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IT is one of the big set-piece days in Scottish politics.
The publication of the annual Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) statistics comes round sooner every year.
The Scottish Government annually publishes figures which are picked up gleefully by its opponents as evidence that Scotland, with its “notional” deficit of £25.3 billion, is better off within the Union.
At the same time, supporters of independence – and bona fide, independent experts – are forced to explain why that is nonsense.
Political economist William Thomson, founder of the Resilient Economy think tank, told The National: “If there was perceived to be a positive from this document, it would never, ever be in the press because it’s of no use other than to bash, because of economic ignorance, to bash the independence movement.”
There are some in the independence movement who question why the Scottish Government publishes the numbers at all, though others say that these exercises are important for transparency and credibility.
All of these frustrations led former finance secretary Derek Mackay in 2020 to set out plans to publish an alternative economic case for independence alongside the GERS figures .
His successor Kate Forbes appeared to back that in 2021 , when she said: “In terms of the alternative case I do think that we need to refresh our economic prospectus as other countries will be doing and so I remain committed to refreshing that economic case taking into account where we find ourselves.”
Since then, the push for an alternative GERS seems to have fallen into abeyance. The National rang around to find anyone in the Scottish Government who would talk to us about alternative GERS. We were unsuccessful.
A Freedom of Information request to the Scottish Government in 2023 asking how many civil servants were working on the project returned the answer: Zero. When did the Scottish Government expect to publish its first alternative GERS figures? “While our aim is to provide information wherever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested.”
Fair to surmise the idea is dead and buried then.
Thomson proposes a different strategy. “This number, [£25.3bn, the ‘notional’ deficit] is just a nonsense number,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
He added: “I don’t know if they should do alternative figures but I think they should try and make sense of GERS.”
The curator of the annual Scotonomics festival argued that Scotland should “own” its deficit, which he has previously calculated would be around the same as is set out in the GERS statistics, so around 10.9% of GDP.
In an academic paper he co-authored last year, Thomson said for an independent Scotland to meet the EU’s target of the deficit of 3% of GDP, there would be painful public spending cuts. He told The National these would be on a par with the austerity imposed on Greece during the Eurozone crisis.
He said: “The GERS figure, if people understood economics differently in parliament, they would be able to make a lot from this but they’re still like, ‘We need to minimise the deficit and we need to say it’s not related to independence.’
“We need to start to own this, we need to start to own a deficit because it’s really easy to argue: the Government’s not invested enough in Scotland for 60, 70, 80 years. So as soon as we’re independent, we need the Government to invest, which is spending money and a deficit is simply the difference between the money the Government spends and how much it taxes back.
“If you want to be taxed more, then jump up and down but if you want spending and you want some [private sector] savings, then you need a deficit.”
