HOW
MUCH ENGLISH MONEY WILL BE USED TO BUY DEMOCRATIC UNIONISTS' SUPPORT IN THE HOUSE
OF COMMONS?
The
current level of Barnet Formula style annual block grant from the English
taxpayer to Northern Ireland is standing at £10.4 billion per year. That is
somewhat more than the total net subscription/subsidy to the European Union that
so much of the argument during the European Referendum campaign was about!
That
adds up to a subsidy to every man, woman and child in Northern Ireland of £5,437
more public money than they will averagely have paid in taxes being paid to the
population of Northern Ireland which is as per the 2011 Census, £1,810,863
(£1.8m). This means that, as set out in the House of Commons Briefing Paper
number 04033, published on the 8th March 2015, whereas the average
Government spend per head in England was £8,638 in Northern Ireland it was
£11,106.
Dominic
Lawson, the son of Mrs Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, and
who is a former Editor of the Sunday Telegraph, wrote in the Sunday Times on
June 18th (see below) that “there are no more successful shakers of
the magic money tree than Northern Ireland’s politicians”. The question is how
successful will the DUP be in shaking the English magic money tree? (or as I
would rather put it picking English pockets!).
I
seen reported rumours of an extra 1.4 Billion or an extra £2.5 billion and have even heard a rumour, which like all such rumours of course is un-attributable
and unverifiable, that the demand may even be an extra billion for every one of the ten DUP
votes in the House of Commons. If the latter is true, that would of course then lead to a doubling of
the figures which I gave above, with over £10,000 of English Taxpayers’ money
being spent on average for every man, woman and child in Northern
Ireland!
In
the past we in the English nationalist Cause have tended to compare our
country’s treatment with that of Scotland. This is partly because of the
success of the SNP in highlighting the independence issue for Scotland and
thereby successfully blackmailing the British Political Establishment to try to
buy Scottish votes for the Union. This latest development will of course not be
generally about buying Northern Irish votes for the Union, but specifically
buying the votes of the 10 DUP MPs in the House of Commons.
It
will be interesting to see whether English People do begin to realise that they
are being taken for fools with perhaps by as much as £20 billion of cuts on
English hospitals, schools, roads, students etc., because of the fact that that
money has been spent in Northern Ireland.
As mentioned
above Dominic Lawson wrote in an article on June 18 2017, 12:01am, in The Sunday
Times
“We are all being
DUPed into a merry splurge”
In
the article he writes:- “The DUP is socially conservative — reflecting the
communities it represents — but in other respects it is to the left of the party
May leads. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is populist. Its manifesto opposed
the Conservative policy of removing the pensions triple lock and introducing
means-testing for the winter fuel allowance. At the same time it advocated that
the province be exempted from the BBC licence fee and air passenger duty. Its
determination on this last point is apparently what’s holding up the deal: the
chancellor, Philip Hammond, is understandably reluctant.
You
get the picture. There are no more successful shakers of the magic money tree
than Northern Ireland’s politicians. Figures released by the Office for National
Statistics last month showed that while Scotland consumed £2,824 more in public
expenditure per capita than it raised in taxes — a source of irritation to the
English — the average inhabitant of Northern Ireland consumed £5,437 more public
money than they paid in taxes. There has been a payment from London to Ulster of
about £10bn in each of the past three years, slightly more than the UK as a
whole has been paying — net — to the EU.
Obviously,
the latter is to foreign countries, while the colossal transfers across the
Irish Sea are to poorer fellow countrymen and women, with all the demands of
solidarity that status entails. But it is quite a racket. To give just one
example: if a legal chambers in London gets a call from Northern Ireland, the
clerk will take it with a song in his heart. While legal aid in England has
suffered drastic changes in allowable charges, in Ulster legal aid is, as one
practitioner put it to me cheerfully, “still the same old gravy
train”.
In
England legal aid was one of the non-ring-fenced areas of spending that most
felt the effects of what David Cameron and George Osborne offered as the
solution to a national credit card maxed out by Gordon Brown: “austerity”, they
called it, and the word stuck.”