Betrayal of Scotland
January 3rd, 1995
A letter to the Daily Telegraph, the first three paragraphs of which were published on 3rd January 1995.
One wonders what sort of distribution of industry Mr Hamish Mitchell envisages with his talk of betrayal of Scotland in the last 10 years. The fact that England has two major steel plants and Scotland none doesn’t mean that Scotland has been “betrayed”. Steel plants have been closed all over England, and indeed in the whole Western World; likewise naval shipyards.
Scotland has less than 9% of the UK’s population. When the number of industrial plants of a given type is down to one or two for the whole UK, is Mr Mitchell seriously suggesting that Scotland should always have one of every type? Every government for years has made strenuous offorts to keep existing industry going in Scotland to encourage new industries to locate there with generous subsidies not available, for example, here in the North West of England. And the policy has indeed been successful for Scotland which now has a computer industry of a size far greater than its population would warrant unless seen as part of the United Kingdom.
Poll-tax experiment or not, the fact is also that Scotland has long received substantially more public funds per head from UK taxation than has England. Nobody I know in England resents that, but we do resent ill-founded accusations of betrayal.
England and Scotland have travelled a long way together for nearly 300 years. It would be the worst sort of tragedy for that union to break up asa result of the sort of ill-informed rancour evidenced by Mr Mitchell’s letter.