Tuesday 5 April 2011
Have the British made one mistake to many by using April 1st to make fools of the English
You can’t fool all of the people all of the time the saying goes, so have the people of England at last realised on April 1st of all days that the British joker is no fool to be laughed at, and are they at last realising that the joke is on them, not only on April 1st 2011 but on every day since devolution 1998 denied them and their country their political and constitutional existence. Since April 1st England’s Health Service has become the only one in the United Kingdom that will not be giving out free prescriptions, and to compound the joke it is England that is providing the money for the other nations to get theirs free. How can the United Kingdom exist when certain parts have better benefits than the English and the English rights to those benefits are being vetoed by Scottish, Welsh and Irish MPs. The British don’t seem to realise that the future of the United Kingdom is at stake, and nor do they realise that an essential feature of the Union must be equality, or is it ingrained in the British psyche that they think that an English life in all its aspects isn’t worth the same as a Scottish, Welsh or Irish one. The United Kingdom no longer has one NHS, since devolution 1998 the UK now has four health services three of which, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are truly national and are under the control of government ministers and fully funded, while England, the only country without its own parliament is being forced to accept a privatised British Regional Health Service in which patient care depends more on where you live than the severity of the complaint, and has resulted in what is termed a post code lottery. The irony of the situation is that the British MPs who forced this privitisation on England were elected from the nations whose counties had been given their own parliament and they new full well that it would not apply to their own health services. Next time you are ill and take your prescription to the pharmacy to pay £7-40 per item put on the fools cap and stand in the corner, because not only are you paying for something the other nations get free but you will probably be paying for second class generic equivalents too.
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2 comments:
Fair point except for "it is England that is providing the money for the other nations to get theirs free"
I support an English Parliament and if we must retain the United Kingdom then a federal structure would reveal where the money really comes from & goes to.
Scottish oil has subsidised the UK since Thatcher & continues to do so. Scotland would be 30% richer without the subsidy to England.
You get a different story from the English media which means your view is understandable.
Lets not fall out overmedia perceptions & just ensure that England has its own parliament and each nation has full fiscal autonomy. ie. raises its own taxes and spends its own money.
Stewart
We compare England to Scotland because most people understand that Scotland has its own devolved parliament and that the people in Scotland get better treatment out of the UK Government than do the people in England.
Clearly we are unlikly to agree on this subject but I'll do my best to put the alternate arguement to some of your observations.
• Sadly, North Sea Oil does not keep the UK afloat. Projected estimates for North Sea Oil Tax for the fiscal year just ended amount to £8.5 billion. Estimated spend in Scotland alone is £52 billion. The equally sad fact is that up until 2007 for most of the previous 10 years or so Banking & Insurance accounted for approximately 30% of the UK exports, and that's what kept us afloat more than anything.
• So-called Scottish waters are not internationally recognised. The UK's economic zone is internationally recognised. The line between England and Scotland was arbiterilly drawn by the UK government when Devolution took place and fishery powers were handed to the Scottish Parliament. In the event of a break up of the UK the line would need to be re-drawn in accordance with international standards.
• Re the Barnett Formula - according to the Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses 2010 the planned spend per head of the population for the year 2009-2010 was: England £8,559, Scotland £10,083, Wales £9,597, Northern Ireland £10,662 - so clearly the people in England don't get a fair share of UK government spending. And yes, we appreciate that it will cost more to deliver services in the Highlands but 3/4 years ago Strathclyde University calculated that incresaed cost equated to about £200 per head of the Scottish population.
• The current cuts in the National budget are also not being applied equitably. The Overall spending cut is approximately 15% but the spending cut for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is only about 7.5% so the people in England are having to carry a greater proportion and they are already penalised by the Barnett Formula.
• We in the CEP are not anti-Scottish, or anti-Welsh,or anti-Irish, all we want is for the UK government to treat all 4 portions of the UK in the same manner and to stop practising descrimination against the majority of the people living in the country.
• With regard to handing back a pittence to Scotland - as far as I understand history, Scotland went bankrupt late in the 17th century following the collapse of the Darien Project and England kindly cleared the Scottish national debt and has subsidies Scotland for much of the following 3 centuries or so.
I hope the above gives you some insight into why we in the CEP are fighting to get a voice for the English people.
Oh, just one more thing. I give below a quote for the Scottish Office report 'Scotland and Oil' published June 2009:
"The main findings are:
• If all North Sea oil revenues had been allocated to Scotland there would only have been 9 years out of the last 27 when Scotland would have been in surplus.
• Including all North Sea oil revenues the last year of surplus was in 1988-89 and since then there has been 18 years of annual deficits with Scotland's spending being greater than the tax raised in Scotland.
• Even if all oil revenues had been allocated to Scotland the total deficit would have outweighed the total surplus by £20bn since 1980-81."
stano
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