HOW MUCH ENGLISH MONEY WILL BE USED TO BUY DEMOCRATIC UNIONISTS’ SUPPORT IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS?
The current level of Barnet Formula style annual block grant from the English taxpayer to Northern Ireland is standing at £10.4 billion per year. That is somewhat more than the total net subscription/subsidy to the European Union that so much of the argument during the European Referendum campaign was about!
That adds up to a subsidy to every man, woman and child in Northern Ireland of £5,437 more public money than they will averagely have paid in taxes being paid to the population of Northern Ireland which is as per the 2011 Census, £1,810,863 (£1.8m). This means that, as set out in the House of Commons Briefing Paper number 04033, published on the 8th March 2015, whereas the average Government spend per head in England was £8,638 in Northern Ireland it was £11,106.
Dominic Lawson, the son of Mrs Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, and who is a former Editor of the Sunday Telegraph, wrote in the Sunday Times on June 18th (see below) that “there are no more successful shakers of the magic money tree than Northern Ireland’s politicians”. The question is how successful will the DUP be in shaking the English magic money tree? (or as I would rather put it picking English pockets!).
I seen reported rumours of an extra 1.4 Billion or an extra £2.5 billion and have even heard a rumour, which like all such rumours of course is un-attributable and unverifiable, that the demand may even be an extra billion for every one of the ten DUP votes in the House of Commons. If the latter is true, that would of course then lead to a doubling of the figures which I gave above, with over £10,000 of English Taxpayers’ money being spent on average for every man, woman and child in Northern Ireland!
In the past we in the English nationalist Cause have tended to compare our country’s treatment with that of Scotland. This is partly because of the success of the SNP in highlighting the independence issue for Scotland and thereby successfully blackmailing the British Political Establishment to try to buy Scottish votes for the Union. This latest development will of course not be generally about buying Northern Irish votes for the Union, but specifically buying the votes of the 10 DUP MPs in the House of Commons.
It will be interesting to see whether English People do begin to realise that they are being taken for fools with perhaps by as much as £20 billion of cuts on English hospitals, schools, roads, students etc., because of the fact that that money has been spent in Northern Ireland.
As mentioned above Dominic Lawson wrote in an article on June 18 2017, 12:01am, in The Sunday Times
“We are all being DUPed into a merry splurge”
In the article he writes:- “The DUP is socially conservative — reflecting the communities it represents — but in other respects it is to the left of the party May leads. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is populist. Its manifesto opposed the Conservative policy of removing the pensions triple lock and introducing means-testing for the winter fuel allowance. At the same time it advocated that the province be exempted from the BBC licence fee and air passenger duty. Its determination on this last point is apparently what’s holding up the deal: the chancellor, Philip Hammond, is understandably reluctant.
You get the picture. There are no more successful shakers of the magic money tree than Northern Ireland’s politicians. Figures released by the Office for National Statistics last month showed that while Scotland consumed £2,824 more in public expenditure per capita than it raised in taxes — a source of irritation to the English — the average inhabitant of Northern Ireland consumed £5,437 more public money than they paid in taxes. There has been a payment from London to Ulster of about £10bn in each of the past three years, slightly more than the UK as a whole has been paying — net — to the EU.
Obviously, the latter is to foreign countries, while the colossal transfers across the Irish Sea are to poorer fellow countrymen and women, with all the demands of solidarity that status entails. But it is quite a racket. To give just one example: if a legal chambers in London gets a call from Northern Ireland, the clerk will take it with a song in his heart. While legal aid in England has suffered drastic changes in allowable charges, in Ulster legal aid is, as one practitioner put it to me cheerfully, “still the same old gravy train”.
In England legal aid was one of the non-ring-fenced areas of spending that most felt the effects of what David Cameron and George Osborne offered as the solution to a national credit card maxed out by Gordon Brown: “austerity”, they called it, and the word stuck.”