He spends just about as much time trying to persuade Scots to stay as he does in winding them up:
Anyway, here are my ten reasons why I think Scotland and England are much better together than apart.
[…]
3. Deep Fried Mars Bars.
As every Englishman knows, these are the staple diet of inner city Scotland*, usually served with a side order of deep fried pizza, washed down with Irn Bru, and followed with a heroin chaser, which makes them vomit it all up again, as seen in Irvine Welsh’s hard-hitting documentary Trainspotting. (*Although we of course are aware that outside the cities, you subsist on haggis and whisky)
Some Scots like to claim that this a grotesque caricature which is typical of the contempt in which they are held by the snide, ignorant, condescending English. But then, the feeling’s mutual, isn’t it? In any international sporting event, the Scots will always support whichever foreign team is playing England.
And isn’t that exactly what’s so wonderful about our relationship? All the best marriages are based on partial loathing: look at Anthony & Cleo; Taylor and Burton; Petruchio and Katherina. It’s the spark that keeps it all alive.
4. The Pound.
As Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has made perfectly clear, an independent Scotland is not going to keep the pound. Why not? Well look at what Greece did when — with a little book-balancing sleight of hand from its friends at Goldman Sachs — it snuck into membership of the Euro.
So if you want a future where you travel abroad, my Scottish friends, or indeed where you want to be able to be able to import anything at all, it’s very much in your interests to maintain the Union. Otherwise you’ll have to find a currency more in keeping with your new global status: the Albanian Lek, perhaps, or the West African CFA franc, as used by your economic soul-mate Burkina Faso.
5. The economy.
Let’s be blunt: apart from the whisky industry, and what’s left of the tourist industry that hasn’t been wiped out by Alex Salmond’s wind-farm building programme, Scotland doesn’t really have one. It is a welfare-dependent basket case, with near Soviet levels of government spending and a workforce who’d mostly be out of jobs if they weren’t sucking on the teat of state employment.
For various historical and emotional reasons, the English taxpayers who bankroll most of this welfarism — e.g. through the iniquitous Barnett Formula, whereby around £1000 more per annum is spent by the government on Scottish citizens than English ones — have decided generally to be cool about this.
But when we hear about Scotland’s plans to go it alone economically, we’re about as convinced as the parents of stroppy teenage kids are when they threaten to leave home right this minute. The difference is that when in ten minutes’ time we get the phone call “D-a-a-d. Will you come and pick me up? I’ve run out of pizza money” we’re not going to come running.
