why is the news and newspapers trying to create division between the

[2shoes]

english and the scotts??
noticed this quite a bit on the news and today in the paper.

cos the English are going to pay for their prescriptions...

...according to one headline I saw

I think they are just trying to highlight the inequalities but in their usual over-the-top style.
There's also the fact that Wales has its own parliament, Scotland has its own parliament, but England does not have its own parliament. English people live under rules imposed on them by English, Welsh and Scottish representatives....doesn't seem fair to me.
I think the media can help the British people by bringing issues onto the political agenda and giving the people a voice. It strengthens democracy - people power and all that. However, I'm not sure what percentage of the people certain papers represent or how much of it is self-serving for eds and their cohorts.

I don't think they are. A division is already there, it's not of the media's making.

It is the way they keep saying that we Scots are taking money from the English, like we don't pay taxes (and we have lower wages, high living cost, high taxes so we aren't exactly milking it.) They fail to mention that the amount they band around is £1,000 less than the Northern Irish get and less than £1,000 more than every English and Welsh person gets.

That really annoys me. In fact the whole thing annoys me and when I hear the English media being so aggressive it does actually upset me somewhat. Regardless of whether we get independence or not we should work together while having a good natured joke at each others expense now and again. The free care for the elderly and everything else they are going on about isn't happening overnight, and there are plenty of problems. Would there be so much fuss if Wales was having the same benefits? I doubt it.

The media here have been extremely negative since the SNP got their teensy majority (of one!) After 50 years under Labour control we might finally be getting somewhere but all that negativity from our own papers is not going to help.

And anyway, if we were that bad there wouldn't be so many English living here and wanting to move here! (Although it doesn't take long for them to start saying they are Scottish despite the accent!)

Inequality is the inevitable result of devolution. You are bound to get differences on issues such as prescription charges once each country's assembly or parliament or whatever gains control of specific areas of policy. If you are ill, you can get some drugs in Scotland you can't get in England, because NICE only covers England and Wales - Scotland makes its own mind up.

The unresolved West Lothian question - why should Scots and Welsh MPs vote on issues that only affect the English population? - is beginning to cause resentment. There have been policies pushed through on Scots votes (IIRC some NHS stuff?).

And Scotland, N Ireland and Wales do get more public funding per head of population than England - it's called the Barnet formula, meant to reflect relative deprivation. But if you are living in Scotland, Ireland or Wales, you might want to point to the way the economy has been run in favour of the South East and service industries over the past 30 years, letting manufacturing and heavy industries decline. Although that applies equally to Northern England.

I think the majority of both english and scots (based on recent opinion polls) now want an independent scotland, thus the unrest

It'd be entertaining if we could just big a bloody big ditch along Hadrian's Wall - Suez canal size - and wave bye bye (from both sides).

just dig

An independant Scotland is a logical follow-through of devolution really. What does the union really mean anymore anyway?

That the Queen gets to keep Balmoral?

And 'we' get what's left of the North Sea oil and gas?

Nah, Thatcher or Major quietly made it law that if Scotland becomes independent, oil revenues keep on heading to the Treasury... or so I heard.

I love hearing people say they're going to move to Scotland to get the free care for the elderly... fact is that it's assessed on the basis that if you can do much more thatn get out your chair (let alone move yourself 00s miles to Scotland) you get nothing.

...why are people so surprised by people voting SNP? The alternative is Labour. Fifty years of Labour hegemony in the west of scotland have left some areas of Glasgow with a worse life expectancy than Iraq and it's the murder capital of Western Europe. Woohoo.

And come on, the paper in question making these claims is the Daily Mail. You think their 'fact-checking' is going to involve anything more than assessing what's going to cause the biggest blood pressure spike among their readership?

IIRC the Scottish and Welsh MPs were the ones who pushed through the Uni top-up fees legislation, despite the fact that Scottish students don't have to pay tuition fees and English students do. (My English son is studying at Strathclyde Uni so I am quite sure of my facts).

If there can be a Welsh and a Scottish parliament then there should also be an English one in which only English MPs get to vote.

I'm not into this separist stuff at all. I was born in Wales with an Irish father, brought up in England and have lived in Scotland for the past ten years. I regard myself as being British.

I don't want us all to distance ourselves from one another. It seems a shame to me.

Kevlarhead it wasn't just the mail it has been on the news as well.

I know. Apparently the SNP are 'picking a fight' by protesting that Blair's offer to extradite the Lockerbie bomber back to Libya, made over the heads of every government official in the UK is not acceptable, and the London media are in a lather about the uppity Jocks not doing what they're told.

If that's 'picking a fight' I'd hate to see what they'd have done if Andrew Gilligan had been from Scotland.

Wot, no italics?

kevlarhead - actually you've illustrated the original point quite well there. Blair hasn't offered to extradite the Lockerbie bomber, and nor could he because of the way the courts work in Scotland. That hasn't stopped Salmond and large sections of the press from insinuating that he has though.

Is there much oil left in the North Sea to argue about?