IF you were a pro-Union strategist reviewing your PR toolkit, you’d be classifying the “Union Dividend” among your top two or three soundbites. It is a very elegant way to re-enforce the “too wee, too poor, too stupid” narrative so effectively invoked by Unionism for decades: Scotland commits its modest capital (too wee) to the UK and we get a return which takes care of our funding inadequacies (too poor) with a “generous” dividend on top, to seal the deal. Despite the extra cash though, when left to our own devices – ie the SNP government in power since 2007 – we inevitably mess it all up (too stupid).

A simple, succinct nugget, preying on our core weakness, our sense of unique inadequacy, which in turn keeps the idea of Scotland in check across the collective psyche. But when you look a bit closer you find that the dividend is actually an appalling misnomer.

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Apart from a few cursory mentions in Hansard over the years, linking the higher cost of life in Scotland to its demographic challenges, no-one really knows why we get a dividend in the first place.

In a process that can only be described as slapstick accounting, the additional money is based not on specific Scottish needs, but rather the amount Scotland was given the previous year, the same process followed every year since 1978.

But it gets worse: the 20% mark-up set by Barnett in the 70s was itself based on even older, one-off deals done by the Scottish secretaries in the 1950s and 60s. And that is it. Every year for 50 years, this dividend, based on Scottish life around three-quarters of a century ago, has been rolled forward, drifting, indifferent, unhinged from modern Scottish reality.

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So if no-one knows what the dividend is for, how do we make sense of the amount we get? It should not come as a great surprise that on the two occasions Westminster secretly reviewed the dividend, they concluded it was too high, with Labour’s 2009 analysis deeming it was four times more than needed. Even more telling is that both reviews were quietly filed away and the dividend left intact, so as not to upset native voters. But much more revealing again is just how captured Labour have become by neo-liberalism when you learn that average public spending of comparable European peers would have allocated five times more to Scotland than the UK level. And most of these peers were actually led by centre-right coalitions. This under-investment explains in large part Scotland’s long -term demographic atrophy under Westminster rule.

Despite the dividend, Westminster’s failure to address and prioritise Scotland’s challenges has allowed it to become entrenched as the sick-man of Europe. Its death rate, particularly among males, has consistently deteriorated every decade since the war, supplanting the Finns by the 1980s as the worst among peers.

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By 2000, Scotland was the only country to have suffered three consecutive decades of population decline. Unsurprisingly, by the 1990s this drove its population to becoming the oldest in the UK and second-oldest among European peers. Dividend, you say? More like a partial reparation for decades of neglect.

Of course today these consequences of decades of under-investment and systemic neglect all fall to the Scottish Government to try to sort. With its generous Union dividend. That’s what the establishment will tell you. Are you Yes yet?

If you want to read more about this work, you can find a research summary page on my website at www.sdonald4pr.com/scotlands-union-dividend

Stuart Donald
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