21-06-2025
SNP is using devolution for its lazy politics of divide and rule
F or neither the first nor, I fear, the last time, today's text comes courtesy of Wilkins Micawber. The relationship between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom in the devolved era is one in which, as far as the Scots are concerned, our friends in the south provide the standard by which satisfaction or contentment in north Britain may be measured.
As dear old Micawber sagely observed in David Copperfield, 'Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.' Translate this into our politics and we may come up with a useful rule of thumb decreeing that if a policy or outcome is sixpence or half an ounce more agreeable in Scotland than in England then joy may be unconfined across the land. Should it be so very marginally worse than the way in which affairs are organised south of the border then misery and woe sweeps the land.
