Wings Over Scotland

The term “angels’ share” comes from the ancient Scottish tradition of Whisky making and refers to the phenomenon of sealing up a volume of whisky in an oak barrel only to find less fluid in the sealed barrel when it’s re-opened. We can only assume that it was a mite confusing to people in the past to have sealed up a resource and find when they opened it back up that it was less than before.

Specifically, it’s the portion of a whisky’s volume that’s lost to evaporation during the ageing process, which is deemed to have been consumed by angels. But there’s a more modern version of the “angels’ share” at play in modern Scotland, and this one’s a celestial snaffling not of whisky, but of Scotland’s money.

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Anas Sarwar in the Sunday Post, 9 February 2014:

“Labour won’t look to switch powers over inheritance or corporation tax.

We do not want a race to the bottom on corporation tax where big business benefits and the workers on the shopfloor don’t. That might be nationalist politics, Conservative politics, not ours.”

Oh, Anas. Cutting corporation tax isn’t Labour politics? Are you sure about that?

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We’ve speculated on a few occasions recently on the effect on Scottish public opinion of almost the entire Scottish media being owned and controlled from outside Scotland. So we thought it was time we actually put some facts and figures to it.

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We had a rather surprising conversation with Alan Trench of the “Devolution Matters” blog yesterday, and it inspired us to get on with something we’ve been meaning to do for ages anyway: compiling evidence regarding the future of the Barnett Formula for UK public spending should Scotland vote No to independence.

Quotes in no particular order. (Click for sources and dates.) More as we find them.

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This is going to be tough. Alistair Carmichael’s list of the “top 20” reasons for staying in the UK, issued today, is a document so farcical it’s actually quite hard to analyse.

It’s difficult to react to it in a rational manner, because the rational response is a torrent of angry invective at having one’s intelligence so heinously and crassly insulted. And going for the satire angle isn’t easy either, because it’s quite tricky to think of anything more ridiculous or idiotic than some of the claims the Secretary of State for Portsmouth makes. Striving as ever for balance, then, this is the best we can do.

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It’s one of the weirder aspects of the independence debate that the No campaign constantly shrieks about how an independent Scotland might run a deficit, as if that was some sort of unusual and terrifying state unique to Scotland. So we thought it might be handy to keep this clip from today’s BBC Breakfast here for future reference.

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As a civil servant in London in the 1960s, and being part of the establishment, I always accepted the general view that an independent Scotland would not be able to survive on its own without financial help from the London Exchequer.

However, when in 1968 I was able to closely examine the UK’s “books” for myself in an official capacity, I was shocked to find that the position was exactly the opposite: that Scotland contributed far more to the UK economy than its other partners. And this, of course, was all before the oil boom.

I realised that the Treasury would wish to keep this a secret, as it might feed the then-fledgling nationalistic tendencies north of the border. I decided to keep an eye on the situation to see how long it would take for the true facts to emerge, which I felt would only be a short time. However, the machinery of Westminster, aided and abetted by the media, did an excellent job of keeping the myth about “subsidised” Scotland alive.

In fact it took another 30 years before the first chink in their armour appeared.

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Someone asked us yesterday for some facts and figures to help them with a debate, and it got us remembering one that we never see being brought up, perhaps because it’s buried in the archives of the Herald under Sport > SPL > Aberdeen (no, really).

It’s a piece that pre-dates the Scottish Parliament (and is written in a style that makes it seem older still), but it’s a complete mess of broken formatting, clearly the victim of numerous website redesigns, and painfully hard to read even when rescued from behind the paper’s paywall.

So we’re going to preserve it for posterity here in a cleaned-up, more user-friendly presentation, because it’s pretty much dynamite.

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It was nice to get a wee plug this morning on Radio Scotland’s always-interesting “Headlines” programme. Their online round-up talked about our piece on Scandinavian taxation, and contrasted it with one written by Scottish Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser for the right-wing “ThinkScotland” blog, in which he disputed the widely-held, and oft-decried by Yes supporters, notion that the UK was one of the most unequal countries in the civilised world.

Now, anyone who’d also read Wings columnist Julie McDowall’s superb, blood-boiling article on foodbanks in today’s Sunday Herald might naturally be rather sceptical of Fraser’s claim that the UK was an egalitarian paradise of wealth distribution, but he provided a link, so we had a look.

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One of the great battle cries of the No campaign is the insistence that an independent Scotland couldn’t possibly be a “land of milk and honey” (even though nobody has ever actually said that it would). You simply can’t, we’re constantly told, run a country with Scandinavian levels of public services on US levels of taxation.

That, of course, is a matter of opinion, rather dependent on what you want that country to spend its money on – it’s a lot easier to afford pensions if you haven’t spunked all your cash on a load of nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.

But that’s by the by. To make a better, Nordic-style Scotland, we’re warned, we’d all have to pay much more tax, and if there’s one thing that terrifies British people beyond sanity it’s the threat of higher tax. But just for a moment, let’s assume that’s really the choice, and have a quick quiz.

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So we’re pretty embarrassed that we’ve only just put these two things together. We’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently pointing out that there’s almost no chance of the Barnett Formula – in essence, a mechanism for returning to Scotland some of the excess money it sends to Westminster in the form of oil revenue and tax receipts – being retained after the next UK general election.

We’ve also spent a good six months highlighting that the possibility of Holyrood being given “more tax powers” after a No vote is actually a trap, not in reality offering more power at all, but more responsibility. (Because it does you no good to have to collect your own tax revenue – the power lies in deciding how your tax revenue is spent.)

And duh, it’s taken us till now to see the connection. Boy, is our face red.

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Let’s make this one as short as possible. This week’s latest comedy FEARBOMB from the No camp (well, one among many) was a topically Doctor Who-themed repeat of one of their classics – “You won’t get the BBC after independence”.

We pulled that one apart in detail almost a year ago, but let’s see if we can boil it right down to the bare undisputed facts for easy quick reference.

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