The Scottish Government

742, ken,

What is a bit worrying is your paranoia in respect of Invasion!, Ok I will humour you, Tell me who you think is likely in the foreseeable future to launch an Invasion of Scotland?? please don't include extraterrestrials , I do know parts of Scotland are UFO hotspots but there are other sites that may cater for your particular paranoia

"Have you ever been to England or Wales?"

Yes my wife is English, any other Questions?

ken, 739 and 740 I admire your strength of feeling, but we are very much at odds.

The Scottish parliament has been in place for 10 years. The Westminster Parliament governed Scotland for 293 years before that.

Post-war Scottish Office policy wanted Glasgow's population down, and dissuaded industry from locating there. That's not my opinion, there are documents to verify the activities.

And please don't suggest it was done because Glasgow couldn't house people adequately - when people are living in cramped conditions, you give them more space Ken. And one thing about Glasgow, there are amazing spaces round the city. Cramped living conditions is not a reason to dissuade industry from starting up in the city, and moving people out. Otherwise the great cities would never have grown at all.

The economic policy went hand in hand with parking trident on the Clyde. I don't agree with you that it's safe on the Clyde. I don't believe the nuclear weapons of mass destruction are meant to be safe. They're meant to indescriminately kill; and possession of them is meant to intimidate other countries.

I do know a little about parking Faslane - I was brought up in its shadow. Not only was the Clyde made dangerous, Mrs Thatcher militarised the Clyde by denying the yards the right to tender for merchant shipping orders, then she threw them very occassional crumbs, then she fairly much closed everything down. When I think of our natural harbours along the Clyde, and how well shipbuilding is doing in the countries that chose to support it: Finland, Greece, Germany, France, Poland - it makes me ashamed to say I'm British.

As for London and the south-east sharing its bounty with the rest of the UK, London did not even spread its wealth round London. That's why Lord Coe applied for a big handout from the assigned Lottery Fund of all the UK's regions and nations to do some rebuilds for the poor, impoverished east-end. It's good to do that, but the richest city in Europe should probably have been able to do it for itself.

You talk about making a point, actually Ken, you're just casting a smoke screen over the size of the economic problems in Scotland. A 10-year old partial-parliament could not possibly have fixed Scotland's economic problems by now. But we have real talent in there. I'm a big fan of John Swinney and Alex Salmond. We need full powers of governance returned to the Scottish parliament. And then we need to go about reversing 300 years of damage. Sorry Ken, to so utterly disagree with you.

Gee Kev 741,

The chip on your shoulder and your perception of Scotlands place in relation to the rest of UK is a bit worrying

"economically little would change, other than we would become our own lord and master, rather than surviving on goodwill and scraps off our neighbour."

In reality we would still be benefitting from the goodwill of our neighbour who would retain a Nuclear dettererent and would be forced to intervene if someone else invaded Scotland for its own security interests.

Have you ever been to England or Wales?

Ken 739.

"The relative benefits of being joined to the South East politically and economically do bring benefits in terms of capital investment etc. London is a global city and has acted in many respects to increase the dispersal of global capital throughout the UK, perhaps not as much as we all might hope but undoubtedly has been a positive. "

How would becoming Independent change this situation??, economically little would change, other than we would become our own lord and master, rather than surviving on goodwill and scraps off our neighbour.
Also we are never joined politically with London anyways, when a Conservative government is put in power by our English neighbours. Scotland as a whole rejects the tory party and as for your opinion on Faslane that is sorry just nonsense.

Devolution don't work , and the current bunch of UK MP's seem more interested in lining there own pockets than helping the "region" called Scotland.

As for the "UK for issues of national and international importance " at the moment UK's International involvement is causing on average two deaths a week, not to mention the BILLIONS being squandered .

When any partnership or business is being run to the detriment of one party, common sense tells you if you have the courage or will its time to
run the show yourself.

Tomk 738 - I accept that some people in the Scottish Office etc might have had some prejudicial views of Glasgow. But it is not just Glasgow that suffers these problems, and my main issue is with current and recent efforts to generate an enterprise culture that by its nature would not be open to the interventions on largescale developments that those reports allude too. Although I do also accept that this would have had various market implications for anyone wanting to set-up a business at that time in Glasgow.

Tomk. 737 - I think you are missing the point, Even now, last 10 years the policies and agencies to support business creation and new start-ups in areas like Glasgow have failed to make any impact on the relative success or failure of said new businesses, now I accept this is as much a case of how policies and resource allocation issues have failed than a failure of an enterprise culture in its entirety, but that is still a factor.

The relative benefits of being joined to the South East politically and economically do bring benefits in terms of capital investment etc. London is a global city and has acted in many respects to increase the dispersal of global capital throughout the UK, perhaps not as much as we all might hope but undoubtedly has been a positive. We are only as great as the sum of our parts. I am in no way rubbishing Glasgow, spent many years living there and love it as a place to live, simply saying it how it is in reality.

And post-war planning that occurred across the country cannot be used as a real basis for saying independence would never have let this happen. City officials had as much to do with this as central government. People where living in cramped, squalid conditions in what was one of the most densely populated areas of the UK. Dispersing the population would be a logical step in these conditions, for public health reasons alone. Glasgow has thankfully made sizeable in-roads into diversifying its economic base, but that was a key structural problem in the time you are talking about and undoubtedly was exacerbated by the discovery and exploitation of North Sea Oil in the 1970’s, and the focus of capital investment elsewhere in Scotland and in industries that Glasgow did not capitalise on.

And if you knew anything about the parking of nuclear armed submarines and the coastline of the UK you would recognise that Faslane is the safest place for them to exist, not some anti-Glasgow thought on well it does not matter if Glasgow gets nuked.

