Dear Orkney News,

I was looking forward to the opening up of the debate on currency which the publication of the Andrew Wilson’s ‘Growth Report’ might engender, well what a disappointment that was.

I suppose if you ask a banker to write a report on currency you get a report from a banker’s point of view. But the Wilson Report is very disappointing indeed even accounting for that, it offers no basis for economic growth in the new Scottish economy, on the contrary it offers 10 more years of austerity weighted down with a Westminster created debt to international bankers. The Scottish people have no legal responsibility for this Westminster debt, nor were they responsible for it in any way. Indeed Scotland has been subsidising the UK economy for the last 40 years.

The Wilson plan is economically illiterate. The plan appears to be just a wee bit more of the neo-liberal economic mythology which has been failing all over the world, and which has no chance of success in Scotland, because it would be run from outside Scotland. So what sort of ‘Independence’ would such a plan give Scotland? It would give us the sort of independence which the Greek people have; we would need to beg the international bankers for permission to invest in important national developments.

The Wilson plan will please the bankers, but have nothing to offer the 2 and a half million Scots we need to come out and vote for Independence. The Scots voters we need, if we want independence; the approval of the international bankers we can manage very well without.

If we are serious about really doing something of importance with our economy to ensure full employment with high wages and high productivity, when the Scottish Government will need to develop our economy and will require to ensure that public investment is high and sustained in order to do this. With a domestic currency under its control it will be able to do this. If it does not have control of its currency it will not be able to do this. It is as clear as that.

It is of course true that if we vote for Independence, we will not be able to establish the central bank, or the other institutions we would require to run our own currency overnight. This would need to be established my legislation in the Scottish parliament, and then in actual form before we could use it.

So there would indeed be a period of perhaps 3 years before we could bring our new currency into exclusive use in our domestic economy. In this period, if would be wise to use sterling, without any attempt to ‘share in sterling’ a sort of ‘Sterlingisation’ as Wilson suggests. However this would be for a limited defined time period, and certainly not for 10 years, and it would not require £5 billion per year in debt repayment.

It seems to me that we will need to give this issue a lot of attention, and show people in Scotland that we can deal with this question of currency, without the assistance of ‘city experts’ bankers who know how these this are done. What the bankers know, is how to look after the bankers and their super-rich masters, they are not interested in the rest of us.

The city experts did not see the financial crisis coming in 2007, and don’t appear to recognise that it is all happening again, and for the same reasons. George Kerevan is correct, the Wilson plan will not allow us to address the needs of the average Scot, and it is the average Scot, particularly those on low earning that we must address is we want to win the referendum this time.

We should look at this currency issue carefully and tell Andrew Wilson, thanks Andrew, but no thanks we have a much better plan.

I want to organise a National Campaign for a Clean Scottish Currency so that we can all understand this issue a bit better and put forward another currency plan to meet the needs of the Scottish people before the independence campaign gets under way.

If you would like to take part in this campaign please let me know.

Yours, Andy Anderson, Saltcoats

Campaign for a Clean Scottish Currency