irc wrote: .... Actually Scotland with 9% (or whatever) of the population would inherit 9% of the civil service so the remainder of the UK would be neither better or worse in terms of the number of civil service employess per capita.
I don't think the Civil Service is uniformly spread across the land. Most of the really top people just have to be in London, of course. (So for example, when a large part of the NHS hierarchy was devolved to Leeds - an installed in the temple of profligate spending knpwn locally as the Kremlin - a lot of time and money was spent when the important functionaries in based in Leeds had to travel to London for regular meetings with the very important functionaries.) OTOH, senior people in successive governments have sited job creation projects where they have expected to gain the biggest political advantage. I suppose one of the biggest white elephants must be the National Insurance set-up in Northumberland, which has administered - after a fashion - NI contributions which long ago became nothing more than a supplementary income tax system, on the pretext that working people were building up benefit entitlement when, in reality, they would have got money from a different source if they had never worked.
It's my impression - and nothing more - that Gordo and his New Labour chums distributed this type of largesse around parts of Scotland. As I'm sure I've posted before, my wife, with an occupational pension of under £300 a month, provides work for three separate HMR&C offices there.
It's sad in human terms, but if the government had even half-reasonable IT provision, many of these low-level clerical jobs + their supervisors + the supoervisors' managers would be redundant. And that's before anybody decides whether means testing the old age pension is more expensive than paying everybody a flat rate.
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