We can’t go on like this

Last Friday, I was invited on the radio to have a go at Kelvin MacKenzie who attacked Scotland’s welfare dependency on Question Time. I had to drop the bombshell: I broadly agreed with him. When I was political editor of The Scotsman, I was regularly amazed at the picture told by the reports I was reading. Masses of cash (much of it English) had deformed our once-great economy. We had gone from Silicon Glen to Mandarin Mountain and the “Scottish government” would be a lot more worried about our appalling levels of poverty-fuelling welfare dependency if they, not Whitehall, were picking up the bill.

In his column today, McKenzie says Scots know how to spend money but not earn it. This is utterly true of the Scottish government, whose sole skill is extorting money from Whitehall and justifying its outrageous budgets. As a patriot (Scottish and British), I have to argue that this can’t go on.