Pjen kindly write out the calculation and the source figures that you are using to obtain the £1 billion figure.
Utter nonsense.
Explain exactly what makes you think 1.6m people are “the tracksuit brigade”?
I’d also like your explanation of what “tracksuit brigade” means, as I’d be interested to see if the many different people from varied walks of life that I know who voted Yes will fit into your definition.
Can you not see why overall borrowing across the whole economy needs to be excluded to work out the balances for the UK and for Scotland.
This is why it is best expressed as percentage difference as it ignores flows to outside sources. This is a difference of 0.2%.
Public sector revenue for 2012was approximately 500 billion.
0.2% of 500 billion is one billion.
Your method pretends that the Scottish deficit for that year was due to the UK rather than to external banks as we were running a deficit economy. Yes, Scotland had a deficit that year of about seven billion, but the UK had a deficit over ten times that. The excess money nominally transferred from rUK was one billion rather than seven billion.
I see you’re still struggling with the fact that Scotland is not a colony of England. May I suggest you don’t get your history from ‘Trainspotting’ or that bloke down the pub that shouts random obscenities about “The English”.
That does however make this all the more amusing:
So, let’s get this straight. You can repeatedly - and seriously it is repeatedly, if I could be arsed to go back over this thread (and the other one) your repeating of this line is well, well into double figures - call people colonialists and imperialists, with all the racist implications that comes with it and despite it being factually incorrect, but one usage of “Plastic Jock” and suddenly you cry racism?
Give me a fucking break.
Pjen, mate. Sort it out. You’re coming across as somewhere between a blithering idiot and a raving madman. And not in the amusing way.
No, Pjen, I’m not falling for this bullshit moving of the goalposts. The claim made by you that I was initially responding to is that “Scotland is an incredibly rich country when oil money is counted as Scottish, which it is not as it is assigned to Westminster”. It is the absolute figures, the figures that I initially provided, that are relevant here as they show that there’s a massive blackhole in Scotland’s finances even when nearly all of the oil money is assigned to Scotland. The only person who is concerned with who owes what and to whom, as opposed to the amount owed, is you, when statistics provided refuted your initial claim.
Colonialism is an attitude and addressable. Nationality is a protected category and is viewed as racism under the law.
It is not bs. With all of its oil its percentage deficit in that year is less than the UK’s.
So, you’re cool with being offensive as hell to anyone here then? Just checking, like. Because - and it appears that you are not aware of this - you are. It is just we don’t make a song and dance about it because you’re making such a brilliant attempt at coming across like a halfwit.
There is a difference between describing a person’s approach as being like a particular mind set (colonialism) and casting aspersions on national and racial groups.
With all of its oil its actual deficit in that year is £12 billion.
Every country in Europe was in deficit that year. The net flow from Westminster to Hollywood is about a billion.
Offensive is offensive.
Glad to here you are cool with being offensive.
Scotland’s deficit of £12bn was 8.3% of GDP.
UK’s total deficit was 7.3% of GDP(cite for both)
Average EU deficit was 3.3%
8.6% puts Scotland in a worse position than Spain. Only Greece and Slovenia had worse figures.
Scotland is a rich country - but one with a big deficit to match. An independent - or even tax-raising - Scotland would have to choose any two of the following: maintaining public services levels; not raising taxes; controlling the deficit. It cannot have all three. The net flow from Westminster to Holyrood is neither here nor there.
Everyone just cool down. No more aspersions on anyone of any sort, get it?
Got awful quiet in here, didn’t it? 
I think most things that need to said have been said on this subject…and a great deal besides!
Time to move on.
Yes. Too much heat and not enough light.
There are obviously two camps- those implacably against any tampering with the union and reluctant to see Scotland benefit from its NO vote, and those who see the response to the NO vote as an opportunity.
In six months we shall know for sure whether the Vow has been kept. We should have an idea how it is going if we see the outline as promised on November 30th and the Cmnd paper on January 25th.
Perhaps we could reassess the situation on those two dates!
I’ve not seen anyone who doesn’t want Scotland to benefit - I want the whole union including Scotland to benefit, and I hope that that will happen. But that’s not going to happen if one side only wants to take and not give, and you’re the person who’s most been suggesting that.
My suspicion is that Scotland will get a better deal than it has now but not everything that it wants, that England will eventually get fair votes on what happens in it, and that you and Alex Salmond will complain that The Vow has been broken by perfidous Albion because not every single thing you could possibly conceive of being included hasn’t occured.
If the Vow is reneged on it will reopen the whole debate. There is a choice.
Emphasis added. This has had little to do with post-1999 devolution. As the Wikipedia page puts it, “the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 comprehensively codified into Scots law the ancient tradition of the right to universal access to the land in Scotland.” No doubt worth doing and possibly of some use in marginal cases, but the real significance here is in that “ancient tradition”. For all practical purposes, Scotland always had a right to roam and, speaking as someone who had that right drilled into me in boyhood and who exercised it at will in growing up, that right was always understood as part of our Scottishness. It was always a classic example of how we were different from the English.
If anything, I’d expect the sensible nationalist take on the point to be that this is a genuinely Scottish right that long predated 1999. Not a fudged late copy-cat add on. As in England.