Don’t bank on the pound, Mr Salmond

The language was dry, technical and – as required of the Governor of the Bank of england – politically neutral. But Mark Carney’s meaning could hardly have been clearer if he had bellowed it through a megaphone, in the plainest terms, from the roof of a Better Together campaign bus. When Alex Salmond says an independent Scotland can retain the pound, while going its own sweet way over tax and spending policies, he is talking through his Tam o’ Shanter. Indeed, in his speech to edinburgh businessmen, Mr Carney blew away the central plank of the nationalist First Minister’s economic policy, laying bare the choice facing Scots if they vote to go it alone after September’s referendum.

If they want to keep the pound, they must adopt fiscal policies agreed by Westminster – or risk plunging into a eurozone- style crisis, with calamitous consequences for jobs and living standards. As Mr Carney warns, the Bank – and taxpayers in the rest of the kingdom – cannot guarantee Scotland’s debts, as Mr Salmond appears to suggest, without power over its economic policies.

There is nothing political about his stance. he is merely spelling out one of the facts of economic life – experienced all too keenly by Greece or Spain, where the one-size-fits-all euro has sent youth unemployment soaring to 57.7 per cent.

It is not only for economic reasons that this paper believes it would be a tragedy, for every part of the UK, to break up history’s most successful marriage between nations. But when it comes to the vote, money could be the decider. With Mr Carney’s warning in mind, we trust that Scots will be canny enough to realise that Mr Salmond is selling them a pipe dream.