Financial fiction put future in peril

THE Brexit bus claiming that £350million of EU contributions were going to come straight back to fund the NHS was the referendum lie of 2016.

Opponents seemed shocked that the Leave campaign could make such an outrageous claim, but the tactic was familiar to Scots.

The idea of making outlandish and unsubstantiated promises had already been road-tested in another referendum, with a degree of success.

The Scottish Government’s White Paper on independence ahead of the 2014 referendum predicted North Sea oil revenues of up to £7.9billion this year – which would have been Alex Salmond’s projected first year of independence.

In the real word, UK oil and gas production was actually in the red with receipts of minus £24million last year.

Despite that, the nationalist mantra that North Sea oil was “just a bonus” would not go away… until now.

Andrew Wilson, one of both Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon’s most trusted economic advisers, has admitted that oil cannot be part of the economic case for independence.

More tellingly, he also said it never should have been in 2014. Of course it shouldn’t have. The danger of trying to balance almost a sixth of the economy on a vastly fluctuating and diminishing commodity like oil was always madness.

The outbreak of candour from one of the SNP’s top strategists is to be welcomed.

If the SNP hope to convince No voters to switch, they will only do so with an open and honest assessment of the costs and risks of independence.

Wilson’s admissions are really just an acceptance of reality. A cheap supply of oil simply isn’t there any more, at least not in the quantities that sustained the UK balance of payments for the last 30 years (and, yes, we Scots did benefit from that, too).

A new economic model for independence has to be built from the bottom up.

It is now Wilson’s task to find a slogan that fills a £15billion-a-year gap.