Category Archives: Anglophobia

Celtic hands deep in English taxpayers’ pockets

Let me start with a rock-solid  fact:  England receives considerably  less Treasury funding per capita than any of  the other home countries. This may come as a surprise to many, because the higher  Treasury payments to Scotland get  the vast majority of the media coverage and  this gives the impression that Wales and N Ireland do not benefit in the same way.  In fact, the Barnett Formula applies to all three Celtic home countries.

What is the Formula?  Here is the Treasury‘s description: “Under the Formula, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland receive a population-based proportion of changes in planned spending on comparable United Kingdom Government services in England. Changes in each devolved administration’s spending allocation is determined by the quantity of the change in planned spending in departments of the United Kingdom Government, the extent to which the relevant United Kingdom programme is comparable with the services carried out by each devolved administration and each country’s population proportion.”   

This  means that the funding advantage of the Celts is permanent while the Formula remains in its present form. This is so  for two reasons: there  was a disproportion  built into the Formula  at its creation in the late seventies – higher payments to the Celts than England on the grounds of their relative poverty and the additional costs of servicing sparsely populated regions such as the Highlands –  and  every time funding to England  is increased the Celts receive a proportionate increase based on their respective  populations, that is, they get per capita the same increase as England.   

The differences in public funding are considerable. The latest  per capita Treasury funding figures are for 2008/9:

England     £7971

Scotland     £9538    (£1567 more than England)

Wales          £9162    (£1191 more than England)

 NI               £10,003 (£2032 more than England.)

Translating the per capita figures to the respective populations produces national additional funding  to the Celts in 2008/9 of:

Scotland     (approx population 5.1m) £7.99bn  extra

Wales          (approx population 3m)   £3.57bn  extra

N. Ireland   (approx population 1.8m)  £3.56bn extra

If the per capita funding of the Celts  had been at English levels in 2008/9  UK  government expenditure would have been reduced  by approximately £15bn pa. 

How much have the Celtic nations gained since the Barnett Formula was introduced?   Mike Denham, a former Treasury economist, produced a report for the Taxpayers Alliance in September 2009 which  came to the conclusion that in “ the last two decades (since 1985-86), higher spending in the three devolved territories has cost UK taxpayers a cumulative £200 billion (£102 billion in Scotland; £43 billion in Wales; £57 billion in Northern Ireland). http://tpa.typepad.com/home/files/unequal_shares_the_barnett_formula.pdfhttp://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/TaxPayersAlliance.pdf

But not all government expenditure made inside Britain  or is identifiable. The total identifiable spend on public services for 2008/9 is:

England        £400666bn

Scotland        £ 48023bn

Wales             £ 26777bn

NI                  £  17322bn

Outside UK    £14053bn

Total               £506840bn

In addition there is  the non-identifiable spending and  accounting adjustments  for 2008/9.

Non-identifiable  public expenditure   £79018bn

Accounting  adjustments                      £22500bn

 Total  UK  Expenditure  2008/9         £608359bn

(The identifiable and non-identifiable stats can all be found at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/pesa09_chapter9.xls – tables 9.1-9.4).

The unidentified expenditure is important because nationalist Celts  complain   that England gets a larger amount proportionately of the expenditure than the Celtic nations. This is a claim with little force because the unidentified expenditure in 2008/9  accounted for less than 8% of the total UK budget spend . The three Celtic  nations have a combined population of 10 million  which is about  16% of the UK population.  16% of the 2008/9  unidentified expenditure is only £12bn.  Even if all the £12bn had been spent in England, an obvious absurdity, the Celts would still be about £3bn to the good on the year ,for they have received £15bn more funding than they would have received if their per capita funding matched that of England.

The funding of the extra Celtic expenditure

Where does the additional  funding for the Celts come from?  In the cases of N Ireland and Wales  it must come from  England because the tax raised in those two  countries is  less than the amount they receive from the Treasury. (Exactly how much tax is raised in each home nation is a little problematical, because it is not possible to assign  all tax revenue to a particular home nation. Nonetheless, it is clear that N Ireland and Wales with their significantly lower average wage and higher unemployment  than England and  Scotland and with no oil and gas revenues  to claim must receive substantially more from the Treasury than they contribute).

