Picture Gallery
reflecting the cost of nationalising the ferry shipbuilding business and sundry other public sector failings as pigeons come home to roost.
Ingin Johnnie Can Nat posters please try to understand that the deficit is not a measure of how prosperous Scotland is – we could slash our deficit by raising taxes or cutting public spending and I guarantee that people will be a lot less prosperous. Scotland remains, despite the deficit, one of the most prosperous regions of the UK. Nor does the deficit indicate that the Union does not work for us. An independent country our size with a deficit as large as ours would have to raise taxes or lower spending. That we are able, in the medium term, to maintain both is only possible because we are part of the UK.
But a defecit of 7 per cent does mean that Scotland could not join the EU as an independent country as the bar for new applicants is just 3 per cent.
hedging bets
Scotland’s relative prosperity and financial stability are in spite of crackpot schemes by the SNP, not because of them. The SNP fiddling of taxation, nationalisation of bankrupt enterprises, cronyism instead of open tendering for contracts – it’s all a drag on the economy, not a gain.
You are parasites
My friend, who insists he is not interested in the economics of independence and refuses to hear the economic arguments involved, will not bat an eye as he is only interested in independence. And the SNP and all other supporters will no doubt take the same view. GERS and all other financial figures are simply an irrelevance in their quest to achieve their ideological desire.
kmcn
So, Mrs Sturgeon can talk “to Arundhati Roy about her novels... India, Kashmir” – but Mrs Sturgeon can’t talk about her minority Scottish Government’s appallingly bad GERS figures because Mrs Sturgeon is Gersdodging in Shetland
Ah’m No Bluffin
A triumph of fiscal mismanagement by the SNP to have now overtaken the UK in the debt stakes, achieving slightly more than half of the whole United Kingdom’s deficit.
Albert Watch Graeme Dickson of the Keep Scotland Beautiful charity said we must all change out behaviour to beat climate change.
Whatever the UK does to combat climate change is wiped out tenfold by China
John Smith
Mr Dickson doesn’t mention the elephant in the room... population growth.
Inchgower2
Pure unadulterated fiction. There is no “climate emergency” since CO2 does not control the planet’s climate as has been proven time and again, but a fact the mainstream media contines to ignore. One degree of warming in 100 years is natural and not a crisis by any stretch of the imagination, given the fact that the planet was warmer than today 1,000 years ago and flourished.
wee scunner It’s selfish and elitist to object to Summer Sessions concerts in Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens, said Geoff Ellis, chief executive of DF Concerts.
“The Gardens are for everyone to enjoy.” So can we remove the curtains and barriers round the benches? You care about nothing but your profits.
Andy Hatt The same thing happens in Hyde Park each summer and then again in winter, with the Winter Wonderland fair. And no, it’s not “selfish and elitist” to object to the privatisation of public spaces, actually – quite the reverse, in fact.
Lux (Not Ron)