So much for ‘dream that will never die’

DARK rumours used to swirl that Soviet Union leaders who were clinically dead were propped up at the Moscow Victory Day Parade and made to move with electrical impulses to give the appearance of life.

The SNP may have to resort to similar tactics with its independence vision – ‘the dream that shall never die’. The Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) figures are a fatal blow to the idea that the nation could go it alone.

They make for grim reading for all Scots, not just the separatists.

The overall budget deficit is £14.8billion, an eye-watering sum proportionately more than twice the size of the UK figure.

We are in the red to 9.5 per cent of GDP. Comparatively, the UK as a whole faces a 4 per cent gap. Ominously, we are worse off than the basket-case economies of Europe – Greece, at 7.2 per cent of GDP, and Spain, at 5.1 per cent.

The chances of an independent Scotland becoming part of the EU are laughably slim – but even if we cleared all the many hurdles, we would be subject to compulsory austerity measures enforced by Brussels.

There would be gulping tax rises coupled with a slashed public sector budget. Nurses, policemen, council staff – numbers would be hammered under the sort of sado-austerity inflicted on Ireland by the EU after the 2008 crash.

The collapse in Scottish oil and gas revenues – down 97 per cent in a year – is precipitous. Oil was initially the SNP’s economic ace card, then ‘just a bonus’ as our so-called onshore economy was, we were told, performing so well. All that lies in tatters. The GERS figures are nothing short of devastating and the public grasp that. No country could cope with the deficit we face with a tax base as modest as ours.

Being part of the UK is a bonus for Scotland of the order of £1,600 a year for every man, woman and child.

Confronted with that reality, the only people left cheering the twitching zombie that is the SNP’s independence campaign are the zealots who think the rest of us should pay any price to break up Britain. As John MacLeod argues powerfully elsewhere on this page, the SNP is on the horns of a dilemma.

Its raison d’etre is separation. The country cannot possibly stand the financial strain.

Nicola Sturgeon – with astounding understatement – called yesterday’s figures ‘challenging’.

In her heart of hearts, she must know they prove another independence referendum would be a crass act of folly and that the UK truly is better together.