Those feral beasts at the Daily Mail have once again acted with total irresponsibility by pointing out a few things about the relationship between Scotland and its colony, England.
In an article on 16th June 2007 it told us …
Awash with cash provided by English taxpayers, Scotland now provides a range of public sector handouts and perks for its citizens that are not available in the south - no tuition fees, free personal care for the elderly, free central heating, free bus and train travel for over 60s, and a range of life-saving drugs denied to patients in England.
This week it was announced that the sight- saving drug Macugen would not be available in England and Wales for treatment of the most common form of blindness, wet age-related macular degeneration. This means thousands of pensioners will go blind every year - but not in Scotland, where the drug will be prescribed on the NHS.
The list of differences lengthens by the week, and the burning question for Gordon Brown and David Cameron is how long the English will put up with it.
The formula which allocates cash between England and Scotland has always been biased in favour of the Scots. While we were all part of a Union with one parliament, and Scotland a smaller, poorer and wilder part of the whole, the English were happy to put up with this subsidy.
Without a Scottish parliament, the disparity wasn't nearly so obvious. Yes, average public spending per person in Scotland was £1,500 a year more than south of the border, but no one rubbed English noses in this unpalatable fact. Yes, one in four Scots worked for the state, compared to one in five in the rest of Great Britain, but the English didn't really mind.
Now, however, the parliamentarians at Holyrood are only too keen to boast about all the goodies they are handing to their electorate, and so the underlying unfairness has become increasingly obvious. After devolution, the size of the Scottish Executive increased by 18 per cent and of associated quangos by 40 per cent. Inevitably, the waste got worse.
This is all exacerbated by the fact that MPs for Scottish constituencies can vote on provision of health and education in England, but we have no reciprocal rights in Scotland: the so-called West Lothian question. So the Scots not only take a disproportionate share of our money, but also have an unfair say in our democracy as well.
The Scottish Nationalist response to this argument is to point to oil revenues. Scotland, they say, receives about £10 billion more every year in spending than it pays in taxes, but the tax revenues to the Exchequer from North Sea oil are about £10 billion as well. In addition to a tax on each barrel of oil, the companies also pay exploration and licensing fees to the government. This money all goes to the Treasury in London and - the nationalists argue - as this tax belongs to Scotland, the two cancel each other out.
But this argument doesn't stand up. Oil revenues may be £10 billion a year now, but as recently as 1992 they were £1 billion a year. They've risen as oil prices have gone up, they can fall back again just as easily, and anyway, North Sea oil reserves are gradually being depleted. The oil bonanza is coming to an end, perhaps as soon as 2030.
Nor is it at all clear that the Scots would be entitled to all these oil revenues. Depending on how you draw the maritime boundary between the two nations, up to 50 per cent of the oilfields could end up in English territorial waters. So there's no excuse for the handout, but the really tragic aspect is that all these subsidies have actually damaged Scotland.
So comfortable have they become sucking on the teat of English subsidy that our northern cousins have lost their way economically. With 50 per cent of GDP in Scotland spent by the state, compared with less than 40 per cent in England, the Scottish economy, cushioned by welfarism, has in recent years grown far more slowly than England's. Scotsmen are less healthy as well; they live three years less on average than Englishmen (so it's not all bad, then?).
Any attempt to give Scotland less money would destroy Labour's political base in Scotland and hand the initiative to the nationalists. Meanwhile, David Cameron and the Tories face a terrible political temptation. They are supposed to be the party of the Union, but there's only one remaining Tory MP from north of the border.
Scottish independence, wiping out all those Labour seats at Westminster, would give the Tories a far better chance of governing what remained of the United Kingdom.
Their current proposal - only English MPs voting for English laws - is a fudge that can't possibly work. If the Tories look like they might lose the election, playing the English nationalist card may become irresistible. The result may be that the final push for Scottish independence comes not from the north, but from the south.
If the English people get so fed up with subsidising benefits for the Scots which are denied to them, then Scotland could indeed find itself becoming independent - and ironically no longer able to afford the benefits it currently enjoys. The tragedy is that despite all the pious speeches Westminster politicians are currently making about Britishness, the future of the Union looks more threatened today than ever.
The paper listed the following injustices …
• English students pay £3,000 a year tuition fess. If they go to a Scottish university they pay £1,700. Scottish students will soon pay nothing at all.
• Scottish teachers earn £1,500 a year more than English teachers.
• English prescriptions cost £6.85. In Scotland they're free to chronic sufferers, and may soon be free to all.
• The Scottish NHS offers a variety of treatments that are not available in England, including remedies for Alzheimer's, lung cancer, blindness and osteoporosis.
• Scots enjoy free eye-tests, and free dental checks are on the way.
• In England any elderly person with assets of more than £20,500 has to pay for all his own personal care costs. In Scotland residents in nursing homes receive free personal care, and many local councils offer help with care costs for those still at home.
• In England assistance with the cost of installing central heating for the elderly is subject to a means test. In Scotland it's available to all.
• Scottish pensioners and students get far more public transport concessions than their English counterparts.
The GOS would like to draw his readers' attention to the Campaign for an English Parliament. Those with a sense of humour (you know, that's the thing we used to have before everything got so bloody that it's hard to find anything funny at all) might like this one.
The Scotsman newspaper recently put together a collection of questions asked by foreign tourists in Scotland …
One visitor, who had obviously confused Loch Ness with Sea World in Orlando, wished to know at what time of night the monster surfaced and who fed it.
Another wished to know "Which bus do I get from the Orkney Islands to the Shetland Islands?"
Another asked "Is Edinburgh in Glasgow?"
Other silly queries included …
"What time does the midnight train leave?"
"Are there any golf courses in Scotland?"
"Can you tell me where the mountain is in Scotland?"
"Are there any curves in the roads here, or are they all straight?"
"Are there any Sheena Easton museums in Glasgow?"
"What is the entry fee for Brighton?"
"Can I get to Jersey any other way apart from sea or air?"
"When's the changing of the guard at the White House?"
"What Tube line runs to Edinburgh?"
At least the visitor to Dundee who asked to meet Crocodile Dundee had an excuse - he was a young boy.
The small island of Iona may be celebrated around the world as where St.Columba founded a religious community, but one tourist was unaware even of its name. Pointing to the island on a map, he asked: "How do I get to one zero NA?"
There are no prizes for guessing where most of these tourists came from. I suppose they're just following the example of their leader who famously asked "I own a timber company? That's news to me. Need some wood?"
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