JACKIE Baillie slams the Scottish administration for “presiding over a two-tier health system … where the price of poverty is pain.” She’s gaslighting us.
Scotland’s main funding source – its “allowance” – is a block grant from London. Holyrood has some limited direct taxation powers, but most are reserved to Westminster. And what Holyrood raises in taxes must be balanced with its devolved expenditure.
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The size of the block grant is determined by the amount Westminster spends on English public services. As an example, for each £1 spent on the English NHS, a small proportion based on population size is allocated to Scotland’s block grant. Holyrood can move expenditure around the various devolved areas – say from education to healthcare – but the total amount of money is fixed. There’s no fiscal autonomy with devolution.
Westminster devolved responsibility for the Winter Fuel Payment to Holyrood, but not the power to raise the additional £100 million which will disappear from the block grant courtesy of Westminster’s cuts. Holyrood faced the challenge of finding the money from elsewhere – it can’t create it like the UK Government can, because the UK Government owns a central bank and the Scottish Government does not.
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Rachel Reeves vowed not to increase public spending until economic growth resumes, which is unlikely given her austerity policies. So, where’s the money coming from to ramp up defence spending by £13-15 billion a year (2.5% of GDP) as Starmer promised? Simple – English Labour will rob the public sector, which means a cut to Scotland’s block grant. Neat, huh?
If Baillie had an ounce of integrity, she’d be saying “the price of devolution is pain”. The problem is the UK Government’s domineering control over Scotland and its economy. Only terminating this fake Union and restoring Scottish popular sovereignty can end the pain.
Leah Gunn Barrett
Edinburgh
RICHIE Venton makes exactly the right call in his article of August 13 (Workers and unions have a vital role in standing up to far right): workers and trade unionists have to face down the fascists.
The extreme right have made inroads all across mainland Europe, with large numbers of people suckered by racist propaganda. There, as here, the problems besetting the majority are absolutely not the result of migrants or refugees, whatever brings them to Europe (or western Europe in the case of Ukrainians).
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We have been subject to four decades of a transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top, and the fabric of our cities, towns and society at large have suffered as a result. A reversal of this, as called for by the Scottish Socialist Party, is the only way to improve the lot of working people in Scotland and drive the fascists out.
As we call for a mass mobilisation of workers and trade unionists for the anti-racist demo on September 7, supported by the STUC and other unions, we should also remember that every organised fascist or racist political group opposes Scottish independence and must be marginalised for that reason also.
David Stevenson
Cambuslang
TO hear Scots Wha Hae properly played by a military brass band, Google “La Marche des Soldats de Robert Bruce”. It is a popular piece on the Continent, played by French army, navy and Foreign Legion, German police and many other bands. Their presentations are of a very noble, yet modest, Scottish national anthem. Robert Burns tells us he wept when he first heard its tune, Hey Tuttie Tatie.
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You will never find it played by British military bands because of its high patriotic appeal to Scots. Scots Wha Hae is played every year in Orleans to celebrate the major Scottish part in the town’s liberation by Joan Of Arc. With Burns’s lyrics, it is the natural choice as a serious, dignified national anthem.
Councillor Tom Johnston
Cumbernauld
TONY Perridge has a touching faith in “the common folk” as the infallible arbiters of what our national anthem should be (Letters, August 10). I would respectfully suggest that they have not been meaningfully consulted and options considered. As it happens, I have an old recording of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s rendition of Scots Wha’ Hae, which is never aired (perhaps we should ask for it?) and which is a world away from the dirge-like versions we have all endured.
Words by our national poet and a tune probably played at Bannockburn (Hey Tuttie Tatie) – where the “common folk” secured our independence for a few hundred years – perhaps qualify it for consideration?
(An interesting piece in another paper, on Sunday last, praised in particular the anthems at the Olympics of America, France and Norway as terrific, but the awful dirge of GB as “depressing”).
David Roche
Blairgowrie
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