In the Guardian today, the above, and:
Cancelled government projects such as the Rwanda deportation scheme and the road tunnel under Stonehenge are wasting billions of pounds of taxpayer money a year, parliament’s spending watchdog has found.
About £6.6bn was written off by government departments last year alone – state spending that did not achieve its intended objectives or create any value for the taxpayer, the public accounts committee said.
The PAC said successive governments’ propensity to cancel projects after spending significant sums of public money was a “particularly egregious” example of poor value.
The committee’s deputy chair, the Labour MP Clive Betts, said the high costs were a sign of government “complacency”, adding: “Those who work hard to pay their dues should be rightly aggravated by this figure.”
Should those Scots who work hard to pay their dues be rightly aggravated by this figure?
They should indeed because they contribute to the UK-wide tax base that funds central government departments. These are reserved UK-wide expenditures (defence, immigration/borders, major infrastructure decisions handled by Westminster). Scottish taxpayers fund a portion through UK taxes (income tax on higher earners, VAT, corporation tax, National Insurance, etc.). Scotland doesn’t have a separate “opt-out” for these central costs.
How much have we lost? 8% of the £6.6bn is £528mn or around 15 new secondary schools.
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And Scotland’s ‘share’ of such expenditures make their way into the GERS figures and are then mendaciously used by the unionists and their media lackeys (or should that be ‘media and their unionist lackeys’?) to ‘prove’ that Scotland cannot manage economically.
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Shouldering a share of England’s national debt was one of the main clauses of the Treaty of Union.
It is England that can’t survive without massive subsidies from Scotland – at least, not in the grandiose manner our imperial masters are accustomed to.
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