The Scottish position is complicated by the Scots nationalist claim that all the North Sea oil and gas tax revenues are  rightfully Scotland’s  and consequently Scotland is  a net contributor to the UK national tax pot.  This is both irrelevant and wrong in fact.

It is irrelevant because while the UK is a unitary state, tax is gathered at the UK level and distributed to finance public spending throughout the UK as a whole. If England was poorer than Scotland,  that would  be an argument for Scotland  subsidising England, because, as Unionist Scottish politicians have long argued,  UK funding should be on need.

The nationalist claim is wrong on two counts. First,  the tax from oil and gas has not covered the additional funding over an extended period and, second,  not  all  the  oil  and gas is  in Scottish waters.

The Taxpayers Alliance  report mentioned previously concluded “North Sea Oil has not funded the Scottish spending gap, despite

Scottish Nationalist claims to the contrary. In only five of the last 23 years have North Sea Oil receipts exceeded the cost of higher funding paid to Scotland. Even with current high oil prices, the income from the Scottish share of North Sea Oil only just covers the spending gap, and North Sea. Oil output is projected to fall by 50 per cent by 2020.”

Hence, even if Scotland had been  granted all the tax revenue from the North Sea for the past 23 years,   they would still have been subsidised very substantially by England over that period.  As for the future, that will see  an ever diminishing tax return from the North Sea even if the price of oil remains high because output is falling rapidly. Should  the oil price falls substantially, as it might well do if alternative energy sources are developed or massive fresh sources of oil such as the Canadian oil shales are exploited,  the North Sea tax receipts could rapidly become a minor consideration for Scotland’s economy – at the low point of  oil prices in the 1990s ($11 a barrel), North Sea receipts were less than £2bn pa.. 

But the oil and gas tax revenue  position is even less promising than that for Scotland,  because  not all the oil and gas is indubitably in Scottish waters.  Much, possibly the large majority of  gas, is in English waters ( Scotsman   North Sea Oil & Gas 13 Dec 2006   Andrew Stuart).  Then there is the question of  territorial waters at the English/Scotland border.  Where there is a boundary between two countries which ends at a coast, international law allows the territorial waters of each country to be determined by extending a line  at the angle at which the land boundary meets the coast. In the case of the boundary between Scotland and England abutting the North Sea the angle is 45 degrees, which means some of the oil and gas fields off the Scottish coast would fall within English territorial waters.

Oil and gas production is self evidently no basis on which to build Scotland’s future.

The differing size of the public sectors

The Celtic countries have dangerously high  proportion of their GDP concentrated on public spending.  While England has a a public sector which is 43% of GDP, Scotland  has one of 56% of GDP,  with Wales posting over 60% and Northern Ireland over 70% (The Sunday Times

January 11, 2009 Scotland on a par with Cuba for state largesse Jason Allardyce)

Bad as these figures are the near future is much bleaker. A recent report  by the Centre for Economics and Business Research projected the Scottish public spending to rise to  67% of GDP by 2012. (Telegraph  Auslan Cramb, Scottish Correspondent 11 Jan 2009). 

The reason why the Celtic countries can sustain such a high level of public spending when their private wealth creating sector is so small is beautifully simple: the subsidy provided by England both openly and covertly.  The Celtic countries GDPs are considerably inflated by this subsidy.

Public spending also has an effect on tax revenues. Income tax and National Insurance deducted from public servants is simply a book-keeping event. It does not add to the tax gathered, merely, moves it from one government ledger to another. The larger the public sector, the smaller the amount of tax actually gathered.

The  costs of  independence

Independence would mean much more than losing the direct English subsidy. A Celtic nation seceding from the UK  would have to (1) take a share proportionate to .their population of the UK national debt (currently £800bn and rising), (2) shoulder the costs of any government contracts (especially PPP and PFI obligations) which are solely for the benefit of the seceding country, (3) establish their owned armed forces, (4) create their own  free standing civil service including a  diplomatic corps and  (5) fund their own benefits system.  In addition, any public sector jobs in the Celtic countries which cater  wholly or partly for English affairs, for example, the administration of English tax and benefits in Scotland and Northern Ireland or the DVLA  centre in Wales  and UK defence  expenditure such as that on Trident in Scotland would return to England.

