Liz Truss’ brief tenure as Prime Minister showed the damage a heavy dose of political and economic lunacy can do to the economy and people’s lives even in a well-established and robust country such as the UK.

There are numerous examples around the world in recent years of political leaders promising the earth to their citizens and then destroying their country’s economy and, in so doing, causing immense suffering amongst those they purport to represent.

Southern American countries make a speciality of this with, as an example, Venezuela, a resource-rich country with a lot of potential, falling apart because of political and economic incompetence.

Unusually we are currently able to enjoy, though enjoy is absolutely not the right word, watching a country on the edge of Europe going down the same path: Turkey.

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Turkey by name and, unfortunately, increasingly a turkey of an economy.

In just over a year the value of the Turkish Lira has halved. Inflation is at over 70 per cent. In Turkey there is no independent central bank – they take their orders from the central government and those orders are remarkably stupid. In the face of rampant inflation and a collapsing currency, Turkey has cut its interest rates rather than raise them.

The result is a further twist to the inflationary spiral and the central bank’s foreign exchange reserves have been virtually cleaned out.

Those who have the chance to do so take themselves and their capital out of the country. Those who cannot watch in despair as their savings and standard of living are destroyed.

Elections are coming up so the government keeps the sweetie gun turned on full blast to try to persuade people to give them another go.

The Turkish President rails, as floundering leaders always do, against those, especially international investors, who will not support their policies.

This episode is almost certainly going to end in tears for Turkey and its people and it will take years of sound economic policy and austerity, neither of which have started yet, to get the country back on track.

Truss’ little brush with the financial abyss and Turkey’s problems made me think about dear old Scotland.

If Scotland were to separate from the UK its problems wouldn’t be exactly the same as Turkey’s, they might well be worse.

The UK, including Scotland, has a debt to GDP ratio of over double that of Turkey. We run a significant trade deficit and a large underlying fiscal deficit too – both of which are bigger than our share of the UK’s equivalent deficits.

We would have no currency of our own but plan to borrow the pound sterling if we could (which we probably couldn’t ). The small countries we would like to emulate such as Denmark run very conservative policy regimes because it is sensible to do so and because as a small country you are given less latitude by international investors. Our brilliant plan would be to try to borrow more from an already weak position.

Our growth is slower than that of our neighbours including England. We like spending money and putting taxes up. Our leaders are economically illiterate, they do not understand business or how to create wealth.

The average mortgage rate in the UK is now starting to fall below 6% again. In Turkey they are around 20% and only at that level because the government forces them down. Could you cope with that?

From April, hundreds of thousands of Scots will pay at least 2% more income tax than people on the same salaries would in England. How much bigger would the gap have to be before higher earners are deterred from living here and take their spending and their taxes to England?

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For the sake of adding 2% we risk losing 47%. This is counter-productive populism which will lead to less tax revenue not more. The problem is not just the current 2% differential but the sure and certain knowledge that the Scottish Government would like to charge higher earners more if it could without them all leaving.

Under a sensible Prime Minister the UK is now heading back in the right direction. It is not fun but it is progress. The line between stability and chaos is a thin one and it is always closer than you think. The devolution which Scotland has within the framework of a strong UK gives the best of both worlds. Turkey is a lesson we should watch, learn from and avoid.