Wee Ginger Dug: Oil is not the only wealth to build a new Scotland on

Personally I don’t believe that Scotland is too poor to be independent, irrespective of the price of oil. Scotland has a broad-based economy, we’re not a petrostate laid prostrate by an evaporating oil price. The low price of energy means that although the offshore economy might suffer, the onshore economy benefits.

Most people who are proper economists, as opposed to Unionists who like graphs, will agree that the benefits to the total Scottish economy from lower oil prices more than offset the damage done to the extraction industry by an oil price which is plummeting because Saudi Arabia is pumping all the oil it can in order to behead its competitors in the fracking industry. No doubt at some point the price of oil will recover. What won’t change however, are the economic arguments against independence. The usual suspects will still claim that Scotland will still be too poor.

In any event, arguments about the Scottish economy are carried out without access to all the relevant information. Westminster likes it that way, and that’s why the Better Together campaign fought its fear campaign almost exclusively on economic grounds. It’s a lot easier to present something that you keep hidden as being far more substantial than it actually is. That’s why we very rarely see Gordie Broon.

The true figures for the amount that Scotland puts into the UK compared with what it gets back are as difficult to find as a meeting of Labour MPs which doesn’t descend into a slanging match. Being of a suspicious nature I tend to the opinion that since the British Government could make the figures perfectly clear and simple to understand if it chose to, the fact that it doesn’t means that the true picture of Scotland’s net worth to the UK Exchequer is considerably more positive than Westminster would have us believe. There are lies, damned lies, and Unionist economic arguments against independence.

If the best argument for independence is that the average family is going to be sufficiently better off to afford an extra Chinese cairry oot once a month, then we’d be as well trading in a draft new constitution for a takeaway menu and a fortune cookie. The best arguments for independence are the arguments that the Unionist media and broadcasters were concerned not to give an airing to during the independence campaign. Those are arguments about democracy, accountability, about getting the governments we vote for, about land rights, social justice, and denuclearisation.

Scotland would be financially better off being independent for the simple reason that we’d no longer be paying for the UK’s military fantasies, for the London sewer upgrade, for high-speed trains between London and Birmingham and London Crossrail, for the Olympics, and for all the other things that Westminster tries to tell us are “UK national spending”. Digging a commuter railway tunnel under central London is UK national spending, but building a new Forth road bridge isn’t. Funny that.

But it’s generally best to avoid getting into economic arguments with yoondom. Instead it’s far more productive to ask them to follow through on the logic of their own claims. Let’s accept that Scotland is an economic basket case and if we became independent we’d be forced to slash public spending even more than it’s currently being slashed by Westminster.

SCOTLAND is too poor for independence, but we are embarrassingly rich in energy resources. We have all that oil that’s not worth much, but we also have coal, shale oil and gas resources that we’re not using because they’d damage the environment. We are so rich in energy resources we can do that. We’ve got hydroelectric, we’ve got Europe’s greatest potential for wind power and for tidal energy. Scotland is the Duracell bunny of Europe.

Scotland is virtually self-sufficient in food. We have a relatively small population living in a rich and fertile country where population density is lower than average for the EU. There’s plenty of room here: this is not an overcrowded land. And even better, we’ve got an abundance of water that falls out the sky in such quantities that the concept of metering domestic water use is not even on the radar. That’s how rich we are.

Our advantages don’t end there. We are in a geopolitically quiet and stable part of the globe. No one wants to invade us. Scotland has no territorial claims. There are no parts of the world full of people who claim to be ethnic Scots seeking reunion with the mitherland. We are surrounded by rich and prosperous neighbours, yet for some reason in the douce wee avenue of north-west Europe with its well cared-for houses, Scotland has broken windaes, knackered gutters and a rusty Ford Escort on bricks in the drive. Unionists never bother to explain why Scotland is uniquely impoverished among the countries of north-west Europe.

We have four of the best universities in the world, a highly-educated English-speaking workforce, a proven record of invention and innovation. We have impeccable democratic credentials. So much so that we were able to conduct an independence referendum where the worst that happened was that someone threw an egg at Jim Murphy. The violence came from embittered Unionists after they’d won. We might complain about corruption in public office, but it’s low-level stuff compared to what happens elsewhere. Scotland is not a kleptocracy like some of the former Soviet states. If you wanted a recipe for a prosperous, stable independent state, it would be Scotland. Yet allegedly we can’t afford it.

So the question is, if Scotland is too poor to become independent, if we’d have to slash public spending to the bone, whose fault is that then, who has had their paws on the levers of macroeconomic control these past 300 years? Hint: it’s not Holyrood. And yet the people who tell us that Scotland can’t afford independence are the very same people who want us to remain under the control of the parliament that has impoverished us. The economic argument against independence is a logic fail.