They would also lose the advantage of being part of  a large nation state with an unparalleled history of meeting its financial obligations. The dire economic condition of Iceland and the Republic of Ireland (RoI) show how easily small countries can be capsized by  irresponsible behaviour by governments and financial institutions. What causes pain in large nations can be mortal with small ones, vide Iceland and the Republic of Ireland.  Imagine what Scotland‘s  position would be if  it had to fund the fall out from RBS and HBOS. The vast sums required would simply overwhelm it.

The Celtic nations might imagine that if they were independent they would be automatically be welcomed with open arms by the EU  which would act as a substitute  for England as a financial protector  of the last resort This is far from certain because the EU  has rather a large number of  financially incontinent members at the moment and is unlikely to welcome others.

Will things change?

There is one thing which would  alter  matters radically is an English Parliament,  but that, sadly,  is not on offer. Labour and the LibDems are committed in practice to the status quo because it suits their  parties who draw much of their representation from seats outside England., while the Tories offer not even an English Grand Committee..

 All that  Cameron has had to say on the matter is that those sitting for Scots seats (not Welsh and N. Irish seats note) should be excluded from votes on issues which only affect England, a concept he has signally failed to define and which Scots MPs  have already said they will  routinely challenge on the ground that anything which affects  England affects Scotland because of the English predominance within the Union.  It is noteworthy that Cameron has recently promised greater powers for Scotland. ( David Cameron in Holyrood powers pledge Simon Johnson Telegraph 14 Feb 2010) which will make change more not less difficult.  

The likelihood is that the next Parliament and  Government will stumble on with  things largely as they are on the devolution front,  That is England’s tragedy, but in the long run the Celtic  nations’  tragedy as well for the longer the inequity of the present situation continues, the greater will be the English backlash when it comes.

Why are the British political elite so Hell-bent on denying England a Parliament?

The Scots have a parliament; the Welsh have an assembly; the implacable factions of Ulster shall run their own affairs if they can but remove their hands from one another’s throats; yet the English, the most politically mature of all peoples, shall possess no such means of political expression and  control over their own affairs, neither now nor ever. So runs the curious view of our political masters.

When I say our political masters I mean the entire British political elite,  for no mainstream party  advocates an English  parliament or gives any sign that it will do so.  This is more than a little strange, because a English parliament is not merely the most just but also the most obvious and economical solution to the inequality of democratic representation and opportunity wrought by devolution..

Why is our political class so  utterly determined that England shall be given no voice? The obnoxious truth is that our political elite  oppose an English  parliament  for Anglophobic  and  self-serving reasons, both domestic and supra-national. There is a general  terror amongst them of what they describe as English nationalism, but which in reality is a dread of English interests being realised and fought for. To that general motive may be added two particular reasons,  the knowledge of Euroenthusiasts that  a strong self-confident England would subvert their federalist plans and the Labour Party’s fear that an English parliament could  mean a near permanent Tory majority in England. Those things are obvious enough.  But there is something deeper, more subtle, more poisonous, whose acid growth has slowly corroded our entire public life, namely  elite sponsored Anglophobia which has its roots in the currently dominant elite ideology of the West, liberal internationalism.

For more than a generation there has been assiduously nurtured amongst our elite a habit of public belittlement of England and the English. The disease spreads far beyond politics and infects the worlds of mediafolk, academics, public servants, pressure groups and important businessmen.  These people I shall call the Public Class.  The habit has become so ingrained and so widespread, that gratuitous insult by public figures of all things English  and the energetic promotion of all peoples and cultures other than the English, has become the norm rather than the exception. Things have come to such a pass that it is now commonly suggested by the Public Class that Englishness does not exist and any attempt to protect English interests is treated as at best chauvinism  and at worst racism. We have the unsavoury spectacle of a native ruling elite actively denigrating their own culture and generally acting against the interests of the mass of their people. Historically, such behaviour is commonly found in monarchies, aristocracies and despotisms. In a supposed democracy, it is best described as bizarre.

This dangerous habit of mind for England extends to the one parliamentary  party, the Conservatives, which might be expected to rebel against it.  William Hague, an Englishman born and bred, gave the game away in an interview in the Daily Telegraph (8/7/98) when he stated “I am not an  English nationalist” and declared that he “is determinedly British rather than English” and was “dismayed to see so many  St George Crosses at the world cup.” It comes as no surpriseto learn that he has since rejected an English parliament on the ground that “it could prove a decisive step in the break-up of the United Kingdom” (translation:  Mr Hague is unreservedly willing to subordinate England’s interests to  preserving the union at all costs).

