Readers' Letters: Politicians introduce rationing under the radar

Politicians always try to avoid using the word “rationing”. But they are happy to put it into practice. The latest example is the reduction in the number of Scottish university students announced on Tuesday by Finance Secretary Shona Robison, a political choice reminiscent of the days of Margaret Thatcher, seared into my memory by departmental closures at Aberdeen University, including its oldest, Classics, Physics and Music.

Shoppers queue for meat in 1940, when food rationing was in force - and people were healthier than they are today (Picture: Reg Speller/Fox Photos/Getty Images)

But the most egregious current example of rationing is the NHS waiting list. It is not egregious because of its existence – it has been a feature of the NHS since its inception – but because of its size.

There is a paradox. Sometimes rationing is a good thing and is accepted as a necessity. The current size of the NHS waiting list is in part due to important factors that took off when another kind of rationing – that of food – ended after the Second World War. Obesity went from being a rarity to a common curse. There are even waiting lists for bariatric surgery. After age, obesity is the most important condition that predisposes those infected with Covid to die from it.

Politicians today only introduce rationing under the radar. Ration books survive only in museums. However good they were for our health – and it is indisputable that they were – the likelihood of politicians today reintroducing them is utterly remote!

Hugh Pennington, Aberdeen

Divided view

With the Scottish budget for the next financial year being set at £59.7 billion, I was intrigued to read Martin O’Gorman’s claim that the present Scottish Government has just spent £107bn from its current budget on public sector salaries alone (Letters 17 January).

I was never great at maths, but that does not add up.

Robert Menzies, Falkirk

Giant con

Martin O’Gorman thinks the Barnett Formula is a subsidy. To understand why it’s not, we need to understand the formula.

Scottish public sector revenues are sent annually to the UK Treasury. Every five years there’s a spending review that decides England’s budget and then the Barnett Formula is applied. The formula gives Scotland the same revenue per person change in funding as the change in funding for similar English public services. From that, the UK Treasury allocates the Scottish Government its block grant, out of which it must fund the services for which it is responsible. But the block grant doesn’t meet Scotland’s needs and is smaller than the revenues Scotland generates.

Take health spending. If England’s NHS budget increases by 3.4 per cent, Scotland’s health budget doesn’t increase by 3.4 per cent because the Barnett Formula doesn’t pass on the full amount. Scotland’s health budget has always been bigger than England’s so this produces a “Barnett squeeze” meaning the percentage premium of the block grant over equivalent UK Government spending shrinks over time, lowering Scotland’s health spending until it reaches the same level as England’s.

Scotland spends more on health due to decades of Westminster-imposed deindustrialisation, lower population growth, an ageing population and higher levels of poverty.

To make matters worse, Scotland has been subsidising the UK for decades. The bogus GERS accounts are how the UK dumps its debt onto Scotland. It explains why Scotland, with just 8.3 per cent of the UK population and possessing up to 34 per cent of its natural wealth, records a phony “deficit”. The UK has loaded onto Scotland over £150 billion in debt interest payments over the last 43 years. GERS also contains spending outside of Scotland which doesn’t benefit our economy and that we didn’t generate.

What will it take for the Scottish Government to wake up to this giant con and finally end it by leaving the failing UK?

Leah Gunn Barrett, Edinburgh

Cash coo?

According to recent census statistics, Scotland has a population of 5.5 million, very similar to that of our near neighbours, Denmark (5.8m) and Ireland (5.2m). The Scottish Government website reports the Scottish Budget for 2023-2024 as £59.7 billion, which it states is funded from the Scottish block grant and devolved tax revenues. This is much less than the national budgets for government spending reported by our neighbours in the same period, i.e. Denmark £160bn and Ireland £89bn.

Even allowing for UK Government spending on reserved matters (eg UK annual military budget of £55bn – of which Scotland’s pro-rata share is around £5bn) that is a large gap. Anyone who has been to Denmark or Ireland recently will know that Scotland looks visibly poorer than our prosperous neighbours, and now we know why.

Despite having a natural and population resource base that is at least equivalent to these two countries, our national budget is only 37 per cent of Denmark’s and 67 per cent of Ireland’s. So I have a simple question for supporters of the union with England – where has Scotland’s wealth gone? It is absurd to argue that Scotland is poor and reliant on the UK, when one looks either east or west.

The answer is obvious; Scotland is the cash cow that just keeps on giving, in order to prop up the UK’s chronically ailing post-Brexit economy. More UK anyone?

D Jamieson, Dunbar, East Lothian

Brexit hypocrisy

It is beyond tiresome seeing nationalists whinge about Brexit, as Fraser Grant does (Letters, 17 January).

As a Remainer, I remember how in 2014 the SNP and its allies campaigned in a referendum that would have taken Scotland out of the EU, without a deal, had they won. The EU Commission Vice-President confirmed that in writing on 20 March 2014.

Had the secessionists won the vote, Scotland would have left both the UK and the EU on 24 March 2016 – before the Brexit referendum. What kind of a position does Mr Grant think Scotland would have been in then? Answer: the same one Scotland would be in if it left the UK now. And no, Scotland is not qualified to apply for EU membership. It does not control its own monetary policy, which is an EU requirement, and would not do so while using sterling.

Mr Grant asks why a separate Scotland could not be like Ireland "with the right economic policies”. Would that mean becoming a tax haven for foreign multinationals? But Ireland has already cornered that market by playing host to more than 1,500 of them. Nationalists talk big about “the right economic policies”, but can’t tell us what they would be. Their prospectus is a pig in a poke.

Jill Stephenson, Edinburgh

Hard to swallow

Euan McColm claims free prescriptions “helped only the wealthiest” (Perspective, 17 January).

That is not correct. Previously, every pharmacist had a story about a far-from wealthy patient coming in with a prescription for two or three items and asking which one they could do without, because the charge applied to each item, not the prescription as a whole. It might have been more accurate to describe it as a “prescribed item charge”. Even some doctors would tell of patients asking whether they really needed multiple items because they could not afford multiple charges. That no longer occurs.

The “80 per cent of prescriptions being free” figure is all very well but it does not address the matter of suppressed demand by those afraid they could not afford medicines they required. That is now no longer likely to be the case.

Therefore, the abolition of prescription charges has helped less well-off people who required several items of medicine; it would be interesting to know what percentage of prescriptions fall into this category.

I do not know whether anybody ever seriously suggested that the charge should simply be per prescription rather than per item, which might have been a reasonable compromise.

Jane Ann Liston, St Andrews, Fife

Justice for all

The Post Office affair has exposed how too many ordinary people in the UK are being denied their fundamental democratic right to justice. The great majority of ordinary people who are not wealthy simply cannot access justice as they cannot afford to pay for legal advice to defend themselves from injustice or malicious prosecution.

This lack of access to justice for all militates against the very foundations of our society. Access to justice must be redefined as an essential service. It needs to be “free at the point of use”.

Urgent reform is overdue in both the process and payments systems needed for the effective and timely administration of justice. Can we now finally hope for no more delays as the Lord Advocate has promised to achieve the just society our democratic system aspires to?

Elizabeth Marshall, Edinburgh

Flat-out wrong

A McCormick appears to think that the Inquisition opposed Galileo for his adoption of the heliocentrism of Copernicus because it believed in a “flat earth” (Letters, 16 January).

In fact, the Church believed in the geocentrism of Aristotle and Ptolemy. As far as I can tell, the Christian church has never held a belief in a flat Earth.

Steuart Campbell, Edinburgh

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