Salmond asking voters to take the biggest financial risk of their lives
IN examining the economies of an independent Scotland, Ian Bell seems to me to present an equivalent argument to the suggestion that if, for example, two people are happily married they would both therefore also be happy if they were divorced (“Better off out of it: a slogan whose time has finally come”, The Herald, May 22).
I believe it is simply not possible at this time to conjecture convincingly on the notion that in a separated Scotland we would all be as well off or better in many ways than now.
The Scottish Government’s new paper on Scotland’s economy is, I feel, so broad brush and one-sided it fails to provide the sound and comprehensive detail we would need to believe that fiscal disaggregation would even be feasible never mind fair.
The paper also fails to display who in fact really owns Scotland’s supposed assets. Scotland has only one-tenth of the population within the Union so it is pointless constantly looking enviously at the relative wealth in London and the south-east of England.
I was once asked directions in the middle of Glasgow by a country farmer from near Lanark who insisted on chatting. Before parting he looked around at the large and impressive Victorian buildings and said: “Ah see where a’ ma’ money goes ... an it’s no’ in Lanark.”
The fact remains that the First Minister is asking voters to take the biggest financial risk of their lives in the referendum. He is effectively willing us to join his Scottish Independence Gambling Syndicate – in fact I suggest the SNP should change their name to SIGS. The recent threat from Alex Salmond that an independent Scotland might not accept a proportionate share of the UK national debt I find so churlish one wonders if he now realises what a desperate and inescapable a corner the SNP has campaigned itself into.
The First Minister’s woes are not limited to debating economic predictions as I imagine he must surely have winced, as I did, at the front-page headline (“Police chiefs call for local authorities to be scrapped”, The Herald, May 22). His top officers in the new national single force, it seems, want to start playing the game of politics.
If that illustrates what an independent Scotland could be characterised by, then I am certain we should all start being anxious. ONCE again Ian Bell is spot on with his analysis. We are constantly told by the No campaign that Scotland would risk becoming an economic basket case if we opted for independence. But it is the United Kingdom which is already in dire economic straits, and things are going to get much worse in the future. The sooner Scotland leaves the sinking ship the better.
The UK national debt is already about £1.2 trillion, 80% of annual GDP, and in the next two years will probably reach £1.5trn, representing 100% of GDP. The Treasury is already spending almost £300 billion a year just paying the interest on that massive debt, and this cost will further increase if higher interest rates result from the UK losing its AAA credit rating.
Actually starting to repay the capital of this enormous debt is not even on the horizon in the UK’s present desperate parlous condition.
And that is just the debt on the official UK balance sheet. Off balance sheet debt is also huge, with future public pensions liabilities, banking guarantees and PFI obligations together amounting to hundreds of billions of pounds and inevitably coming home to roost over the next two decades.
Then there is massive private debt, mostly comprising mortgages, overdrafts and credit liabilities, which together might even outstrip total Government borrowing. In short, the UK is perhaps the most heavily in debt of all the world’s trading nations and is now almost powerless to get out of the mire created by the policies of successive governments and an irresponsible financial sector.
Scotland’s best chance of survival and future prosperity is to get out as quickly as possible, and next year we have a golden opportunity to do so.
We do not need to be a successor state taking an 8% share of this huge national debt just to stay in a collapsing economy and weak sterling union, and be granted a few assets and inherited seats in the European Union and Nato.
As a completely new state we can start with a clean balance sheet and control of our own fiscal and economic policies. We can confidently rely on our own abundance of natural resources, future prospects for renewable energy sources and our already thriving native industries to provide a stable base for a sound economy and our own Scottish currency.
If the EU and Nato were stupid enough not to want such a prosperous Scotland within their membership, so be it – but I suspect they will quickly come knocking at our door, begging us to join.
With all this great future potential in our own country, why should we want to remain as a small minority part of a dysfunctional and badly governed United Kingdom with many years of economic poverty ahead of it? THE SNP castigates successive UK governments for not setting up an oil fund. That criticism is accepted without comment by your columnist Ian Bell.
But where would that money have come from?
Oil revenues instead contributed to the funding of other public expenditure. To endow an oil fund, Westminster would have had to raise more taxes (and yet the SNP promises lower corporate taxation), spend less elsewhere (perhaps leaving our infrastructure in an even worse state) or borrow more (adding to our current debt burden).