Scottish independence: fun with numbers

A lot of the English politicians and commentators are saying that if Scotland left the United Kingdom, it would severely weaken the UK's global influence blah blah blah. Well, the UK has little global influence and I don't see why we need it, but let's address the issue.

Let's assume the Scots vote 'Yes' (and I will be laughing like a drain if they do); become an independent country; leave NATO; refuse to accept their share of the UK government debt (while merrily taking their share of UK government assets like roads, bridges and buildings, which is a bit of a cheek) and keep all the North Sea oil revenues to themselves.

What would this mean for the rest of the UK?

Pretty much naff all.

1. The ONS says that the UK population is 64.1 million, an increase of about 5 million since the 2001 census. Scotland's population is 5.3 million. So in population growth terms, that has knocked the UK back about fifteen years.

2. NATO members are supposed to be spending (wasting?) about 2% of their GDP on defence. So that's about £32 billion a year for the UK. Even if the residual UK has to pay for Scotland's 'share', that's an extra cost of about £3 billion a year.

3. The National Debt was a very manageable 40% of GDP until 2007 and has shot up to 89% of GDP since then; financial crises don't come cheap! So it's been going up at 7% a year. If the rest of the UK has to shoulder all of it, that will increase our per capita National Debt by about 9%, in other words, it adds an extra fifteen months' worth of deficit. Which is not good, but not a catastrophe.

4. North Sea oil revenues are dwindling anyway. Over the past few decades, the extra per capita spending in Scotland (aka 'Barnett Formula') has been broadly equal to North Sea oil revenues; so the UK would lose a bit of income but lose a larger amount of extra spending, which is a net win for the rest of the UK and will go towards paying for the extra costs from 2.

"Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we're not nearing collapse"

Classic stuff in Guardian/Comment Is Free:

Four decades after the book was published, Limit to Growth’s forecasts have been vindicated by new Australian research. Expect the early stages of global collapse to start appearing soon.

The article includes a few charts comparing the predictions of forty years ago with actual outcomes.

So far, the predictions appear to be surprisingly accurate; they predicted rising agricultural, industrial and services output, falling birthrates and longer life expectancy. None of which is rocket science, they merely extrapolated the trend from 1900 to 1970. For example:
The original predictions were that all this will go into reverse in 2020 or thereabouts, but as we are still on the upwards trend, I'm not sure how they work that out and the article offers little in evidence apart from conjecture.

(It's like me predicting that Arsenal FC will remain in the Premiership for the next five years and then be relegated to the Championship; I can't come back in five years time and say that as they are still in the Premiership, my predictions are vindicated and next year they will definitely be relegated. Not that I know much about football.)

Daily Mail sticks to critical issues in Edmonton Beheading Story

'We were called at 1.30pm to an incident in Nightingale Road, Edmonton. We sent a number of resources to the scene including London's Air Ambulance, an ambulance crew and a duty officer.'Sadly a woman was pronounced dead at the scene by the doctor from London's Air Ambulance.' The road is a typical suburban street in the London Borough of Edmonton. The average house value on there is £310,000, while it is £275,000 in the local N9 postcode area. 

From the DM

"E-cigarettes will lead to complete collapse of society"

From The Daily Mail:

E-cigarettes designed to help people quit smoking could act as a 'gateway' to addiction to illegal drugs, scientists have today warned. Like conventional cigarettes, the devices are said to raise the risk of addiction to banned substances including cannabis and cocaine.

Once users have become accustomed to purchasing banned substances, they will inevitably abandon their jobs, studies and families and become dealers themselves. This in turn will lead to an economic slump and an increase in gun-ownership and violent crime as well as more acquisitive crimes being committed by addicts to feed their habits.

Increased demand for cocaine will lead to mass deforestation in South America, with a knock-on effect for global warming, as drugs gangs clear swathes of the rain forest for coca plantations and millions of vulnerable children will fall prey to gangs of men who offer them drugs when luring them into a life of sex-slavery.

The research also found that as most terrorist organisations fund themselves by smuggling and selling weapons and drugs, they will become ever more powerful and wrest control of failing states, which will trigger small scale wars all over the globe which will eventually coalesce into a global struggle for survival.

Scientists concluded that taking that first puff on an e-cigarette is only the first step to being beheaded by Islamic militants or all-out nuclear warfare.

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, the married couple from Columbia University, New York, warned: "E-cigarettes will almost certainly lead to the end of the world as we know it and cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space time continuum and destroy the entire universe.

"Granted, that's a worse case scenario.

"The destruction might in fact be very localised, limited to merely our own galaxy."

My favourite line from the Rockford Files.

I meant to post this for my James Garner Memorial Post but didn't get round to it.

To be honest it's the only line I can remember, and the way I remember it he said and not her, but it's a valuable lesson for life (I've got away with it a few times). From here:

Beth has just got Jim bailed from the police station: Jim notices where she's parked.

Jim: Uh... you're parked in a red zone.
Beth: Oh I always do that. They never give tickets in front of the police station, It's kind of a psychological neutral zone.
Jim: I gotta get a new attorney.
--------------------------------------------
For a slightly cruder version, see Kicking Bishop Brennan Up The Arse:

Ted eventually manages to perform the forfeit, acting on Dougal's suggestion to kick Bishop Brennan and act as if nothing had happened (Reasoning that, since Ted would never kick Bishop Brennan under normal circumstances, he may be able to get away with it as Bishop Brennan would never believe Ted would do such a thing).

