Quote Originally Posted by islaydarkblue View Post
I enclose an article from the Scotsman newspaper dated 11th May 2021 which quotes the Gers figures for 2018-19. https://www.scotsman.com/news/politi...ormula-3233129
Back then £66 Billion was raised in taxes in Scotland whilst the Scottish Government received £81 Billion from Westminster.
This means that an extra £15 Billion was handed over by the U.K. Government to the Scottish Government than they received in taxes.
You can be sure that if it was the other way and Scotland was contributing more in taxes than the Scottish Government received from Westminster under the rules of the Barnett Formula Nicola Sturgeon and the rest of the SNP MSPs would be ramming it down our throats.
Prior to the 2014 independence referendum the SNP politicians keep telling us that everything would be wonderful as they would be able to pull all sorts of extra levers in an independent Scotland.
Since Nicola Sturgeon became the First Minister there has been no mention about pulling all these extra levers because she knows this means taxing people to the hilt and having massive public sector cutbacks to balance the books.
Read the actual title of the article to get an idea of where the paper's alleigances lie (quote) '...Exactly how much money does Scotland contribute to England... ?'

That's right it asks how much Scotland contributes to jolly old England, not to the UK although in fairness this abbaration is corrected in the article text..

Then within the text we read (quote again)

'Does Scotland take more than its fair share of UK public spending'?

It is difficult to say whether Scotland gets an unfairly high proportion of UK public spending'.

It's 'difficult to say', In the year carefully choisen by Islay it seems Scotland might well have received more however Islay's made a bit of a boo boo because his 'research' is, as usual, half assed at best because the article also says

'In 2013, Professor Brian Ashcroft at the University of Strathclyde studied experimental figures from the Scottish Government and found that extra spending per capita on Scotland was almost exactly cancelled out by extra tax revenue between 1980/81 and 2011/2012'.

So in these years there's been a break even - but Islay does like to mention this one year when Scotland might, or might not, have been given more than it contributed by its English masters - don't you Islay?