The Social Consequences Of What Happened Here
David Murray was using EBT’s in his own companies before he used them at Ibrox, but it’s hard to believe the wider Murray empire sucked as much money out of the public purse as it did at Rangers. The costs to society were enormous. Just putting them into hard numbers doesn’t tell the story. You have to dig down deep, into what those numbers represent, in order to get a complete picture and properly count the cost of it.
Rangers total tax bill, when they collapsed, was £92 million.
Someone created a pie-chart, at the time, which revealed exactly how that broke down, into each individual sector of the economy. I went even further, and examined what it meant within those sectors, and how many public services were impacted and what the consequences were.
Let’s start with pensions. Their take of that money could have paid the state pensions of nearly 3000 people. It would have given nearly 7000 an extra £50 on their Winter Fuel payment; the difference between life and death for many of them.
Losses to the NHS would have equalled nearly £16 million. That money would have hired 160 of the best consultants in the world. It could have paid for 200 GP’s. It would have given the Health Service an extra 230 specialist doctors … or 700 new trainees.
The share for welfare would have bought us 900 support workers.
The share for schools would have got us 360 Early Years teachers. It would have paid for 260 educational psychologists. 300 new Higher Education teachers could have been hired. We could have afforded to give over an amazing 38,000 children their own in-class IPad, and given them the high-tech tools for the digital age. If that doesn’t float your boat, it could have bought one hell of a lot of £50 textbook packs … more than 240,000 of them.
Since their club cares so much about “supporting the troops” let’s look at what the share of that pie allocated to defence spending would have bought; that’s £6,500,000. That would have bought 6500 soldiers a full set of high grade body armour … the sort that saves lives.
If we split the share allocated to police and firefighting evenly between these two crucial, undermanned, services we could have put an extra 65 cops on the beat and 85 more life-saving firemen. We don’t need to look too far back to see how important that might have been, and how vital it might be in the future.
A chunk of that pie was allocated to transport; we could have given 1400 annual zone-cards to people who have made an outstanding contribution to the public sphere.
And all of this would have left us with money left over … a huge sum of money at that, £20 million.
And with that money we could have really have done some stuff. Take your favourite four causes from the above and give those sectors an extra £5 million apiece. Or spend the whole £20 million on something that takes your fancy.
If you don’t like the idea of spreading that £96 million so thinly, you could spend it all on one go, on a major national project … and there are many deserving candidates.
It would have fully funded three years of the old Future Jobs Fund. It could have funded Sure Start Scotland for a year. The legacy costs of the ridiculous PFI project could have been reduced by a staggering 40%. Instead of hiring 85 fireman, try 4400. Or how about spending it putting an extra 1000 police on the payroll, as the Scottish Government intends? You could have done that … five times over.
There are more than 2100 primary schools in Scotland. You could have given the money to them; it would have come out to £43,000 apiece. There are more than 370 secondary schools. You could have given them £250,000 … each. You could have given all of Scotland’s primary school pupils £250 a pop … there are 370,000 of them. There are more than 300,000 in secondary education. They could all have gotten an extra £300.
The National Children’s Music Fund costs £10,000,000 every year. You could have funded that for a decade. The Scottish Government was spending £240,000,000 on its Culture and Sports budget … you could have given that a one-time 40% bump. At a time when housing is a major issue, it’s good that some limited funds have been made available to build hundreds of low cost homes … there could have been thousands instead.
Do not let anyone tell you this is a “just a football story” or that it’s about Celtic fans trying to win a cheap points scoring competition … this was a societal scandal, a disgrace of epic proportions. The cost of this for our communities ought never to be forgotten.
It was necessary to offer this as an overview … our focus is on the football though.
