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My preceding Electric
Scotland column gave a specific example of how the UK government plans
to withhold EU cash that was supposed to go to Scottish farmers. The
situation has heated up since then.
According to Newsnet Scotland, the Scottish Government’s Rural Affairs
Secretary Richard Lochhead told the Scottish Parliament that almost a
quarter of a billion euros intended for Scottish farmers was to be
withheld by the UK Government.
The UK government’s decision means that an estimated €223 million of
extra EU cash, known as the convergence uplift, would be lost to
Scotland’s rural community. The money, an accumulation of payments
between 2014 and 2020, is intended as compensation for Farmers in
Scotland who have the lowest per hectare payments in Europe.
An angry Mr Lochhead told Holyrood MSPs the decision was "indefensible"
and compared it to a similar refusal to compensate Scottish sheep
farmers hit by the foot-and-mouth outbreak.
"I thought former DEFRA Minister Hilary Benn's decision not to
compensate sheep farmers for foot-and-mouth was terrible, but this is
worse, said Mr Lochhead. He added, "Were it not for Scotland, the rest
of the UK would get nothing extra - and therefore it is only right and
proper that the UK's convergence uplift should come to Scotland."
Mr Lochhead also revealed that had Scotland been independent the EU
payment Scottish farmers would have been in line to receive would not
have been 230 million euros, but a staggering one billion euros.
More will be heard about this blatant larceny by the UK government. A
Scottish Member of the European Parliament has raised this issue there,
but nothing is likely to happen because the EU Parliament is widely
regarded as a toothless joke.
Blatant insults to
Scotland in the Economist – Again
On the next page is the
cover of the Economist magazine’s 14 April 2012 special issue on
Scotland. It was quickly replaced with a totally bland cover, but not
before enough expat Scots had seen the original one and spread the word.
Besides the cover being grossly insulting to all Scots, not just those
in favour of independence, the content was a wildly inaccurate hatchet
job.
The latest Economist (9 November 2013 included a ‘Special Report:
BRITAIN’. The ‘Devolution’ section on pages 12 -13 contains the
following paragraph:
What turns this [form of devolution] into a problem is that all three
[Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland] receive block grants from
Westminster. This is not offensive in itself: most English regions too,
are net recipients of taxpayers’ money. But it becomes harder to
tolerate if the devolved administrations are seen to be using English
cash to avoid painful reforms.
This was either a deliberate lie or a demonstration of the Economist’s
ignorance of Scotland’s finances: even the UK government now concedes
that Scots pay more UK taxes per head than the folk in the rest of the
UK. In other words, Scotland subsidises the rest of the United Kingdom,
not the other way around.
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