Alex Massie Alex Massie

Alex Salmond’s Southern Helpers

Sometimes it is useful to be reminded that the English are often barely more knowledgeable about Scotland than Americans are about Canada.Today’s Guardian piece “Life Without Scotland” is by turns juvenile, irritating, superficial, irritating and ignorant. It’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek funny but it misses each and every one of its targets.

Nonetheless, the most interesting element of the piece is that it was published at all. It is rather odd to see the English slowly waking up to the fact that Scotland is now officially a semi-detached member of the Union. They don’t seem to like it much.

Complaints about lavish spending on health and education north of the border  fail to recognise that these policies could have been pursued by the old Scottish Office in the pre-devolution era without anyone noticing at all. If Scotland spends more on health that’s partly because it spends less on policing. And so on.

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