I fundamentally reject your assertion that dissolving our relationship with the UK would somehow enhance our lives. Devolution allows many key areas where local ideas can be legislated for and protects within the wider UK for issues of national and international importance where we all need to share the benefits and costs of being an internationally orientated country, any reversal to a parochial inward looking state would be disastrous. Personally think Holyrood has shown that it should be abandoned and more power devolved to local authorities across the country, improving accountability, representation and engagement in the politics of what really impacts on their communities.

737 - there never were policies aimed at letting Glasgow flourish since the second world war. And that was political.

Professor Ian Levitt described a systematic running down of the city by the Scottish office since the second world war. The SO wanted Glasgow's population down from 1.2 million to 600,000. They've done it.

So Ken, the reason there's been no serious attempt at wealth-creation in Glasgow is because the UK government didn't want it. They wanted the population dispersed. A bit hard to believe, but have a look at wikipedia Glasgow and citation 18.

Not only was post-war Glasgow disadvantaged by the UK, they then chose to run a simulation of what would happen to a UK city if a nuclear bomb dropped in its near vicinity. Of all the cities in all the UK, they chose Glasgow.

The result of that was that people could be badly trapped in red sandstone buildings and so the city fathers set about knocking down the amazing red sandstone legacy of the city and the UK government decided, for safety's sake, to park Trident on the Clyde.

Presumably diminishing the size of the city's population wouldn't make the Government look that bad if Glasgow and the Clyde were nuked.

Forgive me Ken, if I don't take your rubbishing of the ability to start businesses in Glasgow at face value.

Your "being brutal" over the facts of who has the economic wealth, and de facto political wealth, in the UK is at the heart of why the relationship needs to be dissolved. A lot of political will made the shape of the game we're playing. And the game has been disadvantageous to Scotland for a long time.

I have never heard such a load of tripe in my life!!!!

Scotland is to a large extent financially dependant on the rest of UK, but lets be brutal here and say it how it is the South East of England even with oil exploitation meeting the hoped price and output. This is one of the worst places to set-up a business in the UK and the business support measures which have long been a Scottish area of responsibility are laughable, if you look at wealth creation say in Glasgow you will see that the agencies involved in new business formation make absolutely no difference in terms of the numbers that survive for any extended period. So NO there will be no sudden enterprise culture emerging should Scotland get independence.

Maybe I would support this notion of independence from the rest of the UK if Devolution had singularly proved that programmes and policies led to substantially better outcomes but I do not think that has always been the case.

And regards Scottish Soldiers going off to war which seems to be a popular topic…. while I have the utmost sympathy for the individuals and families who suffer loss either through death or injury, we do not have conscription into the armed forces, these people not only wanted to join the army but competed for the right to do so.

SNP marketing of Sovereign Wealth Funds such as Norway's bears no resemblance of what would occur in this country. For starters we would have to divert a huge amount of revenue into this fund (because oil will in effect be a massive chunk of total revenue) at the expense of people’s local schools and hospitals. The oil fund will not have had the last 40 years to be built, and oil is a finite resource and UK pools have not been stewarded in the same fashion as Norwegian ones. If only surplus revenue was invested in this fund (which is the most likely situation given that otherwise people will be very unhappy when schools and hospitals are closed) then it will not even amount to a little brother of these other funds that are heavily marketed. Spot Oil price is highly volatile the size of it as a component of the Scottish economy and exchequer would make Scotland very prone to the periodic crisis you see in South America where the price of a primary good suddenly collapses and will need to repeatedly go to the IMF who will over-rule your new found sovereignty in exchange for cash.

Independence and a dependence on oil revenue will break Scottish sovereignty not the other way round, it will be hard enough for the UK as a whole to absorb and get itself out of its oil inflated economy never mind Scotland on its own.

732 Kev

Quite a long reply to my posting but as usual no substance, so what else isn't new?

I have a state pension; all the SNP has to do is show me how the state pension content will be funded if we become an independent state, and the level of payment.

The total value of our crude oil output is around £38 billion pounds per year based on 30 years reserves. 200,000 salaries and taxes would account for £6 billion, leaving £32 billion, or roughly the value of the block grant that the government uses to run some of our services. These services exclude pensions, unemployment benefits, family allowances, income support and so on. This has been known for some time so why don't you provide the answers, or are we back to the 'feel good' factor that will suddenly generate tens of thousands of jobs as the citizens hit the streets with a new found enthusiasm for free enterprise? Have a look around you at the entrepreneurs we have produced over the last three centuries, and look where they live, for the most part! The largest immigrant population in England comes from Scotland; even Scottish entrepreneurs who live in Scotland have expanded their businesses to England. Scots have moved to England in droves to take advantage of the larger population density, and wider choice of employment. What are you offering those Anglo - Scots if independence is achieved? Do we let them come home, all 10 million (estimated) of them, plus all the South African, New Zealanders, Canadians, Americans etc whose support you gratefully acknowledge in these blogs?

Why did the SNP propose annexing Berwick – on –Tweed? Was that a joke or was it serious? If you can’t make up your mind as to where Scotland starts or finishes, or provide a coherent income / outcome balance sheet how can you expect to be taken seriously? Why are you still looking to the Queen as your head of state if independence is achieved? So much for casting the UK adrift and setting forth on our own path!

Dode1

Roll on 2011

The monarchy issue raises some intresting responses,as stated the first minster requires a head of state,I wonder if we can vote for a new head of state,a form of X factor,the candidates can appeal to the public and discuss their merits and aspirations,then a vote.The present head would be allowed to compete.this would allow a head of state to be elected on merits, rather than birth rights or by offering gratuites knighthoods and the like,not that I think our royal family would behave in such a manner.