MOF points out in his blog, that it is impossible to prepare an accurate picture of the cost of Welsh independence because there is no published data on Welsh tax revenue.
A shop in Rhyl collects its VAT from Welsh spending, but this appears in the accounts of the Companies head office in Chester.
A factory in Treorchy collects its NI contributions from its Welsh workforce, but declares it in its company accounts in Birmingham.
The profits from a multinational car components firm, with its manufacturing base in Wales, are declared as that of its UK subsidiary from its London headquarters.
It would be a simple matter to declare the source of this income on a geographical basis - it would only take a few lines in company spreadsheets and a few lines of code in government databases.
I can not believe that at some stage the UK government has not carried out this excercise - just in case we got our way - and I am certain that if the figures demonstrated that an independent Wales would be quickly bankrupt then these figures would have already been published. If as I suspect the figures showed that an independent Wales would be more than capable of being self-sufficient then the figures would be locked away to gather dust in some dusty filing cabinet.
The truth is out there ..... probably kept in the LL files!
4 comments:
It definately is an X-file!
;-)
Hi, I'm an ex-pat Welshman living in New Zealand. I've been here 12 years. I was a member of Plaid Cymru for years and always thought eventually people would wake up to the independence thing.
In support of your comments, i'd make the observation that there are plenty of smaller countries doing OK. New Zealand is a good example. Not super rich in OECD terms but doing very nively thank you and providing a pretty good standard of living for it's 4 million souls. Also, NZ was left completely isolated economically when Britain joined the Euopean Community in '73 and has nevertheless found a way to survive. If Wales were to become independent she would likely be in a better space to prosper than New Zealand was 30 years ago.
Don't know much about tax, but I do know that Wales at the moment is the poorest country in the UK and one of the poorest countries in Western Europe. Time for a change, time to prosper like Ireland, Norway and Iceland.
wales isnt a country neitehr is england or scotland, britain is a country.
so wales isnt poor
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