The bogus nature of the claims made by those who scream blue murder at the slightest public expression of English pride or defence of English interests is shown by the uncritical support the same people give to Scotch, Welsh and Irish nationalism. They also give the game away when they argue that England is so large in comparison with the other parts  of the UK that a Federation would be unbalanced. In other words, their fear is really that England would naturally dominate a federation. The argument about federal imbalance can be simply shown up for what it is, a demonstrable nonsense, by referring to the examples of the USA, Canada and  India. There are sixty Californians to every Alaskan; seventy bodies  in Ontario for each person in Prince Edward Island and one hundred and eleven inhabitants of Uttar Pradesh for every human being in Goa.

What exactly is this terrible danger our political elite see in their misnamed English nationalism? It is not that England would oppress her Celtic neighbours. It is not that England would engage in any form of aggressive action against the rest of Britain. The fear quite simply is that an England with its own voice and political focus would attend to its own interests. The political fat would then would be in the fire.

The prime political fact of the UK is that England  enjoys such a preponderance in population, wealth, educational opportunity, industry and commerce  that she inevitably dominates the other parts of Britain. In fact, England has such a predominant position that she could, if she but  had the political will, utterly dictate the terms of any future  Union or dismantlement of the Union. She has five sixths of the population. She has more than five sixths of the wealth, commerce and industry. An English parliament with the same powers as the Scots would account for approximately three quarters of total UK state expenditure. Most pertinently the English taxpayer pays massive subsidies to the rest of the UK.  An English parliament would eventually mean an end to these  subsidies. It is this fact above all others which frightens those who oppose such an assembly. The effect of ending these English payments to the Celts  would  be profound.

The Eurofederalists  share the fears of English interests being realised and defended, but their reasons are different. They understand that a strong, self-confident England would spell the end of their plans to embed Britain within the EU. That Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should have a means of national political expression is nothing to them, because these countries are too insignificant and above all too poor to resist the march of Eurofederalism. England with fifty million people and the third or fourth largest economy in the EU is a different kettle of fish. It is also a fact that opinion polls show the English to be considerably more Eurosceptic than the rest of the UK, many of whose peoples  harbour fantasies of being given massive subsidies by the EU  in the manner of the Irish Republic, as “nations within Europe”.

Before the 2010 election the Tory position was for “English votes on English laws”, a misnomer because what they really meant was all MPs except those sitting for Scottish seats voting, the Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies not have the same depth of devolved powers as the Scots’   “Wee pretendy parliament”, as Billy Connolly described the largely English-taxpayer funded edifice in Edinburgh.  Since the formation of the Big LibCon coalition, Cameron has made no mention of this. It is a fair bet that the proposal is dead while the coalition exists. If the proposal to shift from first-past-the-post to the Alternative Vote system for general elections becomes law, then Britain will probably be cast into a situation of perpetual coalition, one at least of the partners in which would be the LibDems or Labour. Neither would countenance a move to any measure which would give the English any political voice.  Hence, it is difficult to see how either English-votes-for-English-laws or any other move short of an English Parliament such as an English Grand Committee will be on the agenda for the foreseeable future.

The English-votes-for-English laws or anything else short of would have been of little use in immediately changing the disadvantage under which England constantly suffers, not least because the Welsh and Northern Irish MPs would be voting on much of the legislation because it would apply to them. However, it would be of great utility in forcing MPs to publicly address the imbalances produced by the present devolution settlement. That in turn could spill over into the question of our immersion in the EU which is the other end in the pincer movement between Westminister and Brussels to Balkanise the UK .

Of what has England to be ashamed?

Of what has England to be ashamed? There are wars of aggression such as the Hundred Years War, but these are the common currency of history. As with the history of all peoples there are massacres, such as that of approximately 150 Jews at York in 1190 or the several thousand deaths  which followed the storming of Drogheda in Ireland in 1649 , but they are precious few in England or abroad. Moreover, in the case of Drogheda, the killing took place after the town had refused to surrender and the convention at the time was that the lives of those who had refused to surrender were forfeit if the victor choose to take them.  There is nothing to compare with the mass killings of men such as Genghis Khan or  the frightful slaughter of the  Thirty Years’ War.

