Brown: Indy blueprint ‘ludicrous’

GORDON Brown has delivered a devastating critique of the SNP’s latest independence blueprint, warning it would cripple the Scottish economy.

The former Chancellor, who played a key role in the last battle to save the Union, produced analysis of several multi-billion-pound black holes in Nationalist calculations.

Speaking at a Scottish Fabians conference in Edinburgh yesterday, he branded SNP estimates of the costs of setting up a new country as ‘ludicrous’.

Mr Brown said the Growth Commission report, by former Nationalist MSP Andrew Wilson, ‘has exposed the SNP for ever as a party that has abandoned social justice’. He said: ‘They have abandoned the poor, abandoned the weak, abandoned the young, abandoned the old, abandoned all those that rely on public services in their pursuit of independence.’

Mr Wilson suggested Scotland would start life as independent country with a 6 per cent deficit, but would reduce this by keeping public sector spending increases to 2.5 per cent – or 0.5 per cent, after inflation is factored in.

But Mr Brown said: ‘If you read that report, the first thing you notice is this is a blueprint for independence but there’s nothing about pensions, nothing about the health service, nothing about progressive taxation, nothing about social care, nothing about promises to the young people of Scotland, not anything to do with solving poverty and inequality in Scotland.

‘All the promises of 2014 are gone, the spending commitments are not there anymore.’

Mr Brown’s assessment echoes that of the independent Institute of Fiscal Studies think-tank.

An SNP spokesman said: ‘This is another tired and absurd intervention from Gordon Brown, who bears personal responsibility for ushering in a decade of austerity in the UK.’