The future of Scotland shouldn’t be a lottery

IF I win the Lottery, I often say, I’ll add 50p to the jackpot and pay off my bills… Mindfulness gurus maintain it’s a bad idea to imagine what you’d spend a jackpot on as it leads to unhappiness with your current lot.

They say we find inner calm by concentrating on the here and now (never going to catch on in the SNP, is it? They’re always daydreaming of better days on the far side of the deficit.)

Yet the Lottery sells a fantasy and we’re buying. Yes, we know instinctively that the chances of winning are so vanishingly small that a lottery ticket is akin to a tax on stupidity (some will always pay that levy at the higher rate…).

Still, there are more than 4,500 National Lottery millionaires out there who are the exceptions that prove the rule. We have a flutter and then some. Camelot reported sales were down £670million after the price of a ticket jumped to £2 but we still blew a total of £6.9billion.

And while most of us consider a trip to the Ferrari dealer, some who have won really big dream of changing countries.

Colin and Chris Weir scooped £161million via Euromillions in 2011. They have put a huge tranche of that to good work, setting up the Weir Charitable Trust and I frequently pass Largs Thistle’s swish Barrfields Park, transformed thanks to Mr Weir’s fondness for the club.

But they also pumped an eye-popping £4.5million into the SNP in the last six years, plus £2.1million in loans, only half of which has been repaid.

Confirming their status as the biggest private donors to political parties, they also gave £3.5million to Yes Scotland. Fair enough, you might think. They can spend it on what they like.

But had the position been reversed, had some businessman rich beyond the dreams of avarice lobbed equivalent sums to the Tories and Better Together would it all have passed off so quietly?

The Weirs’ donations are legally unimpeachable, but I do find the SNP funding model odd. Never done boasting that the party has more members than the British Army has soldiers, surely SNP coffers are overflowing thanks to the munificence of the best supporters in the world? Well, no, actually. The party runs its own finances like it would those of an independent Scotland: Badly.

It racked up a £1.3million overspend last year and so it’s arguably only the Lottery ticket the Weirs bought that keeps them afloat. Can that really be right? I’m not one for proscribing and legislating like the Left love to, yet there are already rules surrounding the National Lottery. You have to be 16 to purchase a ticket; you cannot put tickets on a credit card. Sensible stuff.

But is it time to consider limiting the amount of cash a jackpot winner can throw the way of a political party?

After all, the money six random balls generated came within an ace of breaking up Britain, the most successful political and social compact in history.

Let jackpot winners buy all the Ferraris, the yachts, the mansions they like. Let charity donations be unstinting. But let’s ensure jackpot wins cannot skew politics.

I’ll be taking a modest punt on tonight’s Lottery draw but I’d rather my children’s futures weren’t being gambled if the winner turns out to be a political zealot.