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Scottish spun-GERS

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Update, 26/09/2020: The joke at the foot of this post, the pseudo-graph from pseudo Kevin Hague, has been picked up and republished by Munguin's Republic , a lovely site with stunning nature pics, a strong but unencumbering commitment to Scottish independence, and jokes. Thanks, Tris, and best wishes in the ongoing struggle. IT'S TIME for a brief look at GERS, the "Government Expenditure and Revenue in Scotland" report. The usual narrative is: • Scotland has a deficit, because it spends more on public services than it raises in taxes. • The UK funds that deficit by giving money to the Scottish Government (the "fiscal transfer"). This means that Scotland sponges on the UK. • An independent Scotland couldn't fund that difference. All nice and clear, then - and all nice and falsely spun. Let's look at those falsehoods. Firstly, deficits are normal: all countries in the world have deficits, bar a handful of tax havens. What matters is whether a country...
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Scunnered

Constant Readers Sey&Dor have chided me for not blogging for two months (can it really be that long?!). So here is a quick rundown on where this blog now stands, which of course means a quick rundown on where we all stand on Scottish independence. First up is total scunneration at the Holyrood election result: no dent in the SNP, Salmond's reputation is rubbished, and Alba gets nowhere. Indy off the table for five years. Second up is the unbelievable corruption in the Scottish government. Sturgeon and her clique conspired to pervert the course of justice and to jail Alex Salmond for life. A corrupt Lord Advocate - who runs the Crown Prosecution Service but is also a government minister - puts in place procedures (anonymity in sexual-offence cases) that mean that no whiff of this can be published. Craig Murray, the only journalist who gave an impartial account of the Salmond trial and highlighted the strength of the defence, has been sentenced to eight months in jail for doing s...
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Prejudice and Contempt

Yanis Varoufakis, in 'Talking to My Daughter About the Economy', asks why the Australians, when the British invaders came to pillage their resources, destroy their culture, and murder their people, did not retaliate by invading Britain. Why did they not build an ocean-going fleet, load it with soldiers, arms and ammunition, sail it up the Thames, and lay waste to Sussex, Suffolk and the rest of the Home Counties? The answer, of course, is that the Australians were many marbles short of the technology that would enable them to do this. So that means that it was all right for the Brits to do what they did, doesn't it? As a second example of something similar, I recently had a conversation with a Scottish opponent of independence who had run for the hills after the close shave of the 2014 referendum, emigrated to Maine in the USA, and set up her own business designing and marketing household utensils. Ninety-five percent (or some similar and improbably high figure) of Scottish...
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