We left several months ago (not that we're high earners Grin ). The last referendum was awful. The SNP have had years to make a real difference and show voters what an independent Scotland would look like, but they've tinkered round the edges, been too feart to use their tax raising powers properly, are all mouth but provide no real, honest version of how independence would work.
It's difficult to do anything but tinker round the edges when you don't have full fiscal autonomy and all the economics levers usually available to governments at your disposal.
It would be like me asking you to run a house for a family of four but telling you your only getting a budget of £1500 a month and you can't spend more than that, ever, regardless of whether your boiler breaksdown or bills go up.
Given that a 3rd of Scotland’s revenue comes from Westminster I’m curious as to where all the money to bring in these services is going to come from and what price the public will have to pay for it.
Are you referring to the block grant? That isn't revenue from Westminster. That's an allocation of money from things like
National Insurance, Capital Gains tax, income/business tax, and VAT that go into the UK pot and would just remain in Scotland if we were independent.
Since 2001 Scotland have contributed around £900 billion to the UK treasury and received somewhere between £643-786 billion back (depending on what you include), so less than if we could keep all revenue raised in Scotland in Scotland).
As an aside to this point, this system is very beneficial to England but not Scotland (or N.I. or Wales for that matter). For example, health is devolved in Scotland, meaning we have to administer it from the block grant (and under the Scotland Act we can't increase this or run a deficit) so if Scotland wants to increase health spending it needs to take money from elsewhere in its budget, which has no impact on anywhere else but Scotland.
Health for England however remains under the UK government's remit, meaning if the UK government want to increase spending on health for England they can do so at will. Either by borrowing, raising taxes, or printing cash, which is then paid for by the whole of UK. Some equal union that eh?
The SNP still haven't answered fundamental questions such as currency etc. They want independence but have no solid plan for the aftermath. We've seen that happen before with another referendum....
Compete red herring that one. The currency could be anything we want it to be. Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Denmark, Japan, Ghana, Chile, etc, etc, etc all manage to exist and do quite well with their own national currency. Yes, it would probably be a weaker currency than the £ buy again that doesn't seem to affect the above countries too much, many of which have a much higher quality of life than the UK (please note I said many there not all, don't want wide arse coming back saying "Ghana isn't better than UK!"
Surprised that people are not already leaving Scotland. Higher taxes, the health service is a bigger mess under SNP, educational outcomes are poorer, problems with drug deaths are drug misuse are well documented. What exactly the is draw or staying there, if you remove the family ties?
Yes, 1% extra on earnings over 40%/46% is such a huge price to pay and definitely worth moving for. Just remember that when your child is left with a £27k bill for uni, you're paying for your prescriptions, or you're paying for your care when your old.
Also see above for why health/education etc is hindered in the current system. It's also much much easier to work on societal issues when you have full control and working to cater for a smaller number of people. That's why LED is so popular these days and would be a hell of a lot easier to admitted for Scotland from Scotland