Scots enjoy £1,600 extra per head than their English counterparts

Thrugelmir

dktreesea wrote: »

RBS and NatWest aren't dead in the water yet. Give them time. If the government hangs in there and waits a couple more elections they may yet make a return on their investment.

The time frame is moving further and further away. Given the losses being made and the shrinking size of the asset book.

RBS may yet have a sizable provision to incur for their part in US sub-prime lending.

robmatic

chewmylegoff wrote: »

let's not bother eh? i think we can all do without another 40 page thread filled with thousands of posts from scots insisting that RBS's losses occurred in london and therefore are nothing to do with scotland.

Aww, I like that argument. If you accept that HBOS and RBS were nothing to do with Scotland and that the the rump of the UK should assume the liability for both, you end up with tens of thousands of people in the capital of post-independence Scotland being directly employed by a foreign government... a cheery thought for any nationalist Scot.

Loughton_Monkey

robmatic wrote: »

......you end up with tens of thousands of people in the capital of post-independence Scotland being directly employed by a foreign government... a cheery thought for any nationalist Scot.

It is a major responsibility for any national government to maintain it's national security. As part of that process, it is very important to infiltrate the correct amount of 'spies' into hostile nations.

These bank staff will provide a good resource to undergo clandestine 'research' for our government.

All we need to do is train these bankers to be a bit corrupt, devious, and treacherous....

No wait! It's already done.

sss555s

chewmylegoff wrote: »

let's not bother eh? i think we can all do without another 40 page thread filled with thousands of posts from scots insisting that RBS's losses occurred in london and therefore are nothing to do with scotland.

Totally flawed.

I don't see any Scots asking for Oil revenue back from the UK for the time Scotland is part of the UK.

Equally, I don't see why Scotland should take all the hit of the RBS collapse while it was the biggest bank of the UK.

Bush asked Blair to take the sub prime on and Blair asked Goodwin.

They were all in it for their own reasons and the poor old tax payer has to cover the cost of the scam.

kabayiri

robmatic wrote: »

Aww, I like that argument. If you accept that HBOS and RBS were nothing to do with Scotland and that the the rump of the UK should assume the liability for both, you end up with tens of thousands of people in the capital of post-independence Scotland being directly employed by a foreign government... a cheery thought for any nationalist Scot.

Well, we are being told Scottish independence is a long term prosperity thing, not short term, which this issue is.

Going forward, Scotland can implement its' own policies to retain foreign investment, and that includes banking services. Equally, rUK politicians may face public calls to repatriate jobs. Whatever happens, each must look after their own. That seems obvious.

chewmylegoff

sss555s wrote: »

Totally flawed.

I don't see any Scots asking for Oil revenue back from the UK for the time Scotland is part of the UK.

Equally, I don't see why Scotland should take all the hit of the RBS collapse while it was the biggest bank of the UK.

Bush asked Blair to take the sub prime on and Blair asked Goodwin.

They were all in it for their own reasons and the poor old tax payer has to cover the cost of the scam.

what's totally flawed? the argument that the RBS bail out is an english problem because RBS' losses are supposedly attributable to its ex-scottish activities?

RBS didn't fail because Tony Blair asked Fred Goodwin to take on sub-prime losses, it failed principally because it bought ABN AMRO for a huge amount of money, without doing a proper due diligence exercise and ignoring the huge sub-prime exposures it was known to have at the time. That acquisition was, of course, nothing to do with Tony Blair or the UK government (although Alex Salmond wrote Fred Goodwin a nice letter at the time saying what a clever idea it was or something stupid like that).

I'm not aware of RBS soaking up any major UK sub prime exposure at the request of the UK govt, although happy to be corrected with facts.

Lloyds is the bank that took on the UK sub-prime lending which was on HBOS' books (and which were incurred largely by the corporate lending dept of BOS) and which then had to be bailed out.

