I AM indebted to Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson for the information that I am soon to be worthless, useless, and altogether a burden on society.
This will occur next February when I qualify for my state pension.
In a speech at the Conservative Party conference she bemoaned the fact that 88% of Scottish households get more in public services than they pay in tax. They are subsidised by the 12% who create wealth.
The statistic of choice used to be 7:84 – 7% of the UK population owned 84% of the wealth. Now Ms Davidson gives us 12:88. As a pensioner, I will be one of the 88% of state spending recipients living off the backs of the plucky 12% toiling at the entrepreneurial face.
I will be in good company. Folk in the subsidy-junkie 88% include doctors, ambulance drivers, teachers, carers for the elderly and disabled, soldiers who risk their lives in Afghanistan and all sorts of other workers who are a drain on the public purse.
We are united by our inability to create wealth. We are not merchant bankers buying and selling toxic mortgages. We do not build shopping malls or create chains of shops selling trainers. We do not appear on Dragon's Den.
According to another of Ms Davidson's contributions at the Conservative conference, I am not only a drag on the economy but also deadly dangerous. Cancer patients die from lack of treatment because Scottish NHS cash is used instead on my free prescriptions for gout pills and some statins to keep the old heart going.
I hate to think what deprivation I am causing amongst others with my bus pass and winter heating allowance.
Ms Davidson appears to be singing from much the same hymn sheet as Scottish Labour's Johann Lamont. Yes, the leader of the former People's Party who said it was time to end the scandal of Scotland's "something for nothing" culture by ending free prescriptions, imposing university tuition fees, and making sundry other attacks on already-stretched family budgets.
Ms Davidson and Ms Lamont are united in a desire to talk down Scotland and the Scots in their efforts to secure a No vote in the independence referendum. They are united as politicians who do little in the way of generating wealth but fairly do their bit when it comes to pubic spending.
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