As a businessman I considered the question to be posed this Thursday and looked at the numbers.
Scotland's GDP per head makes it the 14th wealthiest country in the world while the UK is 18th per OECD as well as Standards & Poor.
Oil and gas amount to 15 per cent of the Scottish economy and when excluded from the figures Scotland's GDP per head matches the UK's.
Whether there are 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil or 24bn it is a huge bonus and a platform to strengthen and diversify all our great exporting industries - food, whisky, engineering, sciences, technology as well as tourism and renewable energy such as the tidal power of the Pentland Firth.
It is Scottish exports that support the UK currency; without Scotland's balance of payments surplus the huge rUK deficit would see the pound devalued overnight. That is why a currency union will be essential to the rUK, as reinforced by the Financial Times, Robert Peston and the New Economics Foundation.
I have been an EU citizen for 40 years, my rights enshrined with no mechanism for me to be expelled for expressing self-determination democratically. Strategically positioned with all our energy potential and in full compliance with all EU law, EU president Jean-Claude Junckers, past president Pat Cox and Professor Keating of Aberdeen University have all expressed the opinion Scotland would remain in the EU and negotiate our position, especially given our net contribution of £440 million per annum.
On Nato, if you look at our territorial waters then our exclusion would result in theme having to rename the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation - 28 countries, including Albania, are members of Nato and only three have nuclear weapons - the US, France and the UK. Of the remaining 25, 20 have constitutional clauses banning nuclear weapons from their land waters and airspace. In the last 20 years we have been dragged into illegal and futile wars where our service people have been killed and maimed for no positive outcome.
Scotland's future should be in Scotland's hands.
Kenny Anderson,
The Steadings,
Castle Fraser,
Inverurie.
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