STRUCTURAL FUNDING… A BREXIT BONUS

LOL. You are a wag, Tris.

Thank you, Mr Sunak. How kind.

But, in the run up to the Brexit referendum, we were promised that funding from GREAT Britain would be better than funding from LESSER foreigners in Brussels.

And, by my reckoning, this isn’t better at all.

Or do I need to do one of your Sunak Special maths courses?

It appears that we are not only NOT getting more, we are getting a very great deal less.

So unthank you, Mr Sunak. How typically unkind.

Our Employment Minister, Richard Lochhead said Scotland was suffering from a 60% shortfall in financial help.

The UK Government promised its UK Shared Prosperity Fund would replace in full ALLEU funding lost to Scotland after Brexit. 

However, the UK has only allocated £212 million to Scotland over a three-year period, as opposed to the £549 million that would have been made available from EU funding over the same period.

This means that they have cheated us out of £337 million.

Furthermore, the EU fund was sent direct to Scotland to distribute in accordance with their rules, as OUR government and local authorities saw fit.

Whereas, the UK will distribute this fund as IT sees fit, and this will bypass our parliament, the one closest to Scotland which might have more of an idea about what funds were needed where.

Talking of which, even the Tory Times says that levelling up is to be done largely in the South East of England and the Guardian points out that Sunak’s rich Tory constituency has done very well.

As David, on Twitter said:

Let me see if I’ve got this right … £177M for Scotland for 2.76M voters is £64 per voter £20M for Sunak’s own RICH constituency is £230.16 per voter. He even boasted it was going to happen. https://metro.co.uk/2022/08/05/rishi-literally-boasted-about-moving-money-from-poorer-to-richer-towns-17134341/…

I suspect the same thing is happening with other funds that we used to get from the EU… eg:

Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is by far the largest source of EU funds. Over £500 million a year comes to Scotland from the CAP in the form of direct payments to farm businesses and rural development funding. Following Brexit, short-term guarantees have been provided by the UK Government to replace most CAP funds until 2022, but no commitments have yet been made to replace CAP funding in the long term.

Oh well, farmers tended to vote for Brexit (although I know that not all did), so you could say, tough luck.

But it will be tough luck on us when small farms go out of business and we are forced to pay the far higher prices that the remaining larger corporate farms will charge, or buy alternative much lower quality imported produce from one of Truss’s terrible trade deals.

Pardon the vulgarity, but…

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As today’s cheer up, he’s a cartoon AndiMac did specially to commemorate the demise of the Britishvolt factory, so necessary for the production of electrical car batteries for all the electric cars we are to be building in the UK… and yet for which no one managed to find any levelling up funds.

(Hint to management: You should have made a generous donation to the Tory Party or to some senior minister thereof, and the funds would almost certainly have fallen from that magic money tree that they keep secreted for such purposes.)

Thanks Andi.