THE publication of the latest Government Expenditure and Revenue for Scotland (GERS) figures have triggered a now traditional feeding frenzy, with a black hole in Scotland’s finances heralded by Unionist politicians as validating the continuation of their beloved Union.

The killer phrase for me from the GERS report is: “The report is designed to allow users to understand and analyse Scotland’s fiscal position under different scenarios within the current constitutional framework.”

GERS is therefore a measure of the public finances, under the current Union – hardly the greatest endorsement for how the economy has been managed on the UK’s watch.

Major economic levers required to stimulate economic growth are still currently reserved to Westminster. It is indeed a bizarre scenario when politicians from Unionist parties, who should be ashamed at the situation, actively gloat and support a Union that has mismanaged the economy so appallingly.

GERS is a set of figures based on a measure of guesswork that indicate very little, except highlighting the negatives of the current Union. It has little bearing on the finances of an independent Scotland.

The point of independence is not to do everything in the same way as it has been done within the current constitutional framework, but to move away from this one-size-fits-all fiscal straitjacket to a tailored approach that prioritises stimulating economic growth.

Alex Orr
Edinburgh

I COULD not agree more with the points made on Wednesday (Letters, August 22) by Ashley MacGregor and in particular the use of soundbites. So often senior members of the SNP hierarchy when live on air fail to take the opportunity of using a soundbite.

A classic example was on Radio Scotland yesterday morning when Stewart Hosie (SNP) and Murdo Fraser (Conservative) were being interviewed by Gary Robertson on the subject of the GERS figures. Stewart Hosie was busy explaining how the GERS figures represented Scotland’s position within the UK and not how it would be in an independent Scotland where different choices would be made, and jobs would come back here from Westminster which we already pay for, blah blah blah! Murdo Fraser more or less said the deficit would make things tough.

Once again the SNP are giving long-winded explanations from a defensive position which turns the listener completely off. Instead ask Murdo Fraser why Scotland has a deficit created under Westminster rule while raking in oil revenues since the 1970s?

It would be extremely unfair to single out Stewart Hosie, as most senior SNP people are guilty of the same thing. We can only hope that everyone in the SNP will take advantage of Keith Brown’s rebuttal unit, which perhaps should be called The Concise Retort Unit.

Alan M Morris
Glasgow

READ MORE: Letters: We need soundbites to win over older voters​

AS a confirmed “deficit denier” (as George Kerevan puts it) I was disappointed to see both George and The National itself buy into the British nationalist narrative of a Scottish deficit.

Scotland does not have a fiscal deficit (nor a surplus), for the simple reason that it is not fiscally autonomous. There are no transfer payments for, for example, pensions or UK debt, nor any legal obligation to make them. As George somewhat contradictorily admits, the mythical deficit is “notional”, a counterfactual like “what would have happened had Germany won World War Two” (Mismatch on spending is missing the point, August 23).

Leaving aside questions over the “guestimates” of Scottish proportional spending which the statisticians openly admit to having to make, any such construct depends on assumptions about transfer payments to and from Scotland and the rest of the UK. The ones built into GERS by the UK Government (not the statisticians) are deliberately designed, as Tory Scottish Secretary Ian Lang effectively admitted, to reinforce the myth of the Scots as subsidy-junkie scroungers.

Build in a moral obligation for rUK to compensate Scotland for the giant subsidy of our oil revenues, around one third of our GDP in the early 80s (equivalent to the UK Government giving Ireland, say, £650 billion a year) and the deficit will easily turn into a surplus.

Remember this huge subsidy was not extracted by dint of informed consent but rather by a sustained UK Government campaign of lies, deliberately negating what their own expert was saying. Build in an obligation to keep the Better Together vow of a “Union dividend”, essentially a deficit equal to the UK’s, and the deficit drops to 1.9%.

We can argue about how realistic such revised assumptions are, either as part of new “constitutional and governance arrangements”, in Nicola Sturgeon’s words yesterday, or as a result of the deal made after independence. But no Scottish nationalist should accept the Scottish deficit/Scottish sponger concept relentlessly portrayed by the likes of Murdo Fraser and his predecessors in the Scottish elite for hundreds of years. Every time the fictional deficit is mentioned, point out it doesn’t exist, that Scotland has subsidised England and the rest of the UK to a phenomenal extent and that any future real deficit or surplus depends entirely on “arrangements”.

Alan Weir
Glasgow

READ MORE: Scotland has a deficit – but these figures don't tell full story

REGARDING the GERS figures for Scotland, I do not think it is fair for the English taxpayer to subsidise Scotland for more than £10 billion. The Scottish Government should repeal the Treaty of the Union. This would relieve the English taxpayer of paying the above amount.

Bill Purves
Galashiels