Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Read Online Free PDF

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    And that brings me back to Britain’s economy. Yes, the NHS can sack a few managers and the Department for Transport can shelve plans to widen the B3018. Little things such as this will save millions but there will still be millions to go, which is why David Cameron and Cleggy, the tea boy, must think long and hard about losing the Vietnamese Stig. They must think about chopping a whole department. Obviously, I would suggest the Department of Energy and Climate Change because it’s silly, when times are tight, to have a whole ministry attempting to manage something over which humankind has no control. It’d be like having a Department of Jupiter.
    But the climate change department is relatively small, and cutting that when you are a trillion in debt would be like trying to solve a £50,000 overdraft by not having your hair cut
any more. No, Cameron and the shoeshine boy need to lose something big and I believe I have the answer: Scotland.
    Let us examine the benefits of this. In the last election the Scottish National Party, which wants independence from England, took nearly 20 per cent of the vote in Scotland. Add this lot to the non-voters who also want to go their own way and you realize there is significant support north of the border for Hadrian’s Wall to be rebuilt.
    Economically, the SNP thinks Scotland would be fine. I don’t know why, since Scottish public spending is 33 per cent higher per head than it is in the south-east of England.
    But on its website, the party says that Ireland is independent and is the ‘fourth most prosperous country in the world’ (really?) and that Iceland, another small independent state, is the ‘sixth most prosperous country in the world’. (Apart from being totally bankrupt, obviously.)
    Let’s not get bogged down, though. The upsides go on and on. Without Scotland on the electoral map, Cameron would have a majority in the House of Commons, so he could lose the Cleggawallah, we’d never again have a Scottish prime minister and Scotland would become abroad – which would make it an exotic holiday location.
    I think we could take this further. Why not draw the boundary between England and Scotland at York? This way, the SNP would feel that William Wallace’s sacrifice hadn’t been in vain and, better still, all the northern English constituencies could be governed by the sort of left-wing, wetland-habitat, save-the-bat and build-a-wind-farm government they seem to like so much.
    So what, you might be thinking, is in it for those who remain – the Welsh and those in the south of England? Well, there’s no doubt that letting Scotland go would be very
painful, especially after 300 years of friendship. But what are the alternatives? The NHS? The Ministry of Defence?
    No. I’m afraid it has to be Scotland. It costs the UK £5 billion a year and saving that, on top of the £6 billion in cuts from the fat elsewhere, would go a long way towards solving our debt crisis.
    Oil? Well, obviously the Scottish oil companies such as, er, whatever they’re called, will continue to pump the black gold into Aberdeen while the others, such as BP and Shell, could simply divert their pipelines to Kent. That’s fair. Oh, and we’d have to move the Trident submarine fleet as well.
    I want to make it plain to my Scottish readers that I do not want to throw you on to the cutting-room floor. I shall miss you with your funny skirts and your ginger hair. The SAS will miss you, too, since over the years 75 per cent of its soldiers are said to have been from north of the border. But we simply cannot afford to stay together any more. Goodbye, then, and good luck.
    13 June 2010

Give to my new charity – Britain’s Got Trouble
    Oh, dear. I think I’ve been a bit naive again. Because I sort of assumed that in the run-up to the general election, all three political leaders had made it pretty clear that cuts would be necessary, and that as a result, all of us had reconciled ourselves to a few