There is a category of fiscal arrangement in democratic life that cannot be honestly discussed. Not because the numbers are hidden — they are published annually, by governments themselves — but because the act of discussing them triggers a defensive response that has nothing to do with the numbers and everything to do with who is asking. The question is not whether the data is accurate. The question is whether you are permitted to read it aloud without being assigned a motive.

The mechanism is straightforward. When a fiscal transfer flows from a historically dominant group to a historically subordinated one, any scrutiny of that transfer gets immediately recoded as an expression of the dominance it is supposed to redress. The ledger becomes unauditable — not because the figures are contested, but because the identity of the auditor is. The numbers sit in plain sight. The cost of reading them exceeds the cost of continuing to pay.

The oppressor’s invoice

England occupies a peculiar position in the political psychology of the British Isles. It is simultaneously the historic villain — the coloniser, the clearance-enforcer, the famine-presider — and the permanent fiscal backstop. These two roles are not in tension. They are load-bearing for each other. The history provides the moral framework that makes the fiscal arrangement feel like justice rather than subsidy, and the subsidy provides the material comfort that makes the moral framework sustainable. Remove either pillar and the structure becomes visible as what it is: a political convention from 1978 that its own creator called “a terrible mistake” and wished would stop bearing his name.

The Barnett Formula allocates higher per-capita public spending to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The numbers are not subtle. In 2024-25, identifiable public expenditure per head in England was £13,134. In Scotland it was £15,563. In Wales, £15,155. In Northern Ireland, £16,116. Scotland’s net fiscal balance — the gap between what it generates in revenue and what is spent on its behalf — stood at negative £26.2 billion, a deficit of 11.6% of GDP, more than double the UK-wide figure. The formula that produces this distribution was designed by Joel Barnett as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1978, intended to last a single year, devised specifically to “get rid of three Cabinet ministers” by settling their budget disputes quickly. Barnett spent the last decades of his life calling it “grossly unfair” and “a great embarrassment.” A House of Lords Select Committee concluded in 2009 that it was “arbitrary and unfair” and should be replaced. No government has replaced it. No government will.

The reason no government will is not fiscal. It is identitarian. The Barnett Formula is shielded from reform by the same force that shields every comparable arrangement across the democratic world: the political cost of questioning it exceeds the political cost of maintaining it, because questioning it requires asserting the interests of a group whose interests cannot be asserted without suspicion.

Scottish nationalism is civic pride. Irish nationalism has deep romantic currency. Welsh nationalism is cultural preservation. English nationalism is racism — or at least close enough to racism that no serious politician will risk the association. The British Social Attitudes survey confirms the correlation: those identifying as exclusively English are twice as likely as those identifying as primarily British to hold ethnocentric views on immigration and belonging. The academic literature is clear that the association has empirical basis. But the association is then used to do something the data does not support: delegitimise every fiscal observation made from an English perspective, regardless of whether the observation has anything to do with ethnicity. A category error dressed as vigilance.

The result is a country where 62% of people in England agree that Scottish MPs should not vote on English laws, where 56% agree that Scottish public expenditure should be reduced to the UK average, and where — as Henderson and Wyn Jones documented across a decade of surveys — voters “doggedly favour an outcome that dare not speak its name: a political space for England as England.” The demand exists. The language to articulate it does not. No single English MP has referred in the Commons to the government of England as something that actually exists.

The services that prove the point

The Barnett settlement funds more than infrastructure. It funds a specific political performance. Scotland offers free university tuition, free prescriptions, free personal care for the elderly — none of which are available to English residents paying into the same tax base. A Scottish student at Edinburgh pays £1,820 per year. An English student at the same university pays £9,250. The prescriptions that cost an English patient £9.90 per item cost a Scottish patient nothing. The elderly in Scotland receive free personal care that remains means-tested in England.

These are policy choices, and the Scottish Government is entitled to make them. But they are policy choices enabled by a per-capita spending premium funded by a tax base to which England contributes approximately 85% of revenue. The services become evidence of Scottish governance capability — look what we provide for our citizens — while the subsidy that makes the provision possible remains structurally invisible. Reform Scotland has called the tuition system “unfair, unsustainable, unaffordable.” The SNP’s response to a £26.5 billion deficit has been to call for the Scottish Government to stop publishing the GERS figures that reveal it. A 2021 poll found 57% of Scottish independence supporters believe the figures are “made up by Westminster to hide Scotland’s true wealth.”

