Eddie Barnes: Scotland spending more on benefits than the NHS

A predictable Scottish political rammy is underway today. The Labour-run Scotland Office has released a new report - snappily entitled "Expenditure and Revenue in Scotland" - as it seeks to make the case for how well Scotland is doing from the current constitutional arrangement. According to the report, each household would have to cough up £2,700 to pay for welfare spending north of the border if we were reliant solely on domestic tax receipts. Bilge, responds the Scottish Government - what about North Sea oil? What about the UK's whopping deficit which we're soon going to have pay for?

Most of us all know the drill by. And the stale old argument completely misses the most interesting element of this story. The Scotland Office report notes that welfare is now the biggest single item of expenditure in Scotland, at £12.6billion - bigger than the NHS, schools, transport, the lot.

£12.6billion! That's one hell of a safety net. I assume a lot of that will be made up of the public pension, and necessary unemployment benefits. But is it really healthy that our biggest single element of expenditure is on benefits? Not exactly productive is it? Why don't the SNP and Labour have a rammy about who has the best vision for getting that figure down?