In any case, I wasn't arguing that Scotland should take all of the debt relating to RBS. I was in fact saying that I didn't want to have another stupid argument about how the losses were nothing whatsoever to do with Scotland and should all be borne by the rest of the UK if Scotland became independent (which is Alex Salmond's ludicrous "on the record" policy).

If you ask me there's no point trying to hive off bits and pieces of debt and say "this was run up doing X and therefore it's yours". The only people who would win in that sort of exchange would be all the lawyers who would spend time arguing about it. Far better to just apportion the national debt in an arbitrary way.

[(population of scotland)/(population of UK)] x total national debt

that seems to be the best equation to me.

sss555s

chewmylegoff wrote: »

I was in fact saying that I didn't want to have another stupid argument about how the losses were nothing whatsoever to do with Scotland and should all be borne by the rest of the UK if Scotland became independent (which is Alex Salmond's ludicrous "on the record" policy).

If you ask me there's no point trying to hive off bits and pieces of debt and say "this was run up doing X and therefore it's yours". The only people who would win in that sort of exchange would be all the lawyers who would spend time arguing about it. Far better to just apportion the national debt in an arbitrary way.

[(population of scotland)/(population of UK)] x total national debt

that seems to be the best equation to me.

That's what I was saying. It's UK debt and should be divided if devolution happens. It was thurg who was implying it should be Scotlands problem. There was no trying to get out of it as far as I could see.

No point in quoting Salmond. There is nothing to say he would be the Scottish PM even if he is pro devo.

Shakethedisease

Graham_Devon wrote: »

Free personal care when older, no tuition fees, no prescription fees, free eye tests, double the amount of nurses & midwives per 1,000 patients etc.

How long can it realistically go on for? And how do these sort of figure help the independance issue?

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/news/article-2226056/State-gives-Scot-1-600-English-public-spending-south-border-plummets-twice-quickly.html

Might have been better if they'd used the same census data for everyone to calculate their findings though eh ? :cool:

It emerged last night that a UK treasury report released last week used adjusted figures based on the 2001 census releasing findings over Scottish public spending, raising fears that UK civil servants will be deployed to manipulate public opinion ahead of Scotland’s independence referendum...

...The treasury report based on the 2001 census to project Scottish public spending per head whereas figures for London and the UK were based on the 2011 census. The treasury’s findings show the average public spending per person in Scotland to be £10,088 compared to £9,613 for Londoners.

However, it has been reported that if the numbers for London had been calculated using the 2001 census figures, the average Londoner would be the recipient of £678 more than the average Scot.

http://www.scottishtimes.com/westminster_scottish_economy

zagubov

Shakethedisease wrote: »

Might have been better if they'd used the same census data for everyone to calculate their findings though eh ? :cool:



http://www.scottishtimes.com/westminster_scottish_economy

Good point. And let's not forget it took about 70 years before the average Scot was better off after the junion formed. Which means bone of the ones at the event lived to experience it.

So it's a bit hasty to expect an immediate cornucopia of financial rewards when switchig to a new constitutional status.

robmatic

zagubov wrote: »

Good point. And let's not forget it took about 70 years before the average Scot was better off after the junion formed. Which means bone of the ones at the event lived to experience it.

So it's a bit hasty to expect an immediate cornucopia of financial rewards when switchig to a new constitutional status.

It shouldn't be about financial rewards or otherwise - not that it's stopped the SNP banging on about 'Scotland's oil' for decades.

For me it should be about the right democracy for our society, whether nationalism is appropriate in the 21st Century, the politics of division, whether people in a TD postcode are really that different from people in a NE postcode, the functional advantages and disadvantages of a small nation-state.

Unlike many vocal supporters of Scottish independence, I actually live and work in Scotland. I know that there isn't a strong popular support for the notion of independence. In 2014 some career politicians could be attempting to force an artificial construct of a state on me that, say, half of Scotland were not in favour of.

That concerns me much more than £500 more or less of public spending.