The subsidy removes the incentive to become self-sufficient. The lack of self-sufficiency justifies continuing the subsidy. And identity makes the loop impossible to name. That is not solidarity. It is dependency with better branding.

The West Lothian anomaly

There is a democratic deficit in the UK that everyone acknowledges, everyone finds troubling, and no one will fix. Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish MPs vote on English domestic policy — health, education, policing — at Westminster. English MPs have no equivalent say over devolved policy in Edinburgh, Cardiff, or Belfast. Tam Dalyell named this problem in 1977. It remains unanswered nearly fifty years later.

The problem is not theoretical. In 2004, Scottish Labour MPs provided the decisive votes to impose variable tuition fees on English universities — fees that did not apply in Scotland, where their own constituents would continue to attend university for free. The bill passed by five votes. Without Scottish Labour votes, it would have failed. English domestic policy was set by politicians answerable to a different electorate, on a matter that would never affect their own constituents, in a direction their own constituents would never experience.

English Votes for English Laws was implemented in 2015 as a partial remedy. It was quietly scrapped in 2021. The stated reason: it “added complexity.” The actual reason, as the Constitution Unit’s analysis made plain: the Conservative government judged that EVEL was incompatible with “securing Scottish consent for the Union.” The English democratic deficit was identified, partially addressed, and then deliberately reinstated because fixing it might upset the political management of Scotland. The problem was subordinated to the arrangement the problem was caused by.

The security free-ride next door

Ireland presents the same mechanism in a different register. It spends 0.2% of GDP on defence — the lowest of 38 European nations, half that of fellow neutral Malta — while sitting in one of the most strategically significant positions in the North Atlantic, overseeing 16% of EU territorial waters and monitoring corridors carrying 75% of transatlantic undersea cables. Its naval service has 719 active personnel. Norway, with the same population, has 4,000. Ireland’s patrol vessels lack functioning main armament. Its Air Corps cannot operate after dark. It has no combat jets, no submarines, no primary radar, no undersea warfare capability, and no national intelligence authority.

This is not an oversight. It is a strategy, and it works because someone else is paying for it. A secret agreement dating to 1952 allows RAF aircraft to intercept hostile aircraft in Irish airspace. When Russian Tu-95 bombers approached Irish-controlled airspace in March 2020, RAF Typhoons scrambled from Scotland and England to intercept them. When a Russian submarine surfaced near Cork harbour in 2022, a British helicopter and frigate responded — because Ireland could not. When Russia planned military exercises above critical undersea cable infrastructure in Ireland’s exclusive economic zone, the matter was resolved by Irish fishermen threatening to disrupt the exercises, not by Irish military capability, because Irish military capability on this scale does not exist.

Ireland maintains a principled neutrality that polls consistently at 80% public support. The 1996 White Paper called it “a statement of the kind of people we are.” That identity — neutral, non-aligned, morally distinct from the military entanglements of its neighbours — is sincere. It is also viable only because the UK and NATO provide the security umbrella that makes it affordable. Ireland’s budget surplus between 2022 and 2024 exceeded €42 billion. It has the second-highest GDP per capita in the EU. The money is available. The spending is not. Policy Exchange, in a report endorsed by multiple former Defence Secretaries, concluded that Ireland “grounded its security upon the transatlantic-European economic and security order, whilst freeloading off the significant investment of others in protecting it.”

Calling this freeloading is accurate. It is also, in most political contexts, impermissible — because it collides with Irish historical memory of British rule, and any British criticism of Irish policy carries the residue of eight centuries of domination. History makes the observation unsayable. The observation does not become less true.

The pattern is not British

The mechanism operates wherever a historically dominant group is also a net fiscal contributor. In the EU, Germany and the Netherlands contribute billions more than they receive. When Dutch Finance Minister Wopke Hoekstra asked the European Commission to investigate how southern European countries reached the point of needing COVID-era bailouts, Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa called the question “repugnant.” Hoekstra apologised. The fiscal question was answered not with data but with moral censure, and the censure worked — because questioning southern European fiscal management, from a northern European position, activates a cultural narrative about Protestant superiority and Mediterranean irresponsibility that no politician wants attached to their name. The question was legitimate. The identity cost of asking it was not.

In the United States, blue states are net contributors to federal revenue — New York alone provides $89 billion more than it receives — while the most federally dependent states are disproportionately red. Pointing this out intersects immediately with race, region, and partisan identity in ways that make the fiscal observation politically unusable.

