In England unemployment is up, riots, you name it. Very different picture north of the border.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinio...cle3170114.ece
France top for Scottish food exports
Scotland's hotels outperforming the rest of the UK
Come on England, KUTITB
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinio...cle3170114.ece
France top for Scottish food exports
Scotland's hotels outperforming the rest of the UK
Come on England, KUTITB
Are they happier north of the Border because there are no super-rich lording it over them?
It’s Grimsville UK where toddlers resort to keeping cockroaches as pets, the streets are grubby and the towns full of angry young men, riot-torn wasteland and terrifying housing estates. Newsweek’s cover last week suggested that Great Britain had become Little Britain.
However hard David Cameron tries to dispel the image this week as he opens his new campaign to put the “Great” back into Britain, Vince Cable seems to agree. In his speech to the Liberal Democrat conference this week, the Business Secretary warned of grey skies stretching over the United Kingdom for the foreseeable future. But there is a corner of the country that appears to be doing rather well — Scotland, where they can see blue sky over the rainy uplands.
Surely Scotland is the home of Trainspotting — syringes and heroin — while England is best summed up by Four Weddings and a Funeral?
But look at the figures and you find that there has been a subtle change. Last week Scotland was the only part of the UK where unemployment fell and there was a net rise of 23,000 in the numbers finding work. Job creation in the private sector is running at twice the rate of job losses in the public sector, and Scotland appears to be quietly confident.
The riots this summer didn’t touch Scotland, which welcomed fleeing Englishmen at the Edinburgh Festival. Instead the Scots sent their police south of the Border to help the auld enemy. Crime there is now at its lowest for 35 years.
Scotland’s image as a country inhabited by dour Calvinist pessimists has also been reversed. Using similar methodology to the Prime Minister’s “happiness index”, Professor David Bell, of the University of Stirling, has discovered that over the past ten years Scots have overtaken the English and Welsh. His work shows that in 2003 Scotland recorded 3.98 on the happiness scale, some way behind England, which recorded 4.8, but by 2008 Scotland had overtaken Wales and England to become the most contented part of the UK.
It’s apparent as soon as you walk though Edinburgh airport and drive into the capital. The Scots appear relaxed and at ease. The country still has wretched housing estates and pockets of hell, life expectancy continues to be one of the lowest in Europe, but it doesn’t have the other extreme — the super-wealthy.
The only yacht in Edinburgh is the Royal Yacht Britannia, now a museum. A few large estates full of deer are owned by absent or ancient English families and discreet Dutch and Danish magnates, but they aren’t rubbing everyone else’s nose in it.
There is no sense of the huge disparity of wealth that you find in London, the private underground swimming pools threatening the foundations of nearby tower blocks, the Russian oligarchs knocking together four family houses to create their vast pieds-à-terre.
It’s this gaping sense of inequality that makes those in the South East feel so disgruntled. For once Karl Marx seems to have got it right when he said: “A house may be large or small; as long as the neighbouring houses are likewise small. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut ... the occupant of the relatively little house will find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.”
In Scotland it is different. Ordinary Edinburgh families haven’t been ousted from the city and can still afford three-bedroom houses with sash windows, high ceilings and a trampoline in the garden. The high streets haven’t been taken over by Prada. The smart immigrant population is made up of middle-class English refugees attracted by the quality of life — free university tuition, free prescriptions and free personal care for the elderly.
Then, of course, there are the other enticements to living north of the Border — the freezing of the council tax since 2007, the infrastructure spending on extensions to the M74 and M80, new hospitals, bypasses and rail links as well as free parking at hospitals.
The English complain that all this is paid for by put-upon southerners. Treasury statistics suggest that state spending north of the Border averaged £10,212 per head last year, £1,624 per person higher than in England. But even here the Scots have called England’s bluff — the majority don’t want independence but they do want fiscal autonomy — so they can no longer be accused of sponging.
According to the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey last year, nearly 60 per cent of Scots say that they want taxation levels to be decided in Scotland. They are convinced that they won’t become another Greece or Ireland but will be more like Denmark, which has about the same population, while Broken Britain can become Broken England.
