labour seats at Westminster, would give the Tories a far better chance of governing what remained of the United Kingdom.
Their current proposal - only English MPs voting for English laws - is a fudge that can't possibly work.
If the Tories look like they might lose the election, playing the English nationalist card may become irresistible.
The result may be that the final push for Scottish independence comes not from the north, but from the south.
If the English people get so fed up with subsidising benefits for the Scottish which are denied to them, then Scotland could indeed find itself becoming independent - and ironically no longer able to afford the benefits it currently enjoys.
The tragedy is that despite all the pious speeches Westminster politicians are currently making about Britishness, the future of the Union looks more threatened today than ever.
There is only one certainty. The current arrangement - financial and political - between England and Scotland is so unfair as to be unsustainable.
Unless a way is found to level the playing field, the United Kingdom will come under unbearable strain.
dailymail.co.uk