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11th September 2013: The world's gone mad and I'm the only one who knows
13th August 2013: Black is white. Fact. End of.
11th August 2013: Electric cars, not as green as they're painted?
18th June 2013: Wrinklies unite, you have nothing to lose but your walking frames!
17th May 2013: Some actual FACTS about climate change (for a change) from actual scientists ...
10th May 2013: An article about that poison gas, carbon dioxide, and other scientific facts (not) ...
10th May 2013: We need to see past the sex and look at the crimes: is justice being served?
8th May 2013: So, who would you trust to treat your haemorrhoids, Theresa May?
8th May 2013: Why should citizens in the 21st Century fear the law so much?
30th April 2013: What the GOS says today, the rest of the world realises tomorrow ...
30th April 2013: You couldn't make it up, could you? Luckily you don't need to ...
29th April 2013: a vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE, because THE ABOVE are crap ...
28th April 2013: what goes around, comes around?
19th April 2013: everyone's a victim these days ...
10th April 2013: Thatcher is dead; long live Thatcher!
8th April 2013: Poor people are such a nuisance. Just give them loads of money and they'll go away ...
26th March 2013: Censorship is alive and well and coming for you ...
25th March 2013: Just do your job properly, is that too much to ask?
25th March 2013: So, what do you think caused your heterosexuality?
20th March 2013: Feminists - puritans, hypocrites or just plain stupid?
18th March 2013: How Nazi Germany paved the way for modern governance?
13th March 2013: Time we all grew up and lived in the real world ...
12th March 2013: Hindenburg crash mystery solved? - don't you believe it!
6th March 2013: Is this the real GOS?
5th March 2013: All that's wrong with taxes
25th February 2013: The self-seeking MP who is trying to bring Britain down ...
24th February 2013: Why can't newspapers just tell the truth?
22nd February 2013: Trial by jury - a radical proposal
13th February 2013: A little verse for two very old people ...
6th February 2013: It's not us after all, it's worms
6th February 2013: Now here's a powerful argument FOR gay marriage ...
4th February 2013: There's no such thing as equality because we're not all the same ...
28th January 2013: Global Warming isn't over - IT'S HIDING!
25th January 2013: Global Warmers: mad, bad and dangerous to know ...
25th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
19th January 2013: We STILL haven't got our heads straight about gays ...
16th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
11th January 2013: What it's like being English ...
7th January 2013: Bleat, bleat, if it saves the life of just one child ...
7th January 2013: How best to put it? 'Up yours, Argentina'?
7th January 2013: Chucking even more of other people's money around ...
6th January 2013: Chucking other people's money around ...
30th December 2012: The BBC is just crap, basically ...
30th December 2012: We mourn the passing of a genuine Grumpy Old Sod ...
30th December 2012: How an official body sets out to ruin Christmas ...
16th December 2012: Why should we pardon Alan Turing when he did nothing wrong?
15th December 2012: When will social workers face up to their REAL responsibility?
15th December 2012: Unfair trading by a firm in Bognor Regis ...
14th December 2012: Now the company that sells your data is pretending to act as watchdog ...
7th December 2012: There's a war between cars and bikes, apparently, and  most of us never noticed!
26th November 2012: The bottom line - social workers are just plain stupid ...
20th November 2012: So, David Eyke was right all along, then?
15th November 2012: MPs don't mind dishing it out, but when it's them in the firing line ...
14th November 2012: The BBC has a policy, it seems, about which truths it wants to tell ...
12th November 2012: Big Brother, coming to a school near you ...
9th November 2012: Yet another celebrity who thinks, like Jimmy Saville, that he can behave just as he likes because he's famous ...
5th November 2012: Whose roads are they, anyway? After all, we paid for them ...
7th May 2012: How politicians could end droughts at a stroke if they chose ...
6th May 2012: The BBC, still determined to keep us in a fog of ignorance ...
2nd May 2012: A sense of proportion lacking?
24th April 2012: Told you so, told you so, told you so ...
15th April 2012: Aah, sweet ickle polar bears in danger, aah ...
15th April 2012: An open letter to Anglian Water ...
30th March 2012: Now they want to cure us if we don't believe their lies ...
28th February 2012: Just how useful is a degree? Not very.
27th February 2012: ... so many ways to die ...
15th February 2012: DO go to Jamaica because you definitely WON'T get murdered with a machete. Ms Fox says so ...
31st January 2012: We don't make anything any more
27th January 2012: There's always a word for it, they say, and if there isn't we'll invent one
26th January 2012: Literary criticism on GOS? How posh!
12th December 2011: Plain speaking by a scientist about the global warming fraud
9th December 2011: Who trusts scientists? Apart from the BBC, of course?
7th December 2011: All in all, not a good week for British justice ...
9th November 2011: Well what d'you know, the law really IS a bit of an ass ...

 

 
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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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