DESPITE all the crowing headlines in the British nationalist press today, yesterday's Budget did not represent a bonanza for Scotland. The Conservative claims that the Budget delivers to Scotland the largest block grant since the establishment of devolution are nothing more than the usual Tory twisting of words. The "extra £4.6 billion" takes no account of the additional emergency Covid funding Scotland received this year, and according to Scottish Finance Secretary Kate Forbes, Holyrood will actually have "less funding for day-to-day spending in every year of the spending review period if you compare that to this year".
READ MORE: UK Budget: Pensioners set to lose £2600 as triple lock halted
The lack of financial provision going forward to help deal with the impact of the pandemic can only mean that as far as the UK Government is concerned, the effects of the pandemic are over and done with, so surely they'd agree that either they cough up the extra funding or they drop their opposition to another independence referendum which they are currently basing on their claim that dealing with the pandemic has to be the sole priority of the Scottish Government. They can't have it both ways, because that would mean that they are unprincipled and opportunistic hypocrites, which isn't exactly the best hill on which to plant a Union flag and prove to the people of Scotland that this country's future is best left in their hands.
If the Conservatives were as keen on planting trees as they are about planting Union flags, the UK could go into the COP26 conference with the confidence that it had already met all its carbon reduction targets. Yesterday's Budget was mainly notable in Scotland for the number of Union flags that the Conservatives have decided to plant in devolved fields. The Budget contains provision for £170 million of so-called levelling-up funding which is to be spent on projects chosen by the Scotland Office despite the fact that they relate to devolved matters. Rishi Sunak said he was "proud" of the way in which his government is bypassing Holyrood, saying it was "totally reasonable" for the UK Government to spend directly in Scotland on devolved matters.
Money that Scotland would have previously received under the seven-year EU Structural Fund programmes to spend according to its own needs and under the control of the Scottish Parliament will now be distributed annually according to a Conservative Government agenda without any democratic input from the people of Scotland. This is the sort of thing that the devolution settlement was supposed to prevent from happening.
The Conservatives gave themselves the legal authority, but not the moral or political authority, to bypass Holyrood with a clause in the UK Internal Markets Act, a blatant example of the shameless way in which the Conservatives are using Brexit – which of course Scotland voted against by a decisive margin – to undermine the devolution settlement without the consent of Scotland in order to pursue their Anglo-British nationalist vision of a post-Brexit centralised unitary UK state. Alister Jack's recent admission that he dislikes referring to the UK as a union of nations is further evidence that the eventual goal of the Conservatives is to reduce the political significance of Scotland and Wales to nothing more than glorified English shire councils.
Even if it were true that the Budget represented an unprecedented financial bonanza for Scotland, it still would not justify the neutering of the devolution settlement and the bypassing of the Scottish Parliament. Once again the Conservatives are displaying their profoundly anti-democratic instincts.
This piece is an extract from today's REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.
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