Next general election - who to vote for

EarthRod

A good read from an ex Tory voter

QuantumChoices #FBPE #ABTV on Twitter

PS you don’t need a login for twitter to access

Bl4ckGryph0n

Read that and noted that he starts off on economic stuff and about half way starts on Brexit stuff then finally ends up blaming Brexit.

I think he lost the thread regarding his argument and ended up overstating his case.

He doth protest too much

BobbyMac

When I was younger I used to have a book with jokes in it. Looking at that list of tweets reminds me of it. Just a long list of one liners with no backup, opinion, etc. Populism from another angle.

BobbyMac

Glad your comprehensive reply has put this one to bed

BobbyMac

A fair point, although it didn't feel like that for the 120,000 poor souls whose death was linked to the austerity doctrine

Is austerity linked to 120,000 unnecessary deaths?

Hasn't the current Tory Government abandoned Cameron/Osbournes version of austerity?

How's future surpluses looking once the Brexit "deal" is finalised and the UK loses Scotland's Oil, Whisky & Irn Bru revenues?

BobbyMac

From your own link.

However, the link to health and social care spending is speculative as observational studies of this type can never prove cause and effect.

Plus of course this is an absurd line of reasoning. How many people die because we don't spend everything on health and social care?

How many might have died if the economy had collapsed?

We are now in surplus on day to day spending. The risk to the economy of excessive spending and borrowing has been reduced. Those policies can now be relaxed, as was always planned.

Probably in a much better state than the Scottish budget deficit if it's not being subsidised by the rest of the UK.

What's it now? About 8% compared to just over 2% in the rest of the UK?

Rasczak

Ah the old subsidy junkies jibe, now even the Tories in WM don't come out with that guff

However we do enjoy the largesse from the rest of the UK up here allowing the Scots to keep all the oil & tax revenues for themselves while collecting the provvy cheque from WM

Hopefully your burden will be alleviated shortly

Scotland has subsidised rUK since the 70's not the other way around

I did forget to add in the previous post, when NATO & Trump demands that defence spend is 3 to  4% of GDP, will that also be shook from the magic money tree?

fluxo

Guff?

Gers figures: Scottish economy deficit cut to £13.3bn
The Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (Gers) report said the figure represented an 8.3% share of Scotland's GDP - triple the UK figure of 2.4%

Those figures are a year old. I haven't seen new Scottish figures but the UK deficit has dropped to 2%. Take Scotland out and it would be even lower.

BobbyMac

GERS (an estimate) is a Tory creation by the then Tory SOSFS Ian Lang as an accountancy tool to dampen demand for devolution/independence

A leaked memo from Ian Lang to John Major said
“I judge that it is just what is needed at present in our campaign to maintain the initiative and undermine the other parties. This initiative could score against all of them.”
https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2014.00747.x

Dr Andrew Goudie (Chief Economic Advisor), has noted that "Gers tells us nothing about the situation under independence", even the most pro-union amateur economist Kevin Hague agrees with this assertion

In the past, Oil Revenues have been incorrectly classifed as non geographic and allocated against the Oil Companies home HQ

In just two years, then, Scotland’s economy has suddenly produced over £15bn more than the official UK government figures had previously claimed it did

scotfact

Also National debt interest is classified as a “non-identifiable expenditure”, Scotland is allocated the debt interest on 8.4% of the whole UK national debt, rather than the smaller proportion actually incurred by spending on or in Scotland

It could be argued that GERS is an estimate based on Garbage Data IN, Garbage Data OUT
More on why GERS might properly be called crap data

raduv1

So even with those changes to GERS, Scotland is still running a budget deficit of around 8%. Also worth noting GERS is produced by the Scottish government. Remind me which Tories run that?

Feel free to provide evidence otherwise whenever you are ready.