England’s immediate Celtic neighbours have had on the whole a good deal from their association with England. Those Celts who imagine that England has exploited their countries in a peculiarly gratuitous, vicious and avaricious fashion should look at the general historical (and, indeed, present) fate of small countries faced with powerful neighbours. That general fate includes occupation by force, the reduction of conquered populations to a servile state, wholesale  depredations, chronic legal disadvantages, the refusal of free trade – even with the occupying power, the absolute  exclusion from government and, at the worst, genocide.

Compare such behaviour with that of England’s towards Scotland, Ireland and Wales for the past century and a half  (at least). During that time all Celts have shared absolute legal equality with Englishmen, have enjoyed the immense  benefits of free trade with England, had an inside track to the first industrial revolution, have been able to export their surplus populations to England, have received greater parliamentary representation than the English, have been given the privilege of national parliaments, a privilege denied England as I write,  have benefited – particularly since 1945 – from preferential government spending paid for by the English, and, most important for small peoples, have received the protection of the British state which would be nothing without England. As for the Irish Famine, that most prized price of victimhood for Irish nationalists, it was caused not by deliberate British policy but by the administrative inadequacy of the British state to deal with such a calamity.  

In truth, it is a very long time since the English behaved with gratuitous harshness or deliberate unfairness to even Ireland, despite the fact that Fenians remain to this day a source of provocation which would bring condign punishment in most parts of the world as it is now and which would have guaranteed such punishment everywhere at any time in history prior to the nineteenth century. If Celts had an ounce of intellectual and emotional honesty they would stand amazed at England’s moderation not shout their unreasoning hatred or bleat imagined wrongs.

As for the British Empire, although it is an obnoxious thing to be a subject people, it is reasonable to consider the condition of those who became imperial subjects before they were part of the empire. Apart from those taken forcibly to the colonies as slaves, all the native populations who came within the Empire lived either in despotic states such as those in the Indian sub-continent or in tribal societies where they were subject to the commonly brutal conditions of such a life. It is also true that many lived under foreign rule before they became subjects of the British Crown, most notably those living with the Mughal Empire. The fact that Britain was able to establish the Raj in India points to the fact that the native populations were far from happy with their rulers before Britain took control. That control was only established, as happened with the Spaniards and Portuguese in America, because sufficient of the native population was willing to support the would-be colonial powers.

On the plus side, Britain brought much of value to  the Empire. Playing the “What did the Romans ever do for us” game, Britain can point to the rule of law, parliamentary government, large scale administration, modern armed forces, access to European intellectual life, organised education and modern technology.  Most importantly, being ruled by Britain meant having an inside track to modernity. It is also true that from the second half of the 19th century official British imperial policy was predicated on the principle of putting the interests of the native population first.

To modern eyes the slave trade is the grossest blot on England’s name. I am repelled by both the idea of slavery and the particular cruelties of the Triangular Trade, but then I am a man living in an advanced industrial state with all the conditioning and prejudices that implies. Placed in the context of human history it looks rather different.  Forms of legal and customary bondage from full blown chattel slavery where the slave is simply property to the indentured  labourer who binds himself to an employer for a legally set period, have been the norm rather than the exception everywhere at every time. Where formal bondage did not exist, informal bondage through economic circumstances has been the fate of most men and women who have ever lived.

It should also be remembered that the trade could not have been carried on without the cooperation of native Africans.  Until the 19th Century European involvement in Africa was very limited, being mainly restricted to coastal settlements, many of which were no more than forts. Had the African not been so eager to sell his fellows, the trade could not have existed. The balance of power was unarguably with the African slavers not the European buyers.

England also made amends. Not only did Britain abolish the slave trade much earlier than most, she maintained an  antislavery patrol for more than sixty years in the Atlantic. In the 1830s, She also ended slavery in the Empire at the immense cost to the British taxpayer of £20 million in compensation payments to slave owners at a time when UK GDP was only £453 million (http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/).                

Put in the context of contemporary behaviour, at any point in her history, England’s behaviour,  both domestically and abroad, will, at worst, stand comparison with that of any other nation or state and, at best, be seen as morally superior at most times and places.  A first rate example of this is the fact that England was the first state to provide general support for the poor by the Poor Law Acts of 1597 and 1601. The operation of the Poor Laws may have bad reputation today, but they did provide the means of subsistence at a time when the common European experience was to depend on private charity or starve.