Calman Trouble Vol. 42

Monday morning’s vengeful fug has set in (along with a dusting of spring snow, to put me in festive fettle) and the afternoon promises to be busy. Well knowing that all my readers are great enthusiasts for the cavilling detail of the United Kingdom’s constitutional structure and implicated funding mechanisms, I thought I’d send you all scurrying off to peruse a report written by Professors Drew Scott and Andrew Hughes-Hallett, on “The UK Government’s proposals for the future financing of devolved government in Scotland: an economic assessment”.

Published on the Reform Scotland website, the document “offers a critical appraisal of the proposals published by the UK Government in November 2009 to reform the arrangements for funding the devolved administration in Scotland.” Or to make the link more obvious, the funding proposals emanating from the Calman Commission on Scottish Devolution. Professor Scott is employed in the University of Edinburgh’s School of Law but is an economist by training, while Professor Hughes-Hallett is a macro-economist who was previously based in Scotland but now works at George Mason University in Virginia and is a member of the Scottish Government’s Council of Economic Advisors. Even if, like me, you are not an economist, the paper is broadly comprehensible. The sharpness of its critique has generated some gum-tightening headlines for enthusiastic Unionists (wherever they might be hiding), including "Calman commission reform will cause ‘financial black hole’" from the Times.