UNIONIST Kevin Hague has blocked a top Scottish columnist after clashing over Scotland's economy.

Hague, from pro-Union think tank These Islands, blocked Iain Macwhirter after tweeting about his column which said the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) figures don't reflect a true picture of the country's finances.

In an article in The Herald titled "GERS should be renamed TWITS: too wee; too poor; too stupid", Macwhirter wrote: Suddenly, independence doesn't seem such an expensive luxury ... GERS is, if anything, an index of dependency: a measure of how Scotland has lost out being a backwater of the UK, not a country with the economic powers – tax, borrowing, debt – required to run a national economy.

"But even then, as the tax expert Professor Richard Murphy has pointed out, it is absurd to claim, as GERS has in recent years, that Scotland with 8% of the UK population accounts for nearly 60% of the entire UK deficit. This just doesn't make sense."

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Hague said Macwhirter's argument is "ignorant nonsense", adding: "I don’t know which is more remarkable - that people get paid to write ignorant nonsense like this, or that people pay to read it.

"Depresses the hell out of me that sentient beings can read this and find it persuasive."

Macwhirter hit back, saying Hague missed the point of the article.

He tweeted: "This is just offensive Kevin. You ignore the point of my piece , and my responses to your posts. These eccentric GERS figures, whatever they mean, tell us nothing about the viability of a Scottish economy - only that it is clearly not thriving in the U.K."

Hague blocked Macwhirter instead of responding.