By Alec Ross
Some thoughts on whisky…..
Whisky (again). Since reading the latest industry figures, been trying to put it into some perspective. Here goes…
41 bottles a second exported.
£123 per second (£3 / bottle) direct to the Treasury,
Which is:
£7380 / minute, or £442,800 / hour.
After a day, the treasury “earns” £10.672m. One day. The mystery of why London doesn’t wish us to leave is deep and unfathomable.
A year’s trading provides tax revenues of £3,878,928,000. From a single product line. London then decides how much of this we get back. It’s called pooling and sharing / better together / precious family of nations.
£3,878,928,000 gets you a lot of bang for your buck.
You could build the new Aberdeen bypass five times over, and still have change (£700m of change). You could build fifty-five new hospitals to a scale of the state of the art new one in Kirkwall. It would get you at least ten major road projects the size of the Glasgow missing link. If you we’re prepared to wait five years you’d have more than enough to build a bridge from Portpatrick to Donaghadee.
Some thoughts:
Secondly, for as long as Westminster holds all the major economic powers and levers, little of the investment outlined above will ever happen. Indeed, the opening phase of the AWPR (Aberdeen bypass) today reminds us of the excellent infrastructure work undertaken by the Scottish Government, even with the limited powers it is reluctantly granted – powers that Brexit undermines.
And thirdly, just imagine what we could do if we held all the powers, and the levers, and had a Scottish Treasury in a normal independent country?
So, viewing the current situation through the prism of whisky (as I often do, sometimes literally) I conclude:
Why are we still here?
Slainte.
