You Cannot Follow The Money Any More

Scotland's place in the world and all that is one of the issues of the present Parliament that is exciting debate.  The roaming pundit alleged historian David Starkey has weighed in with one of his bids to grab a headline regardless of the facts.

His vision of the SNP as a National Scottish Devolution Action Party with Task Group Blueshirt enforcers derives from 1930's Germany and is typically well wide of the mark.  There are more than enough examples around of authoritarian single party regimes to choose from today and recently, never mind history.

This kind of intervention simply distracts attention from more careful thinking and analysis of what the reality of the early 21st situation is and what it implies.  In our present age more than ever than in past times it is as well to follow the money.

If you can that is. For all the welter of state and allied bodies statistics and time taken we are aware that they are only about what is measured and accounted for.  It is all too evident now that there is a lot of economic and financial activity that does not appear in any of these figures and can only be guessed at.

There is all the tax haven activity, related financial movements and also all the goings on at the margins of legality and beyond that we know is happening but can neither control nor measure.  Beyond that there are the rewards of crime itself in its many ways.  Some think that in some places this is almost as large, if not larger, than the actual measured economy.

The bright financial future that is envisaged for Scotland may be in these spheres if this post from Naked Capitalism is near the mark.  The SNP and others have declared already that the financial sector will be among the foundations of future prosperity and freedom from austerity.

Quite how this squares with being members of a regulatory EU  and/or being bound by the Euro is difficult to work out.  But it might be possible.  Perhaps we should really be looking at not so much at what appear to purely political structures but at the great crime and related political syndicates of recent history.

Given that some of these could control either most or the key parts of governments by traditional and well established means sheltered from the Law or law enforcement this could well be what might be the future.

Looking at the contrast between the USA and the UK in the numbers of financiers brought to book and that the Scottish end of our debacles loomed large it would be not too great a step.  The terms of the Naked Capitalism post suggests that secrecy is already a given and is legal under existing Scottish law.

So just who is already fixed up with secret company and financial structures which protect them from inquiry, criticism and using politics to pursue their personal financial interests?