In Canada, Quebec receives over $14 billion in equalisation — 53% of the total pot — while Alberta has not received equalisation since the 1960s. In 2021, 61.7% of Alberta voters voted to remove equalisation from the constitution. Alberta’s complaints are coded as petro-state selfishness. In Catalonia, the fiscal deficit with the Spanish state runs to approximately €21 billion annually — 8.4% of regional GDP — and the refusal to address it openly has been one of the primary accelerants of the independence movement.

In every case, the structure is identical. A legitimate fiscal question exists. The identity of the questioner makes asking it politically toxic. The arrangement continues not because it survives scrutiny, but because it has made scrutiny socially expensive.

The concession that strengthens the case

Two complications deserve acknowledgment rather than evasion.

The first: England’s fiscal “contribution” is substantially an artefact of London and the South East. The IFS data is unambiguous — the North of England receives £42 billion in net fiscal transfers, the Midlands £23 billion. Only London and the South East are genuine net contributors. The framing of “England subsidises Scotland” is a simplification. The more precise claim is that the UK’s most productive economic region subsidises everywhere else, and the Barnett Formula ensures that the subsidy is distributed on terms that have nothing to do with need and everything to do with political management of the Union. The English regions that feel most aggrieved — the North, the Midlands — are themselves net recipients. Their grievance is not that they pay for Scotland. It is that Scotland receives a structural premium they do not, despite comparable levels of deprivation, and that the premium is politically untouchable for reasons that have nothing to do with economics.

The second: history is real. The Highland Clearances devastated Scottish communities. The Irish Famine killed over a million people under British governance that treated them as expendable. Welsh coal communities were exploited by English industrialists who extracted the wealth and left the social wreckage. These are not abstractions. They are facts with material legacies that persist in regional economies, demographic patterns, and institutional capacity. The argument is not that history should be forgotten or that its consequences are imaginary. The argument is that converting history into a permanent moral debt that makes present-day fiscal scrutiny impossible is not justice. It is the leveraging of guilt as a governance mechanism — and it serves the interests of the political class managing the arrangement far more than it serves the populations the arrangement is supposed to help.

The word that does the work

“Solidarity” is the load-bearing term. It converts a fiscal transfer into a moral obligation, making the contributor feel guilty for questioning it and the recipient feel entitled to it. The philosopher Samuel Scheffler identified the mechanism precisely: solidarities create preferential obligations that function as “moral tax shelters” — shielding insiders from broader scrutiny.

But solidarity implies reciprocity. When one party is actively campaigning to dissolve the political union while continuing to receive the transfers it provides — as Scotland intermittently does — the word stops describing the relationship. It becomes what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls “parasitical solidarity”: a rhetorical tool rather than a moral relation. It extracts compliance by invoking values the arrangement itself no longer embodies.

The Quarterly Journal of Economics published a model in 2021 that formalises what most people intuit: two equilibria exist in democratic politics. In one, class is the salient political dimension, and redistributive scrutiny is high. In the other, identity is salient, and redistributive scrutiny falls. The finding from European autonomy research is starker still — the identity effect exceeds the fiscal effect by a magnitude of seven to one. When identity dominates the political conversation, the ledger becomes invisible. Not hidden. Just impossible to read aloud without being assigned a motive that has nothing to do with arithmetic.

The principle

If a nation or region cannot fund its own chosen standard of living, it should not expect others to fund it indefinitely — particularly when those others receive a lower standard of living, have no say in how the money is spent, and are culturally prohibited from objecting. This is not a radical proposition. It is how every other allocation of resources in democratic life is assessed: transparently, with accountability, subject to periodic review against measurable outcomes.

The fact that stating it about nations feels transgressive is the phenomenon this essay describes. Identity does not just shape political affiliation. It functions as an accounting shield — one that protects fiscal arrangements from the ordinary scrutiny applied to everything else, by ensuring that the cost of asking the question always exceeds the cost of continuing to pay. The people inside these arrangements — Scottish taxpayers receiving services they did not choose to fund this way, English taxpayers contributing to outcomes they cannot influence, Irish citizens whose security depends on a relationship their national narrative prevents them from acknowledging — are not served by the silence. They are managed by it. And the difference between being served and being managed is the difference between solidarity and something that merely borrows the word.