Nicola Sturgeon’s government has been forced to issue a last-ditch appeal for more time to make thousands of delayed farm subsidy payments in the hope of avoiding up to £60 million of EU fines.
For the second year running, the Scottish Government has approached the European Commission asking for the June 30 payment deadline to be extended following the catastrophic failure of a £178 million computer system that was supposed to hand out the money.
Yet, fifthly and candidly, government must rule more of our lives.
The Left doesn’t approve of the state handing out money to private companies. Their ideal is state ownership and state management, like the old NHS and British Rail. For farming this means nationalisation of all farmland, with each farmer becoming a salaried employee. That worked out so well for the Soviets.
Government. The one thing it’s good for, it’s not good at.
Yet another Government IT failure which will take 2 years to fix. That’s some screw up and they probably need to start again.
I note also that the new politics of the SNP is really the old politics as she avoided answering direct questions on the subject. Sturgeon needs to be thrown off by her high horse.
If the answer isn’t independence (but in the EU and using the pound) then the question is unworthy of her piscine excellence.
According to scot.gov there are some 52,000 farms in scotland… How the fuck can a system supporting such a relatively small number of “clients” cost 178 million quid??!!
The company that I was involved with before my retirement had a couple of users that supported all the order-processing, stock-control and accounting for at least twice that number of active customers – and they did it on 50-user Novell-server-based PC networks, costing less than one thousanth of the above system (and their systems worked too!).
How many school-leavers with a hand-held calculator and a copy of the EU rules would it take to do the job?
“For farming this means nationalisation of all farmland, with each farmer becoming a salaried employee.”
That would be good for most farmers as their annual profit divided by their hours worked would be far less than the minimum wage. Plus they undoubted breach all the laws on hours worked per week etc, so they would have less hours to work. Many small farms would require massive investment to bring them up to H&S standards required for employees (H&S are a bit less bothered about the self employed killing themselves). I’d hazard a guess that to run the UK farming system as if it were one large corporate entity would take an employed workforce many times the number of existing farmers, family workers and paid staff. Plus if you aren’t directly worried about getting your pay regardless of the outcome, the work would suffer – why work extra hard to get the harvest in before the weather turns if you have no skin in the game?
In fact I’d say that a National Farm Service would have a wage bill several times the current cost of agricultural subsidies, plus a huge capital investment bill to maintain/replace dilapidated machinery/buildings, and a massive drop in output due to lack of employee incentives.
Bit like the NHS really………………
john77 said:
“How many school-leavers with a hand-held calculator and a copy of the EU rules would it take to do the job?”
Hmm; first you’d have to find the handful of school leavers who can do enough maths (even with a calculator), reading and writing to be able to manage the job.
Scotland asking Brussels for permission. What’s wrong with this picture?
It’s probably all been blown on buckfast and smack.
And Tunnocks’ Teacakes.
Jim makes a point that echoes my late fathers.
He too over his first pub in ’68 in Huddersfield and whenever strikers came in to his pub he would support them and say he wanted pubs to be nationalised so he could strike in sympathy. They generally didn’t get the point.