By Mark E. Saunders of “The Scottish Minuteman” https://www.facebook.com/profile.php/?id=61575625542197

Every August, a report drops like a hammer — GERS.

The Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland report arrives with the same ritual timing, and the same ritual headlines.

Scotland, we are told, is broke.

Scotland, we are told, is subsidised.

Scotland, we are told, cannot stand on its own two metaphorical feet.

I must admit, it is an interesting annual event. But I really don’t want to talk about the methodology of GERS, or the fact that 25 of its 26 figures are more guesswork than estimates. Those arguments have been made many times before by cleverer people than me — whether those arguments are well known to the public or well hidden from it is a separate problem.

But, whatever way you look at the published figures, GERS does not prove that Scotland has a crippling spending deficit. Nor does it prove that an independent Scotland would automatically be financially better off.

What it does demonstrate is arguably much more fundamental.

GERS describes Scotland’s fiscal position within the economic and spending framework of the UK as it exists today. It is not, and never has been, a set of accounts for a hypothetical independent Scotland.

Yet that distinction is often lost in the constitutional debate.

Union supporters and politicians treat the GERS ‘deficit’ almost as though it were an infallible financial statement saying: Scotland costs more than it raises, therefore Scotland cannot be independent.

Independence supporters and politicians, meanwhile, have responded by trying to dismiss or minimise the deficit altogether.

I think that misses the more interesting argument.

Neither approach really asks what GERS actually establishes.

Accept the figures. Then ask what they actually tell us.

If GERS is being used to argue that Scotland is supposedly too financially weak to be independent, then surely it also raises a much bigger question about the economic model within which Scotland has operated for decades.

It really begs the question: Can Scotland afford to remain part of the Union?

Or, more fundamentally: Is the economic model of the Union delivering the prosperity and fiscal sustainability that any country should reasonably expect?

If the answer is no, then GERS cannot, by itself, legitimately be offered as an argument for preserving the status quo.

It could just as legitimately be an argument for changing it.

There is also a crucial difference between saying “Scotland cannot afford independence today” and saying “Scotland could never build a financially sustainable independent economy.”

GERS cannot establish the second proposition.

GERS isn’t an independence balance sheet.

It is a picture of Scotland’s finances under the Union.

And that in itself doesn’t make GERS meaningless.

Quite the opposite.

It makes the question of what GERS is actually telling us far more important.

Because GERS doesn’t reveal that Scotland can’t afford to leave the Union. It actually reveals that Scotland can not afford to stay.