Wings Over Scotland

An alert reader sent us a piece of interesting follow-up info to yesterday’s piece on NHS Scotland costs. Because comparable figures for NHS England are available too, and they make for surprising reading.

These are the Scottish figures for medicine costs at list price, ie before any negotiated discounts that the health service is able to obtain:

The population of England, at 55 million, is just over 10 times that of Scotland (5.4m). So one would imagine that its like-for-like costs would come in at around £12 billion.

But they don’t.

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The BBC front page headline for this is actually just the alarming-sounding “Scottish prescription costs rise by 25%”, without even the qualifier about the timespan.

It’s worse than that, though.

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If you vote Scottish Labour:

And if you vote Scottish Conservative:

Always good to know.

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It’s probably overdue that we start collecting these together. So here’s Sir John Major on the Andrew Marr show yesterday, explaining why a “once in a lifetime” referendum should in fact be held again because its outcome was determined by something that turned out to be untrue.

Which is, of course, totally different to Scotland being told to vote No in 2014 in order to stay in the European Union, because [REASONS TO FOLLOW AT SOME POINT]

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The entire Scottish media has today leapt like starving dogs at a tin of Chappie on a new “study” by right-wing flag-crazed imperialist nutjobs T***e I*****s, which claims to prove that an independent Scotland would have a BLACK HOLE!!! of infinity squillion pounds and all the crops would wither in the fields and stamps would be £5000 each and we’d be invaded by space monsters and all the usual stuff you’d expect.

(In all seriousness for a moment, it genuinely tries to flog the “fiscal transfer” myth and the “Scotland would have to join the Euro” myth and a bunch of other Better Together Greatest Hits that were utterly debunked old hat half a decade ago, and in order to make its economic case work it basically pretends that Brexit isn’t happening.)

But at the bottom of its article the New Statesman offers to link its readers to the full extent of the author’s professional economic expertise and well-argued case, and in fairness if you click the link they do exactly that.

Credit where due, it’s an uncanny likeness of the gloomy wee fella.

Labour MP Stella Creasy, explaining to Sarah Smith on today’s Sunday Politics why she backs a so-called “People’s Vote” on Brexit because voters should have the right to change their mind about a referendum if circumstances change.

Except, as always, for viewers in Scotland.

The Daily Record’s politics lead story today is a slightly underwhelming poll that shows 41% of Scots believe the Tories are carrying out a power grab against the Scottish Parliament, against 34% who think they aren’t (and 25% who have no idea).

Which seems a good time to round up the last results of our own most recent poll, and some slightly disturbing revelations about the Scottish public’s grasp of devolution.

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Scotia episode 2, because posting anything about the World Cup feels too mean.

So we stumbled, we thought, across a random Twitter idiot this morning.

Alert readers may have spotted a flaw or two in that claim.

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In the light of David Davis’ resignation last night and the continuing shambolic chaos that is UK politics, it seemed a pertinent time for these findings from our latest poll.

Readers probably won’t be too shocked that it’s Scotland Vs The Tories again.

Alert readers may recall that a few weeks ago we revealed how an independent Scotland could reduce its budget deficit by billions of pounds a year – by renting out the Faslane naval base to the rest of the UK to keep their nuclear weapons in.

Voters in England, we learned, were more than happy to pay Scotland £5bn annually – and perhaps even more – for a Trident submarine park during the decades that it would take to build a replacement base south of the border.

Of course, that plan is only any good if the people of Scotland would accept it too.

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