As today is GERS day and the papers are telling us how shit we are, and as we’re close to significant ten year anniversary – I thought I might try – once again – to counter a tiresome and defeatist (and untrue) narrative.
1) Scotland has been in a Union for 317 years. Devolution is 25 years old. Westminster has been at the wheel of the economy for 95% of that time and still controls all the economic levers that matter. If it’s a catastrophe, it’s entirely their fault.
2) The whole point of GERS is to make Scotland look feckless, irresponsible, poor, wee, stupid and, frankly, a bit crap. Ian Lang didn’t quite put it like that, but that’s the gist of his leaked memo to Margaret Thatcher.
3) The black hole is a total fallacy because the target deficit isn’t zero. It isn’t even close to zero. Every country in the world runs a deficit. Deficits are good things. Deficits help growth. The real deficit is the one between the target and actual – which may be 1bn (as it was in the UK in 2010 when the deficit was bigger than the GDP, although strangely nobody suggested that the UK couldn’t be independent). Plus, it’s not like we’re gifted the money. WM borrow in our name and then send us the bill. Pooling and sharing. Better Together. It also takes no account of things that we wouldn’t pay for after independence (nuclear submarines, £2bn less on conventional defence spending) because we wouldn’t need to.
4) Related to this, GERS says precisely zero about what an independent Scotland would look like because it assumes that an independent Scotland would act, fiscally, exactly how it had done as part of UK. That’s clearly insane, as if it did there’s no point in being independent. The whole point of the cause is to be able to do things differently.
5) GERS takes no account of Brexit. Next Indyref (assuming there is one – we may not need one, at least not in the way people think, to gain our self-governance, but that’s a different conversation for another day) will probably be “out UK and in EU” or “in UK and out EU”, which the WM and ScotGov impact reports demonstrate to be two completely different outcomes.
The GERS thing is important and interesting (and bollocks). It’s like 2014 – we spent our time countering stuff that wasn’t true which left us little time to make the case. We are far, far too nice and way too reticent. If we aren’t for independence, what are we for? The only reason the Tories made gains in 2017 is because they made it about independence and we didn’t. I genuinely think that GERS, and other things, means that we put independence front and centre of absolutely everything. That way we own the narrative, the debate. I’d also suggest we stick to something very simple. Like, should Scotland be independent? Simple. Start from there. The rest is a distraction, noise.
Ten years, people. High time we got going.
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