As of yesterday, Scotland accelerated its quest to become the Greece of the North as it passed a budget making it the highest tax region of the UK. Higher rate taxpayers in the Celtic welfare safari will pay £400 a year more tax than those earning £43,000 or more anywhere else in the UK. Fine. Sooner or later the Money Tree worshipping heathens will discover that the Laffer curve is no laughing matter.
Reporting on this was Sarah Smith, daughter of the late Labour leader John Smith and thus a woman with clear lefty credentials and who has risen, entirely on merit, to the top of BBC news in Scotland. Sara duly trotted out the line that her fellow Money Tree worshippers in the SNP were pushing: This is the cost of Scots - unlike all other Britons - getting free NHS subscriptions. And they also get free University Education and free deep fried Mars bars to go with their free heroin. Okay I made that last "free" but up but there was a long list of other genuine and equally justifiable "frees" which we do not enjoy in England, Wales or Northern Ireland.
Of course the Scots had all these "frees" before the tax hike. This is not therefore a tax hike to pay for all those frees it is to pay for some new frees or the ever more bloated cost of running the devolved assembly. All the frees Ms Smith mentioned are, thanks to the Barnett formula, paid for by the English, Welsh and Ulster subsidy of the Greece of the North.
Ms Smith could have torn apart the SNP's nonsense in half a minute. She did not. She did not provide any critique at all. That is not the way that the money tree worshipping deficit lovers North of the border operate. And BBC Scotland sits at the heart of that Scottish mindset.
Gosh how I wish for a privatized BBC and Independence for the subsidy junkies North of Hadrian's Wall.