THIS week sees George Osborne’s fifth Budget since December 2014. That’s approximately one every three months. Far from having a “long-term plan”, the Chancellor is making things up as he goes along. In fact, his economic policy-making is more erratic than ever. A fortnight ago, complaints from Tory backbenches and the City forced him to abandon plans to cut pension tax relief for high earners. Result: Existing plans had to be torn up and Treasury officials put to work to write a new Budget. We’ll see the results on Wednesday.

But first, a word on last week’s GERS report, which outlined the present state of Scottish public finances. Cue a Twitter-fest as Labour Unionists rushed to claim the latest GERS “proved” that an independent Scotland was financially unviable – thereby justifying their role in saddling us with a Tory Chancellor. Had there been a Yes vote in 2014, John Swinney would now be preparing the first budget for an independent Scotland. Thanks to “Better Together”, we still have Osborne.

We are told that the latest GERS “proves” an independent Scotland would have a gaping hole in its public accounts. This would necessitate ruinous spending cuts.

How preferable then – coo the Labour Unionists – that we perpetually incompetent Scots decided stayed inside the UK, so the English can go on bailing us out. What a patronising position for the Labour Unionists to take – both towards the English as well as their fellow Scots.

As it happens, the weekend headlines shouted that it is the UK Chancellor (not John Swinney) who finds himself with a hole in his finances – to the tune of a further £18 billion since December.

There was hardly a peep from Scottish Labour’s self-appointed economic gurus. Scotland’s poor, low-waged and those on benefits face a new round of cuts this Wednesday, as George Osborne wields the Treasury axe with his usual smirk. Can anyone really believe that Swinney, acting as an independent Scotland’s Finance Minister, would respond in the same fashion?

What about those GERS figures? To be blunt, given the politically engineered drop in world oil prices, an independent Scotland would face a gap of £14.9bn between public spending and current tax income. That’s based on starting with the current Scottish Government finances and a notional share of UK Treasury spending allocated to Scotland. An independent Scotland would start with an annual budget deficit of roughly 9.7 per cent of GDP, which is big by international standards. Yet it hardly compares with Ireland’s 32.4 per cent in 2010, and Ireland recovered. For the record, Ireland’s budget deficit is now lower than the UK’s.

How would Swinney have filed the budget gap, if Scotland had been independent this month? The Labour Unionists argue he would have needed to make swingeing cuts – rather like the ones Osborne is making for real, and to which Labour MPs signed up when they trooped into the Westminster lobbies to support the Tory welfare cap in 2012. Actually, a Scottish Finance Minister determined to protect public services (eg John Swinney) would have used the economic levers available in an independent Scotland to protect public services.

Here’s my rough “independence” budget. For the record, these are my own thoughts and don’t represent official thinking from the SNP. I’m using the GERS statistics for 2014-15.

Clearly, an independent Scotland, in its first few years, would have to borrow to fill some of the budget shortfall. After all, so does George Osborne. In fact, Osborne has been singularly incapable of meeting his budget forecasts and always ends up having to borrow more than he plans. Swinney would be more prudent. He has actually balanced the Scottish budget every year.

Let’s say that in the early years a Scottish government aims to borrow half the GERS deficit, or just under five per cent of GDP. That’s a bit above the EU target of three per cent but not enough to worry the markets, provided there is a firm deficit-reduction target. Here is a point the Labour Unionist tweeters deliberately ignore: If Scotland had voted Yes, and George Osborne had refused to let Scotland join a common currency, then Alex Salmond would have felt no obligation to accept any share of Treasury debts. In other words, an independent Scotland would have started life debt-free. Running a five per cent deficit would therefore be sustainable over, say, five years.

That leaves the rest of the GERS budget gap to fill: roughly £7.5bn per annum. Achieving this entirely through tax rises and spending cuts would not be a good idea. Consolidating the budget by about five per cent of GDP would hit the very economic growth we need, as well as eroding essential social solidarity. Yet there would still need to be some budget consolidation. I suggest going for consolidation of circa £3bn, or two per cent of Scottish GDP. That’s tough but not tougher than what we’re getting anyway from Osborne. Last year, the Chancellor increased stealth taxes by roughly one per cent of UK GDP and nobody seemed to notice. At least in an independent Scotland the burdens and eventual gains are shared more equitably.

How to consolidate? I’d prefer to tax more than to cut. We could follow Chancellor Osborne’s aborted plan to reduce pension tax relief for very high earners. We could do better at capturing business taxes from multinationals. We should also note that there would be automatic savings in Scottish expenditure as a result of independence. For example, we currently pay about £3bn per annum in our share of UK public debt interest. But if Osborne had excluded an independent Scotland from the common sterling area, we would no longer be obliged to pay that share. And while Scotland would need to fund its own defence, we would not be paying our current share of the nuclear deterrent or the bombing of Syria.

That leaves the equivalent of about three per cent of GDP to find to fill the budget gap. We could do that through asset sales. Remember that an independent Scotland would be heir to its proportional share of the UK’s £1.3 trillion of assets – in property, capital and fixtures. It would not be that difficult to realise £3bn or £4bn in asset sales per annum as an interim measure.

Ultimately, an independent Scotland would ramp up economic growth, bringing the budget into balance. On Wednesday, Chancellor Osborne will be forced to downgrade UK growth forecasts. He will try to bluff his way out of this by claiming the British economy outperforms other “big” economies. This hides the truth that small, industrial economies are (on average) nimbler and show more social solidarity, and so are able to deal with economic crisis better and faster than large, lumbering economies.

Last year, Ireland grew a fantastic 6.9 per cent. The UK grew only 2.2 per cent. UK growth in 2015 was also bested by the likes of Sweden, Iceland, Luxembourg, and the Czech Republic. With strong growth, an independent Scotland would soon generate greater income and close any budget deficit. Sadly, all we have to look forward to this week is George Osborne’s latest back-of-the-fag-packet round of cuts.