The Scots should have their fiscal autonomy. Then we can see if they flounder on their own and return to being Scots with a grievance or if they become a little ray of sunshine in these harsh economic times.
It’s Grimsville UK where toddlers resort to keeping cockroaches as pets, the streets are grubby and the towns full of angry young men, riot-torn wasteland and terrifying housing estates. Newsweek’s cover last week suggested that Great Britain had become Little Britain.
However hard David Cameron tries to dispel the image this week as he opens his new campaign to put the “Great” back into Britain, Vince Cable seems to agree. In his speech to the Liberal Democrat conference this week, the Business Secretary warned of grey skies stretching over the United Kingdom for the foreseeable future. But there is a corner of the country that appears to be doing rather well — Scotland, where they can see blue sky over the rainy uplands.
Surely Scotland is the home of Trainspotting — syringes and heroin — while England is best summed up by Four Weddings and a Funeral?
But look at the figures and you find that there has been a subtle change. Last week Scotland was the only part of the UK where unemployment fell and there was a net rise of 23,000 in the numbers finding work. Job creation in the private sector is running at twice the rate of job losses in the public sector, and Scotland appears to be quietly confident.
The riots this summer didn’t touch Scotland, which welcomed fleeing Englishmen at the Edinburgh Festival. Instead the Scots sent their police south of the Border to help the auld enemy. Crime there is now at its lowest for 35 years.
Scotland’s image as a country inhabited by dour Calvinist pessimists has also been reversed. Using similar methodology to the Prime Minister’s “happiness index”, Professor David Bell, of the University of Stirling, has discovered that over the past ten years Scots have overtaken the English and Welsh. His work shows that in 2003 Scotland recorded 3.98 on the happiness scale, some way behind England, which recorded 4.8, but by 2008 Scotland had overtaken Wales and England to become the most contented part of the UK.
It’s apparent as soon as you walk though Edinburgh airport and drive into the capital. The Scots appear relaxed and at ease. The country still has wretched housing estates and pockets of hell, life expectancy continues to be one of the lowest in Europe, but it doesn’t have the other extreme — the super-wealthy.
The only yacht in Edinburgh is the Royal Yacht Britannia, now a museum. A few large estates full of deer are owned by absent or ancient English families and discreet Dutch and Danish magnates, but they aren’t rubbing everyone else’s nose in it.
There is no sense of the huge disparity of wealth that you find in London, the private underground swimming pools threatening the foundations of nearby tower blocks, the Russian oligarchs knocking together four family houses to create their vast pieds-à-terre.
It’s this gaping sense of inequality that makes those in the South East feel so disgruntled. For once Karl Marx seems to have got it right when he said: “A house may be large or small; as long as the neighbouring houses are likewise small. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut ... the occupant of the relatively little house will find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.”
In Scotland it is different. Ordinary Edinburgh families haven’t been ousted from the city and can still afford three-bedroom houses with sash windows, high ceilings and a trampoline in the garden. The high streets haven’t been taken over by Prada. The smart immigrant population is made up of middle-class English refugees attracted by the quality of life — free university tuition, free prescriptions and free personal care for the elderly.
Then, of course, there are the other enticements to living north of the Border — the freezing of the council tax since 2007, the infrastructure spending on extensions to the M74 and M80, new hospitals, bypasses and rail links as well as free parking at hospitals.
The English complain that all this is paid for by put-upon southerners. Treasury statistics suggest that state spending north of the Border averaged £10,212 per head last year, £1,624 per person higher than in England. But even here the Scots have called England’s bluff — the majority don’t want independence but they do want fiscal autonomy — so they can no longer be accused of sponging.
According to the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey last year, nearly 60 per cent of Scots say that they want taxation levels to be decided in Scotland. They are convinced that they won’t become another Greece or Ireland but will be more like Denmark, which has about the same population, while Broken Britain can become Broken England.
The Scots should have their fiscal autonomy. Then we can see if they flounder on their own and return to being Scots with a grievance or if they become a little ray of sunshine in these harsh economic times.
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