Finance fears
In speaking of a Scottish budget deficit Peter Mabon (Letters, 24 May) is not, I think, strictly correct. My under-
standing is that the Scottish government is obliged to balance its books each year and has always done so. The gap between income and expenditure to which he refers is not a precise figure. For instance, many of the taxes levied on Scottish residents are not collected by the Scottish administration. The figures we have are compiled using various assumptions and estimates based on necessarily incomplete data.
What can be said with certainty is that the public finances of the UK, as of many other countries, give cause for concern. Citizens feel entitled to ever greater expenditure by the state on their behalf but are unwilling to fund it – see the furore over the very modest proposals in the recent Conservative manifesto. How an independent Scottish Government might approach the situation is anyone’s guess.
At present any Scottish administration has very limited economic powers. It is effectively a department of the UK state, as the PM underlined in her recent Edinburgh speech when she said, devolution not withstanding, she would be keeping an eye on all parts of the UK. Big Mother is Watching You.
S BECK Craigleith Drive, Edinburgh
Clearly my letter of the previous day in The Scotsman ruffled Gill Turner’s feathers for daring to point out the blindingly obvious that the Barnett formula (£8.5 billion funded by the English) pays for a lot of the extra freebies in Scotland that are unavailable to England (Letters, 23 May). At no point did I suggest these benefits were not desirable or necessary (as was the main thrust of her letter) but was merely stating that much of the help would no longer be available for people on low income with the cessation of Barnett under independence – readily accepted by the Plaid Cymru leader but dismissed by Nicola Sturgeon.
Rather than indulge in personal attacks in a vain attempt to deflect attention away from our unsustainable fiscal deficit (-9.6 per cent) which would be worse than Greece, she and her fellow SNP supporters who claim to be the champions of equality should explain to the least advantaged how exactly they would replace the Union dividend while maintaining their benefits – if we became independent. In this connection the silence from Ms Sturgeon’s so-called Growth Commission is deafening.
IAN LAKIN Murtle Den Road Milltimber, Aberdeen