FEBRUARY is the time you start to long for the Scottish winter to be over, though this year it has not been too bad. Our thoughts turn where? To Greece perhaps? Retsina and ouzo, kleftiko and souvlakia, tranquil islands and rugged mountains, icons in the churches and lizards sunbathing on ancient marble?

Well, I’ve not been there for a few years, and I dare say my fading memories are more agreeable than the present reality. Greece is the crisis that has never quite gone away for the EU. This week, further tense talks between the debtor government and its international creditors are under way, with the Greeks still struggling to recover from the eurozone’s longest downturn. Their slashed budgets and painful cuts have done little to revive growth, leaving them even more dependent on the three international bailouts they have received since 2010.

We may pity the destitute Greeks, but this week we got a warning that the Scots are set on the same primrose path. It came from Douglas McWilliams and the outfit he heads up in London, the Centre for Economic and Business Research. It figured in a story in The Sunday Times predicting independent Scotland would be the new Greece. A lurid headline ran “Economist warns of £19 billion cuts after Yes vote” (meaning indyref2).

In good Scots fashion, Ah ken his faither, from my own old days in East Lothian. I’ve followed his fortunes with interest. There was a time they prospered, and he rose to be an adviser to Chancellor George Osborne. Then came a fall from grace.

After rest and recreation, he is now back in action. What I hold against McWilliams are his statistical sins. He first came to my notice in 2009, when he compared Scotland with North Korea and Cuba, claiming we were on course to have state spending at 67 per cent of gross domestic product, the third highest in the world. A couple of years later, after “my annual visit to the family home in East Lothian”, he was comparing Scotland’s rate of economic growth with that of Spain, Greece, Portugal, Korea, Poland and Turkey. It is true Greece has meanwhile fallen by the wayside, see above, but all these other countries today enjoy growth rates higher than Scotland’s, while Poland and Turkey have been positively booming. I think we could have done more to improve our own mediocre record, but the biggest lesson lies in the fact that an independent country can change its condition in a way a dependent country cannot.

Over the years the welter of nonsense from McWilliams has been so huge that here I am going to confine myself to his latest comparison between Scotland and Greece. Starting with the weather, there is in fact little similarity between the two, but in economic terms the most important divergence is structural. With their many publicly owned industries, the Greeks remain mired in a situation that Scotland moved out of 30 years ago. Their very attempt to reduce this sector, while not wholly unsuccessful, has brought fresh problems of demoralisation and corruption among the workforce. In these respects, reform has actually made things worse.

The equivalent process for Scotland was the Thatcherite programme of privatisation. Nobody would pretend it was easy, or that its results are in every instance perfect. But just compare the times when, to get a telephone, you needed to send off a formal application to a public authority (which, I suppose, could have refused it) with the equivalent process now, when you just walk into a shop to pick up the latest gadget. The difference between Scotland and Greece is between an antiquated, state-run economy and an economy of the 21st century – also the difference, in the era of globalisation, between failure and success.

Scotland has fully accomplished this transition to the global economy. We export about half our total output: oil, whisky, financial services. Greece exports little more than a quarter of its total output, of which the biggest single sector is fruit and vegetables. It has yet to accomplish the transition to the global economy, and its political system continues to impede the transition. Only a Scotland similarly reduced to exporting kale and oatmeal could vindicate McWilliams’s frivolous fantasies. Scotland will not turn into Greece without the sunshine so long as Scotland has a much more advanced economic structure than Greece has – which is likely to be a good while yet.

Matters of economic structure are also something separate from the financial repercussions, good or bad, that may flow from them. The structure survives, the finances fluctuate. After long mismanagement, Greece built up official debt amounting to 180 per cent of its gross domestic product. Scotland, not yet being a sovereign state, has no official debt. We have borrowing powers within a UK framework but are still in the early days of a new fiscal system, and the powers have not so far been used for any operation on the open markets. When they are, it will offer the first glimpse of Scotland’s standing there. At that point, all readers of The National should buy Scottish government bonds and so boost demand for them: they will also be a cast-iron investment.

The way things stand, we are in strict legal terms not liable for any of the existing UK debt, because we have never been a contracting party to it. Accordingly, before the referendum of 2014, the Treasury in London announced it would honour that debt in its entirety whatever the result of the vote. Alex Salmond then promised Scotland would pay its whack anyway. We still cannot put a figure on this, as it would have been the outcome of negotiations between a departing Scotland and the UK it was leaving behind.

I think Alex was being too generous. After the dishonesty of Project Fear, repeated or even magnified in the European referendum, and now echoed in McWilliams’s drivel, my own advice would be that after independence we should start our debt with a clean sheet. We would be the new kids on the block, so we would be paying a higher premium on fresh borrowings anyway. But that would induce prudence in the liberated Scotland from the start, and before long bring the cost of borrowing down. If that is austerity, it looks far preferable to having a reborn nation continue to flounder in the financial bog of somebody else’s imperial past and delusions of post-European grandeur. How fitting that McWilliams should be their messenger.