Unionists in desperation

Sir, What Councillor Redman is telling the easily led is that a UK, with a massive national debt (which has been doubled by this Tory Government to the unprecedented figure of £185,000,000,000), is hanging on to Scotland to throw money at it. Aye, right. Or perhaps instead he is confirming UK economic mismanagement of the Scottish economy.

Or that a country of clever and able people with more natural resources per capita than any other nation in the world has been reduced to a beggar state by a 310-year UK union.

What he is claiming, as the Republic of Ireland moves into sixth place in the world table of well off societies, is that the Scots are the stupidest nation in the world unable like the 195 others – more than half of them smaller than Scotland – to rule themselves. We need handouts from England.

Well, hooray for that. Let’s just carry on, cap in hand.

The fantasy deficit from the GERS he instances is Scotland’s UK deficit. It bears no relationship whatsoever to a deficit an independent Scotland would manage. All countries, except Norway, have deficits. So he relies on the uninformed believing a deficit is a debt while it is in fact upfront spending to provide future revenues.

I find the running down of Scotland and our people by the unionists increasingly shameful but I take comfort in understanding that they are in desperation now.

It is useful to know that included in ‘Scotland’s deficit’ is more than £4 billion we are charged against interest on the UK’s national debt, £3.5 billion for defence - mostly Trident but including our share of invading and bombing the Middle East and building aircraft carriers without planes – and our nine per cent share of other items of ‘national expenditure’ like House of Lords, high speed rail links from London, our share of maintenance of the London underground network and the London sewerage system (yes, I kid you not) and lots of other stuff which has nothing to do with us and which an independent Scotland wouldn’t have to pay for.

And I used to think the Scots Tories were for ‘sturdy self reliance’. I wonder what happened to that. David McEwan Hill, Dalinlongart, Sandbank, Dunoon