UK Block Grant funding last year was highest in Northern Ireland even without the bribes thrown at the DUP to capture their Parliamentary votes, funding that will be scooped up by Austerity 2 if the Tories win an outright majority in the commons on Dec 12th.
Last year total block grant spending by the UK Government was £772Bn the highest spending award per head went to Northern Ireland at circa £13,950 but surprisingly for those who attack the Barnett Formula particularly former UKIP supporters, London is the largest Block Grant user at a staggering spend rate of £12,847 per person and with a population somewhere in the region of 8.9M you can see why the Barnet formula is required for smaller places such as Scotland and Wales who receive much smaller public expenditure amounts balanced by the size of their population but are through the Block Grant for Scotland of £10,152 per person compared to an England outside London expenditure per person of only £8,529 per person able to spend 20% more per annum on services for their people.
The ‘Barnett Formula’ itself is not rocket science, in a UK-Scotland scenario, England has 10 times the number of people than Scotland therefore with a UK spend of £1 the equalisation rate for Scotland would be 10p and for England -3p yep that’s a minus!
The current Labour Party policy team has looked at how, whether we end up with BREXIT or not, can public expenditure be equalised over the next decade and lift the whole of the UK out of its current austerity trap, a trap that even Greece who has suffered major tax evasion problems by its population has managed to dissolve through the input of help from the EU and that includes the Tories austere and miserable UK.
Labour has obviously looked to its Scottish roots and the ability for 20% higher expenditure for 5M people and asked how it can deliver for the remainder of the UK. Its answer is to renationalise those items that the Conservatives under Thatcher and various PM’s since privatised in England and benefit from the nations gift to the Tory investors. Scotland for example has nationalised water, a strong and separate NHS, its own energy grid and Scotrail who run 94% of all trains over the Border are a wholly owned subsidiary of the Scottish Government. It has denied access to carpet-bagging investors to its socially required infrastructure.
Its easy to see Labour’s new thinking and its easy to see how it is affordable and can be achieved to benefit the English, without damaging the benefits from being a union gives to the peripheral populations of the UK who need the taxes paid by the many to assist the few.
