It's GERSmas day. GERS (Government Expenditure and Revenues Scotland) is the annual present for British nationalists instituted by
IT'S GERSmas day.Scottish Secretary Ian Lang in the early 1990s in order to provide a political tool to use against those arguing for greater Scottish self-government. Thirty years later and it is still fulfilling that purpose.
The GERS figures form the foundation of British nationalist arguments that an independent Scotland would be unable to maintain current levels of public spending, far less to increase them. As such, they are fiercely defended by diehard opponents of Scottishwho treat what is essentially a political exercise as a species of holy writ which it is heretical to criticise.
However, even the most ardent supporters of the GERS figures reluctantly concede that they tell us nothing at all about the finances of an independent Scotland – even as they use the figures to argue that they 'prove' that an independent Scotland would be an economic basket case with a huge and unsustainable deficit.
The truth is that the figures only give us a snapshot of how Scotland performed financially over the past year as a part of the UK. The entire point of independence is to give the Scottish Government the ability to make different decisions from the UK Government across the entire range of governmental revenue raising and spending.
, a substantial proportion of which consists of spending outside Scotland which is notionally on Scotland's behalf. But if much of the spending is notional, then so is the deficit which the GERS figures assign to Scotland. The headline deficit in the GERS figures is a Westminster created deficit which Westminster allocates to Scotland and then uses to tell us that we are too poor to become independent.
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