Robbing Peter

Today in The National there is an article by Jim Murphy giving the Labour view of yesterday's Ashcroft poll.  It's entitled 'We must unite to remove the Tories', so he's still banging the same old drum, and we don't need to go over why this is nonsense again.  However, there was an interesting paragraph in it.  He said

Scottish Labour is offering radical change for Scotland.  We will use a Mansion Tax on homes worth more than £2 million across the UK, mainly in London and the south east to find 1,000 extra NHS nurses in Scotland.  We will also tax the bonuses of the bankers in the City of London to get young unemployed Scots back to work.

 This just goes to show what a tin ear Mr Murphy has for what's happening in Scotland.  His great suggestions boil down to 'we're going to take money from England and spend it on the Scots'.  Really?  Really???

One of the names we were called that was most resented during the referendum was 'subsidy junkies'.  I and many others on comment threads grew heartily sick of explaining yet again that Scotland is not dependent on England for money, that our GDP is in fact pretty similar to the UK as a whole.  Nevertheless, we still had English people coming back time and again with accusations of Scots benefiting from English largesse to fund things like free prescriptions and free university tuition.   And here we have Mr Murphy wanting to make that accusation actually true.

What Scots want is to have control of the money that they earn.  We want to keep our earnings in Scotland, to be spent in the way that best suits our needs.  Any shared services with the rest of the UK we would obviously pay our share of, but most of the money earned here should be spent here.  It's really not hard to understand - unless you're the Labour party in Scotland that is.