We can best weather the storm together

FURTHER proof, if it were needed, that the SNP inhabits a parallel universe was in copious supply yesterday.

The annual GERS figures demonstrated beyond doubt the financial worth of the Union: equivalent to nearly £2,000 for every man, woman and child.

And we’d face a deficit of more than £15billion, nearly a tenth of economic output, if the UK was broken up.

For supporters of Scottish independence, the picture painted by this raft of data could hardly be bleaker.

And yet Finance Secretary Kate Forbes said the figures showed the Union had had its day. In a flight of fancy that defies credulity, she even asserted an independent Scotland would extend the furlough scheme beyond October.

This is looking-glass politics that takes no account of harsh reality.

Miss Forbes was parachuted into a pivotal Cabinet job after her predecessor, Derek Mackay, was forced to quit.

In these inauspicious circumstances, Miss Forbes took the reins on Budget day in February, and was deemed to have performed well.

But now the pressure is on – and she faces the monumental task of engineering an economic recovery.

Her extraordinary assessment of the GERS data points towards delusion, dogma and an inability to face facts.

Wrenching apart the UK at any time would set us on a course for colossal debt and austerity. In the midst of a pandemic, it’s an unconscionable prospect.

The SNP knows it can only sell its battered prospectus for independence to voters by covering up its myriad flaws.

It can hardly argue that the GERS statistics are misleading – as it has used them before in a bid to further its agenda.

Far from the socialist idyll the SNP has promised its supporters, an independent Scotland would be on life support from day one. Miss Forbes and her colleagues will cling to the dangerous fiction that it would be an unalloyed success. But on any reasonable analysis, yesterday’s figures demolish the separatist case – and the SNP’s milk-and-honey rhetoric.

And they drive home that our best hope of weathering the economic storm to come is as part of the United Kingdom.