tyke

It's a bit long, but worth reading. This is the kind of system you get when the socialists are running things and they don't even have to raise the money they spend.

Daily Mail
McLunacy
By Tim Luckhurst

Devolution, says Blair, is a great success. The truth is, it has created the most grotesquely bloated public sector in the developed world. And you fools in England are paying.

Picture a land in which economic activity is dominated by government. For many people, access to work depends not on their ability but on who they know in the state apparatus. Power resides with one political party. The best and brightest leave and do not return.

This land is not Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. It is Scotland six years after Tony Blair’s disastrous decision to create a Scottish Parliament.

An investigation by a Scottish newspaper has uncovered the squalid truth about one of the Prime Minister’s flagship policies.

Mr Blair says the devolution of power to Scotland is among his Government’s proudest achievements.

In fact, evidence published in Glasgow this week proves that the new Scottish Parliament has created the most grotesquely bloated public sector in the developed world. And the biggest victim is the English taxpayer.

For decades after World War II, one sight symbolised Scotland’s extraordinary dependence on the British state. Once a week, in towns all the way from the English border to John O’Groats, families would huddle together outside municipal offices, frantic to read notices revealing who had been allocated a new council house.

At the time, home ownership was restricted to a tiny, persecuted minority and socialist councillors believed that each of these owner-occupiers should be forced to pay for one new council house per years. The result was vast estates of grim standardised homes which made Scottish cities resemble the worst of those built by Eastern European Communism.

Scotland ran on Soviet principles. The state provided jobs as well as accommodation and expected grateful conformity in return. The result as Lady Thatcher discovered, was a country wedded to the dependency culture.

Overdependence on the state nurtured a spurious feeling of security and encouraged industrial militancy. Economic growth was paralysed. Scots had been indoctrinated to believe that prosperity came from government – not enterprise. When the going got tough, we just demanded more subsidies.

Eventually Scottish politicians were forced to admit that tax and spend was not the answer. Led by the father of devolution, Donald Dewar, they boldly declared that with home rule things would be different.

This was the new mood INTO phpbb_which the Scottish Parliament was born. From all sides, politicians queued to promise that devolution would mean reform. Something had to be done to close the gap between Scottish and UK economic performance and Scotland’s home rule leaders swore they knew that.

The subsidy culture would end. There would be less bureaucracy and a bonfire of the quangos. The new Scottish government would withdraw from activity best left to the market and concentrate on delivering better public services.

All very well in theory – but the result has been failure. Despite receiving enough English tax revenue to spend hundreds of pounds per person more on the NHS in Scotland than any other part of Britain, waiting lists north of the border remain scandalously long.

Lavish investment has created equally poor results in schools and universities. It is a very long time since Scotland’s fabled educational excellence has been more than a cruel myth.

The evidence published this week has revealed the reason.

Far from shrinking the Scottish state, the ridiculous little home rule parliament has created one of the largest public sector bureaucracies in the developed world. A staggering one in four Scottish workers is employed by the state. The ranks of civil servants, smoking-cessation counsellors, diversity outreach workers and teenage pregnancy advisers grow every week.

Last year, 11,000 new jobs were added to Scotland’s government payroll at an additional cost of £1bn to the taxpayer. Only one in four of these new employees was a frontline doctor, nurse or teacher. The number of pen pushers employed in Scotland rose from 7,000 to 10,000.

MINDLESS
Economic dynamism is stifled by layers of red tape and mindless interference. Ministers in Scotland’s devolved government know this. They call bureaucracy a drain on the economic growth and have repeatedly promised to slash state jobs and promote enterprise.

But they have no incentive to honour their commitment. As long as Scottish profligacy is funded by the British taxpayer, the Labour and Liberal Democrat coalition that rules Scotland will just on investing in new government jobs with gleeful abandon.

Opponents of devolution always warned that Scotland’s notoriously corrupt Left wing elite would use devolution as an opportunity to leap aboard the gravy train and pull their friends up behind them.

Labour and their even more Left wing partners the Liberal Democrats have replaced the socialist supporting dockers, shipbuildiers, and minder of 30 years ago with a vast new quango class. These people can be relied upon always to vote for parties that will keep them in their meaningless jobs.

The sheer absurdity is that this Scottish exercise in social engineering has been funded by the English taxpayer.

In every year since devolution dawned in 1999 Chancellor Gordon Brown has lavished money that should have been spent on English public services on his Scottish homeland.

OBSCENE
His generosity has created a farcical situation in which Scotland’s own finance minister regularly apologises for his failure to use his whole budget. Scotland’s devolved government always ends the year with a surplus.

Mr Brown really should know better. In Scotland where entrenched trade unions resist any kind of reform, it was inevitable that investment would be used to expand the state, not modernise it. Now that process has gone to obscene lengths.

Bloated with money Scotland does not earn, the Scottish government has indulged in an orgy of expenditure. English taxpayers who wonder how we Scots can afford to abolish student tuition fees need look no further than their own salary slips. You paid for it.

You pay for Scotland’s policy of free care for the elderly, too and for separate schools for Catholic and Protestant children. You also paid much more than your fair share of the £430 million it cost to build the lavish new Scottish Parliament building.

If you think that is appalling, spare a thought for Scotland. England has not just feather-bedded this beautiful but abysmally governed little country. It is in the process of molly-coddling it INTO phpbb_sclerosis.

Massive subsidies have stifled Scotland’s growth and contributed to an alarming population decline. Thousands of Scotland’s brightest and best flee their homeland every year to work in other parts of the UK.

All this looks to Scots increasingly like the direct result of being ruled from Edinburgh instead of London. The best thing the Chancellor could do to help would be to cut the Scottish budget and force his Scottish Labour chums to economise.

Indulging in the begging bowl mentality that devolution was supposed to eradicate, is undermining Scotland’s confidence in home rule as well as its economy