Scotland and the CSR

This weeks comprehensive spending review has caused a great deal of debate.  Was it fair?  Were the cuts to fast?  What was the actual cut in Scotland?

Starting with the facts, the UK Treasury have claimed that the cut to the Scottish Budget has been £900m.  This proposition has been pushed by Tory whipping boys, the Lib Dems.  Unfortunately for Mr Clegg and his Lib Dem sell outs, it’s a fairly simple calculation to show the actual cut in Scotland next year is £1.3bn, a real terms cut of £1.8bn!

These cuts would be bad enough standing alone but matters are made worse when you consider that Scotland has been subsidising the UK for at least the last 5 years.

This position was helpfully clarified by Professor Andrew Hughes Hallett of St Andrews and George Mason (Virginia) Universities.  In an interview on BBC Scotland (23^rd Oct) Professor Hallett confirmed that Scotland would “definitely be better off in terms of revenue” and when asked directly, “Economically, does John Swinney have a case when saying Scotland can’t afford the Union?” Professor Hallett answered “well I would have thought he has a case, I mean you would probably think the same if it was your private income because at the moment on the current account there is a subsidy going to London”

These are facts which the Unionist parties will not like to hear and many south of the border would be well advised to pay heed to them, particularly journalists like Simon Heffer who, when writing in the Telegraph (24^th October) made a serious of simply ignorant comments such as;

“The spending review may have cut deep but we continue to bankroll Third World despots and Scotland”

“Not only would it be fair for the Scots to take the same degree of pain as the English, it would be good for them”

“Instead of its [Scotland] continually having to hold out the begging bowl to the English taxpayer”

Comments like these show the complete and utter lack of understanding that exists in large sections of the UK media, although some of it is wilful and deliberate in perpetuating the myth that we are too small and too poor to be Independent.  It’s a case of if you say something often enough, people eventually start to believe it, regardless of the facts.

Setting aside oil revenues (of which there is a vast fortune on a one way trip to the treasury) there are various sources of income generation from Scotland, such as Crown Estates incomes, paid directly to the UK treasury, foreign exchange revenues, tax revenues and the built in surplus in contributions to reserved areas.  An example of this is defence spending, appropriate given this weeks strategic defence review.  Currently Scotland contributes around £2.8bn to the UK towards defence, yet only £2.0bn is returned to Scotland through defence spending.

As John Swinney said in his address to the SNP conference in Perth, “we can no longer afford to be part of the Union”