A Place to Stand

      This article in which an African economist calls for an end of "aid" to Africa strikes home.

      For us in Scotland it is also of equal interest when we see that Scotland gets more money per head through the Barnet formula than the rest of the UK (by purest coincidence the excess we get matches fairly closely to the tax paid on what would be Scotland's share of the North Sea Oil.

   "Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa's problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn't even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid....

 A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unscrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign.

.....our politicians were overwhelmed with money, and they try to siphon off as much as possible. The late tyrant of the Central African Republic, Jean Bedel Bokassa, cynically summed it up by saying: "The French government pays for everything in our country. We ask the French for money. We get it, and then we waste it."

     Turning down money isn't exactly easy but the comparison between Emperor Bokassa and our own Fat Controller is fairly obvious as is the demand that ever more money be available for the special interest groups that our ruling cartel support. If the billions spent on windmills, qangos, anti-smoking officers and campaigns and on our NHS, which spends 25% more per head than in England but with worse health outcomes, normal Scots wouldn't notice either

     One way of doing that would be the SNP way of separation (though they expect a separate England would still want to pay for our windmills). Another and in my view better one, would be to allow the economy to grow (only the greens publicly admit they want recession but the actions of the others prove they do to) and cut income tax by at least 3p (what we subsidise windmills by). As Scotland grows to be the richest and lowest taxed part of Great Britain we would see accounts moving into balance.