Mea Culpa, Scotland

The Irish government has set up a truly independent body to recommend how shrinking public resources can best be deployed to maintain key priorities. Last July it Ireland’s proposed a 5.3 billion euro package of cuts, a 5% reduction in social welfare programmes and the loss of 17,300 public sector jobs. Scotland could also do with a truly independent review of public expenditure. Of course, unlike Ireland, Scotland was fortunate the UK government was able to take responsibility for its banking collapse. As Ireland painfully discovered, being a sovereign and independent nation is great fun up to a point, but if your bankers make a complete horlicks of their operations it is nice to have nurse on hand to clean up. Ireland is awash with books agonizing over its experience of the crash, led by the redoubtable Fintan O’Toole’s ‘Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger’. Others have chronicled how bankers, builders and property developers and their cosy links with the political elite in Dublin helped bring that the country to its knees. Such national soul-searching is yet to be seen in Scotland even though our First Minister was cheerleader-in-chief as his old employer, the Royal Bank, as it set out on its disastrous bid to conquer global markets. Had Scotland been an independent country by the millennium, the SNP have done nothing to curb the expansionist ambitions of Scotland’s two leading banks. Had Scotland been independent when they finally tottered towards insolvency in late 2008 and had to be rescued, an SNP government in Edinburgh would have been presented with a similar bail-out bill as Dublin and Reykjavik. Of course, as taxpayers and UK citizens, we Scots are sharing with our English, Welsh and Northern Irish neighbours, the costs of bailing out our banks and the consequences of the deep recession that followed. We will be paying that price in higher taxes, lost jobs and constrained public services for years to come. And we should also confront, as the Irish are doing, our own collective role in this disaster.

[Via http://jucameron.wordpress.com]