henry_the_cow | Some TL;DR for you.. [2/5] (Reply)

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I trust none of the politicians. This applies to both MPs and MSPs, but Scotland can only threaten around 10% of MPs, which means it largely can't affect policy unless the UK government is already a minority on a knife-edge. In future I think the politicians who I can actually vote out and are a £1.50 bus ride away will be a little more scared of me, and will have my interests closer to their hearts.
Scotland has altered the choice of UK government for two years out of the last 67, to the best of my knowledge (and those were both minority governments which quickly fell): Scotland is politically insignificant to the UK. It has no stick to beat Westminster with if they do things Scotland doesn't like.
They promised devolution after the '79 independence referendum and delivered nothing.
Do you know about the McCrone report? "Scotland's rich." Classified. Secret. For thirty years. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCrone_report) Westminster has also sacrificed EU agricultural subsidies for Scotland, and Scottish fishing rights - and sure, some of that can legitimately be counted as "redistributive", but I find it extremely two-faced of these people to claim that Scotland is oversubsidised, and that the Barnett formula should be rewritten, when on closer examination it turns out that Scotland has not only been a net contributor to the UK for quite some time, but has also had to make substantial sacrifices for the UK's greater good in terms of its agricultural, marine and petroleum resources.
Quebec has been promised extra powers twice, said ok-we'll-stay twice, and received nothing.
The rush (borderline illegal, I think: arguing you can break purdah because you're speaking as the Conservative Party, not as the UK government, is kindof weaselly) to adjust and schedule ill-defined extra powers so late in the day stinks. It's clearly something they had no intention of doing since they could have published a schedule with their extra powers documents months ago.
The extra powers are pretty stinky too: Scotland currently controls (I think) 7% of its budget; it's already legislated that it'll control about 15% of it in 2016; Labour propose to increase that to a gobsmacking 20%. The Tories propose 40%, but if they're in power in 2015, they may be dependent on UKIP for support, which makes it highly unlikely they'd push that through: Farage wants to remove the Scottish parliament in the event of a No vote (well, I don't pay too much attention to him, but his 2011 manifesto said he'd get rid of MSPs and replace them with all the Scottish MPs from Westminster). Lib Dems are much more generous but somewhat less credible.
But maybe the status quo is ok? Well the arguments around things like NHS funding suggest no: it seems that much of the way that devolution has been set up constrains Scotland to match UK public funding fairly closely, and in particular this appears to mean that as Westminster privatises various sectors (e.g. NHS England), the public funding involved decreases and Scotland has to decrease in lock-step unless it manages to move funding in from elsewhere in its budget. So the privatisation agenda, even though it technically doesn't need to be applied here, gets forced in through the back door.
Worse, when you look at things like TAFTA/TTIP, another satanic transatlantic free trade agreement we appear to be about to sign up to, its provisions include things like compulsorily opening up market sectors to international competition if they've been opened up to internal competition (and NHS England means that UK health has been so opened). At least this is my understanding, which doesn't count for much since TTIP is being negotiated in secret and there's damn all media coverage of it. TTIP includes things like secret courts (they like secret) wherein private companies can sue governments over policies that impact their profit. These companies have no shame: witness Quebec being sued for banning tar sand exploitation and Australia being sued for removing logos from cigarettes.