The Saturday List #66 - Scottish Independence - The massive hidden costs for us

I was thinking about Scottish Independence and all the things which will suddenly need to be completely changed. Some of these costs will clearly be borne by the Scots, but there will be huge costs involved in "de-integrating". Let me explain. Think how much every govt dept etc costs to run. Think how many departments there are. Each on of these will need to be split into two, have two sets of management where there was one. All the relevant data for those north of the border will need to be stripped out of the existing systems and loaded into new ones built from scratch. This is a major undertaking and will cost the taxpayer millions, the question is "which taxpayer"? The UK taxpayer had no say, so why should we pick up the bill for all this work? Here's a list of just a few organisations which one assumes will have to be set up from scratch, and will require huge IT projects, funded by taxpayers to get up and running. Even if the Scots pay for all the new systes, will they pay to have the data extracted and checked from the existing systems, work which will be done on existing UK systems.

1. UK Passports
2. DVLA licencing
3. HM Customs and Inland Revenue
4. Network Rail
5. UK Air traffic control
6. UK Immigration services
7. Coastguards
8. UK roads authorithy
9. Food standards agency
10. British Transport Policy
11. MOD
12. Royal Mint

Each of these will need to be split in two, HR systems replicated, databases split/shared, a new management structure enacted. All this work wil cost us a fortune, as we all know how bad the govt is at IT projects. It is not as simple as simply saying "Hoorah, we are Scottish" - how do you split air traffic control? Who pays for what?

I've not seen anyone explain how any of this would work and no one has told me how much it will cost me