Land bankers say the funniest things...

From today's FT:

Redrow has marked its 40th anniversary by reporting record sales and earnings on the back of pent-up demand released by the government’s Help to Buy scheme...

[Company founder] Mr Morgan said the key to expanding production was increasing the number of sites the company is building on, which was dependent on a still difficult planning system.

"The planning process is not in a sufficiently good state to deliver implementable planning permissions, so that needs further work, although there has been some good progress made,” he said... That doesn’t mean riding a coach and horses through greenbelt policy, it just means having a sensible look at boundaries that were drawn up 60 years ago and are hopelessly out of date," he said.

Also from today's FT:

The number of new homes being built in the UK hit a post-credit crunch high in the past three months, for which the government partly credits Help to Buy.

Chancellor George Osborne said the scheme was "working exactly as we intended". "Help to Buy is also driving a big increase in housebuilding in Britain, boosting the construction industry and increasing housing supply," the chancellor said.

Stewart Baseley, of the Home Builders Federation, said: "This increase in demand is allowing builders to significantly increase the number of new homes being built – homes that the country desperately needs." Housebuilders were recruiting "thousands" of apprentices and other staff, he said.

We know perfectly well that the so-called "homebuilders" a) don't actually build houses, their sub-contractors do and b) they have enough land with planning to keep them going for the next five or ten years, but they deliberately restrict output to the profit maximising level. Current output of about 160,000 new homes per year is very close to the long run average for private building since the 1950s.

We also know that increasing the number of homes has barely any up- or downward effect on house prices (especially if the number of new homes per year only increases the housing stock by about 0.5% - 1%), but the two articles also offer another explanation for supply inflexibility. It's because the supply of bricks and available subcontractors is relatively inflexible in the short term, so if the "home builders" try to increase output too fast - from whatever level - that pushes up their input costs and the pesky brick manufacturers and sub-contractors end up collecting some of the rent.

But if the land bankers are going to lie and obfuscate, could they at least get their story straight? Either supply is restricted by planning (which is at least plausible if you weren't aware of the amount of land they are hoarding) or it is restricted by credit availability (which is more or less implausible). if planning laws were as restrictive as they make out, then Help To Buy would not have had any effect, would it?

"Telephones banned in Germany by Frankfurt court"

From the BBC:

A court in Frankfurt has found that telephones are being used to arrange car-share agreements involving drivers lacking the necessary legal permits to operate under German law and has banned the use of the devices.

It has emerged that telecom companies were told last week that users of their "low-cost" tariffs could no longer take passengers and faced a fine if they continued.

But a spokesman for Deutsche Telekom said it had decided not to suspend telephone services, adding that the ban was not enforceable while an appeal process was ongoing.

"Germany is one of the largest markets for telephony in Europe," he said.

"We will continue to operate in Germany and will appeal the recent lawsuit filed by Taxi Deutschland in Frankfurt. You cannot put the brakes on progress. We will continue our operations, regardless of whether some users are offering or requesting ridesharing services throughout Germany."

A check of DT's customers confirms that drivers continue to offer pick-ups in Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf to people who contact them using the telephone.

Germany's Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière applauded the court's decision, pointing out that telephones are also often used to arrange other types of criminal activity, such as drug deals or shifting stolen goods.

"This is a big step forward to a crime-free Germany," he added. "If you have something to say, please communicate by open postcard, using clear hand writing to speed up the text-recognition process."

RyanAir's tried and tested press release gets its annual outing

From Scotland Herald:

RYANAIR chief Michael O'Leary warned Air Passenger Duty was strangling growth at Prestwick Airport as the airline unveiled plans to slash its summer schedule at the hub by a third...

Yup, they quite sensibly reduce the number of their scheduled flights every year at the end of the holiday season, and they always blame it on Air Passenger duty.

Funny how they never issue a press release at the start of the holiday season to explain why they are increasing the number of scheduled flights, even though APD is still there.

For the last few years' episodes, click http://markwadsworth.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/how-years-fly-by.html">here.

Greenies don't do physics

Once again, there is more evidence that Big Green and the Brussels bureaucrats acting at their behest don't understand the basics of physics.

It started with the ban on powerful lightbulbs. This was understandable; there was a "greener" alternative in the form of compact fluorescent bulbs and it seemed a logical move by the manufacturers of these compact fluorescents bulbs to lobby for the competing product to be banned. However, it saved almost nothing in the way of power in the grander scheme of things.

This new move, to ban the more powerful hairdryers and vacuum cleaners, is completely bonkers. Not only does there not appear to be anyone who could gain out of such a ban, but it takes the same amount of energy to dry someone's hair, regardless of the rate at which that energy is supplied.

So less powerful appliances will have to be used for longer. No energy will have been saved, the same amount of CO2 will have been produced and the same number of polar bears will be left swimming around looking for an ice floe to stand on.

Exclusive - Proclaimers could move south if Scots vote against independence

From Reuters and The Guardian

The Proclaimers are considering having their home in Cornwall rather than Edinburgh should Scots vote against independence, pop industry sources told Reuters.

The Proclaimers, Edinburgh songsmiths, have finalised contingency planning ahead of the Sept. 18 vote. The chances of secession have increased with support for Scottish independence rising dramatically in August

Pop industry sources said Craig was considering travelling 500 miles, with Charlie operating a further 500 miles away in France as a foreign division of the band.