Numbers that strike at the heart of Nicola’s separatist dreams

SCOTLAND’S First Minister was yesterday nowhere to be seen – probably because this year’s Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland report had just thudded on her desk like a dead cat.

And these GERS statistics, fuel for an annual hissy fit among Scotland’s competing political parties since 1992, are the stuff of Nationalist nightmares.

They were originally got up by a Tory government, of course, to make its case that devolved Scottish government would be impracticable and costly.

Nowadays, cynics can make ready use of them as a bullet through the heart of the First Minister’s lifelong dream, independence itself.

Nationalists can argue, quite rightly, the GERS statistics are only a snapshot of Scotland’s economy within the present constitutional order of Scotland within the United Kingdom and do not truly detail what the finances of an independent country would look like.

But their opponents can, no less fairly, assert they suggest how big its fiscal deficit would be – the annual shortfall between what Scotland raises and what she spends.

And it is daunting. Even including our fair geographic share of North Sea oil and gas, the latest report shows a shortfall of £12.6billion – 7 per cent of Scotland’s gross domestic product (GDP) and higher than any other country in the EU.

In fairness, it is falling: last year, it was £13.8billion. But the structural deficit of the UK as a whole is falling faster – and is now only 1.1 per cent of its GDP.

Drastic

Put in immediate terms, Scotland’s public spending per person is £1,661 higher this year than in the UK as a whole – and, per person, public sector revenue is £307 less. This means a ‘Union dividend’ of £1,968 for each of us.

‘The size of Scotland’s deficit is also important,’ adds Pamela Nash of Scotland in Union, ‘because at its current level a separate Scotland wouldn’t be able to meet EU criteria for new members without making drastic public service cuts and increasing taxes.’

One can make obvious caveats. Scotland’s higher public spending is not a proof of profligacy, but a consequence of geography. We are a northern country and, beyond the Central Belt, one of scattered population amidst swathes of empty hill and glen.

And nationalism is about much more than budgets. A century ago, as the British government of the day squandered the last of its moral capital down the green and lovely lanes of Killeshandra, the Irish won a war of independence in the knowledge it would leave them significantly poorer for decades to come.

It was the 1960s before the Republic even began to emerge from an order of peat, priests and pixies and the 1990s before she began to enjoy serious prosperity.

But, even amidst her recovery after the economic crash a decade ago, there are no votes in any suggestion she return to the United Kingdom.

Ireland is a lovely country with gracious and winsome people; her immaculate towns and villages a reproach to the scruffiness all too prevalent in Scotland. Yet her independence comes at a daily cost.

The Republic has no equivalent of our National Health Service and only the poor, and those over 70, are entitled to a ‘Medical Card’ granting free health care. You must pay the equivalent of £45 to see a doctor. Almost everything is dearer than in the UK – cars, beer, wine, chicken, jeans, training shoes, McDonald’s.

And, though domestic rates were abolished decades ago, a property charge was reinstated after the 2008 crash. You have to pay to have your refuse collected and there are all sorts of wicked little taxes: for instance, a small levy every time you use your bank card.

On average, living in the land of saints and scholars is 14 per cent dearer than life on this sceptred isle – oh, and they even tax your dog: Lassie will set you back 20 euros a year. Ireland is still a grand place to live, but Dáil Éireann must balance the books – and an independent Scotland would have to do the same.

It is for this reason Nicola Sturgeon is much keener on threatening a second independence referendum than organising one. It is also why, despite a turn of events at Westminster of excruciating embarrassment to Ruth Davidson and Scottish Labour continuing to talk itself to death, Nationalist nerves are taut and morale is strained.

Only in the past week, Humza Yousaf has publicly regretted the very handle of ‘Nationalist’, that tireless blogger Stuart Campbell – the Bath-based gadfly behind the Wings Over Scotland blog – has threatened to launch his own political party to out Nat the Nats in 2021… and, fast coming up the pike, the trial of Alex Salmond on serious criminal charges.

The former First Minister denies all wrongdoing. And Campbell can be dismissed: voters are unlikely to warm to a potty-mouthed demagogue who will do anything for Scotland save live in it.

Doubts

But there must be doubts about Sturgeon’s judgment. To the horror of cannier Nationalists, months ago she called for a second EU referendum, thus legitimising future pressure for a rerun should Indyref 2 happen and be won, by a sneeze, by Yes.

Last week, she was happy to back the possibility of Jeremy Corbyn – a humourless Marxist long a chum of every enemy of the West you can think of as Prime Minister.

Last month, too, Nationalist MPs were permitted in large number to vote for the legalisation of abortion and samesex marriage in Northern Ireland – a little province where they have no mandate whatever.

That, too, will come back to bite Sturgeon hard. And, though she echoes John McDonnell and the Lib Dems and Dominic Grieve and the rest in saying she will do anything, but anything, to stop a hard Brexit, she refused at every turn to do the one thing that would certainly have stopped it – whipped her Westminster MPs to support Theresa May’s deal.

It was typical Sturgeon opportunism and one for which her party may yet curse her. The terms of May’s Withdrawal Agreement – leaving the UK in the single market, and so on – would have made a bid for Scottish independence far easier.

Selling Yes in a future order where our single market is, effectively, just the United Kingdom – to whom we export 60 per cent of all Scotland’s goods and services; the EU accounts for merely 18 per cent – is the stuff of rainbows, unicorns and airborne pigs.

And, of course, there are the rumours of Sturgeon being spoken of for some new international role; talk that her CV is already with the United Nations – whispers from those not necessarily benevolent to her. It is the sort of murmur, once begun, almost impossible to stop.

Certainly, however good Nicola Sturgeon may be at nationalising shipyards and half-built ferries, the slipway is already being greased for her own departure.