National Lottery « Dr Alf's Blog

English: Alex Salmond photographed in his constituency at Turriff (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dr Alf is correct, Alex Salmond and the Yes campaign, aided and abetted by the BBC, have sold the people of Scotland a pup.

The Barnett Formula provides on its own £3,500 gbp a head as a direct subsidy from London and the South East; on top of that the UK is a nett contributor to the EC and most of the rebate it gets is distributed to the Celtic fringe, which of course includes Scotland.

Alex Salmond provides free social care for adults north of the border and free tuition fees, courtesy of the English taxpayer, and south of the border, we are saddled with the extraordinary costs associated with force mergers of 8 Scottish police and fire commands.

In addition, we have more freight movements in England and more car ownership, so we pay a disproportionate amount on Petroleum Revenue tax which, together with the National Lottery, is bankrolling the NHS, which the Scots as the unhealthiest people in the Union use the most per head.

Supposedly, they are going to be better off yet they should lose £6,500 gbp a head per year.

Alex Salmond has put forward wildly optimistic figures on North Sea oil revenues and seems to think he can use the pound, create a separate defense force without extra costs and despite having been told he cannot, remain within the EU automatically and keep the pound.

At best, this man is a demagogue, with an inflated ego and “Braveheart syndrome”.

He and his fellow demagogues need to be told some home truths and his Scottish MPs need to be sent packing from Westminster, with a one way ticket and all the money we send to Scotland should be redistributed as a tax rebate for those of us living in England who subsidize the rest of the United Kingdom.

Either way the Barnett Formula needs to end along with David Cameron’s career followed by his immediate replacement with Boris.

Hopefully commonsense will prevail and the Union will remain intact.

If it does not then we need to become a tax haven and rid ourselves of the troublesome Celtic fringe once and for all.

John Gelmini

North Sea Crude Oil Samples (Photo credit: karenblakeman)

I tend to agree with Dr Alf here.

Margaret Thatcher believed that people made redundant during the recession of the early 1990s would take their redundancy pay and start new businesses.

A very few did, whilst the rest guzzled beer and frittered the money away on debauched and licentious living.

I remember this well because many of the latter lost their houses (they failed to insure their mortgages) and became tenants of buy to let landlords.

Those in this positions lost their credit ratings, were unable to borrow from banks and until the economy grew again in the 1990s were not able to get jobs.

North Sea oil money, which should have been used to modernize the country, and earn foreign exchange, via an intelligently run Sovereign Wealth Fund, was wasted on dole money and has since been used to prop up the NHS, until payments of dole money and pensions made the NI fund insolvent in 2000, making it necessary to fund the NHS through Petroleum Revenue Tax, money filched from the “good causes” part of National Lottery Funding and now the doubled price of lottery tickets.

As oil wells tend to replenish themselves and new techniques have been developed to get at hard to extract reserves, there is more money to be had from North Sea Oil, but as before, the new money is being squandered on make-work schemes designed to conceal the true level of unemployment, actual unemployment and on training scheme providers who have had no more success at finding people jobs than would have occurred if they had not been in existence in the first place.

John Gelmini