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GREET NO MORE: IT’S NOT SEPARATION WE NEED BUT A UK-WIDE REGIONAL STRATEGY

There is an increasing clamour for more powers to be devolved to Scotland whatever the result of the referendum.  Perception in some quarters is that more powers are desirable even without independence.  Some claim that more powers are even essential to improve government in Scotland.  This argument is misguided to say the least, on many counts… 
More government cannot improve anything.  Instead, the wealth destroying impact of government should be minimised by restricting its activities to the absolute minimum possible. 
Expanding government can only cause more wealth destruction and further empower politicians and bureaucrats at the expense of an ever more depressed and impoverished working population.
The quest for more powers for Scotland also rests on the assumption that we can make more effective use of more power than we display with the powers we already have.  However, so far devolved powers have resulted in politicians and civil servants indulging in ever more wasteful and unsustainable largesse, largely at the expense of the rest of the U.K. 
The benefits which were claimed for devolution are at best debatable and none of the claims made for its advantages have been convincingly demonstrated, at least so far.
The argument for more powers ignores the costs of assuming extra responsibilities.  It also very importantly and blindly assumes that there is no other additional cost or penalty for acquiring extra devolved powers in Scotland - for example through disproportionately greater losses of U.K. supporting expenditure and the loss of U.K. infrastructure. 
It also ignores the consequences and cost of loss of U.K. interest, concern, expertise, scale and support and the costs of disconnecting as well as disconnection and replacement costs from a vast array of U.K. government central resources. 
Currently, for example, Scotland benefits from a disproportionate level of U.K. research expenditure and university funding and health research and benefits from the smaller shared overhead of U.K. national infrastructure.  There is a lamentable lack of understanding or analysis of the cost consequences of losing that support other than manifestly absurd false claims like, that there would be no U.K. defence expenditure reductions in Scotland, even if Scotland was independent. 
This wishful thinking and misleading nonsense by Nationalists blinds everyone to the big issues.  The elephant in the room is the lack of recognition that more powers do not address the most essential shortcomings of the U.K. and how they impact on Scotland, its people and the rest of the U.K.
We share an island and a union with England, Wales and Northern Ireland and they constitute our major social and trading partners.  Legitimate regional issues that we face in Scotland as opposed to sectarian Nationalist arguments for separation are also similarly relevant for other peripheral regions especially those most distant from the South East and our very London focused and centralised state. 
The South East and London regions also suffer from over-centralisation and the lack of effective regional policies.  Political separation or devolving more powers does not address that central issue. 
What would benefit Scotland and all the other regions of the U.K. including the South East would be a U.K. wide regional policy that equalised economic opportunity and normalised as many trading and living costs as possible to create a more level nationwide playing field. 
That would generate more equal opportunity, productivity, useful output and therefore improved wealth creation and education and health and living standards across the whole country. By more fully and effectively exploiting all our human resources and so maximising the full potential of the U.K. and all its regions, we would maximise the output of our business and human contribution while removing and even reversing the ever increasing focus, concentration and pressure on London and the South East. 
An effective regional policy would reduce and probably reverse the centralising pressures that exist on housing, education, health, policing and communications that currently generate ever increasing costs from growing congestion and infrastructure overload.  For far too long, the consequences of increasing centralisation have been addressed by ineffective subsidies and other passivising regional funding initiatives that have served to fatten, misdirect and corrupt regional government and public sector activities. 
Yet all this economic aid has done no more good than our wasteful and misguided foreign aid to the so called underdeveloped world.   Sectarian government spending can only be wasteful and socially and economically corrosive.
The best future for Scotland would be in a better organised United Kingdom and the best future for the United Kingdom would be in having a unifying strategy rather than centralising policies. 
While power can corrupt, it doesn’t necessarily ever improve anything.  All the political power in the world will not yield any benefit unless it reduces the role of government and maximises individual freedom. 
Government has to minimise expenditure and let the people of the U.K. flourish.  In Scotland we should understand that better than any other part of the country or indeed the world.
Our tragedy is that those who wail and greet the most are part of the ‘gimme gimme’ welfare dependency that results from unwarranted and useless government subsidy at the expense of a national policy to equalise standards and opportunity across the country. 
The consequence of the Labour, Liberal and Nationalist self serving and misguided devolution settlement for Scotland, and the U.K. in general, are already dire.  Breaking up the Union will make them worse, as will more devolved powers.  The only people who could benefit are banana republic politicians who are ruining the lives and prospects of an already debt ridden people in a country they have driven towards bankruptcy and yet they are still striving for more powers that are destined to make our poor economic situation even worse. 
We need a regional strategy that will realise the objective of a United Kingdom and unite and maximise all our people’s freedoms and powers.