Guy Stenhouse: Let's have fantasy not fibs over independence

Let’s start from the obvious position that if there were ever to be another referendum on Scotland’s constitutional future the absurdly biased question we had last time would not be used. Instead there would be some variant on the theme of the real question which is: does Scotland want to remain in the UK or to leave it? On this question poll after poll has shown over many years that about a third of the electorate want Scotland to leave the UK and the rest don’t.

There are therefore rather a lot of people who need to be persuaded that something which is a terrible idea is actually a good idea.

There are many things relating to Scotland’s future if it left the UK where reasonable people could hold a spectrum of views. An example is whether Scotland’s economic growth rate if it were independent would be higher or lower than if it remained part of the UK. You can legitimately argue the point either way although it must be said that England’s growth rate has tended to be better than Scotland’s for many years and a Government such as we have in Scotland which does not understand how business works is not an encouraging start.

On points like this it’s fair for the SNP to make its case. There is no justification for wasting public money to do it but if the SNP can find the £600,000 it raised for this sort of thing, but which it has unfortunately lost down the back of the sofa, then that’s fair enough.

What isn’t fair enough is blatantly trying to tell the Scottish electorate things which are not true. Some vulgar people might call that lying but to lie you have to know that what you are saying is not true, the alternative judgment is that it’s just stupidity. Either way it is not good.

The SNP are currently pedalling two specific “facts” which are simply untrue and they know or ought to know that to be the case. Unfortunately these are not the only examples of this trait but they are big and they are clear.

The first is that because you have been paying your National Insurance all these years the UK would pay your pension to you as a citizen of a Scotland which had left the UK. The sad fact is that your National Insurance is not carefully put away in a piggyback for when you grow old but is instead spent on the pensions of today’s pensioners. The state pension for Scottish pensioners in a separate Scotland would be payable by the Scottish Government and nobody else.

The second – and even bigger – nonsense is the claim that the UK has said it will be solely responsible for all of the UK’s outstanding debt so Scotland wouldn’t have to take any. Kate Forbes, who seems to be clueless on economics, said this was so as recently as last week.

What the UK Government actually did at the time of the referendum in 2014 was clarify to the holders of the UK’s National Debt that the Government of the UK, as the original issuer of the debt, would stand behind it rather than the holders of the debt being owed money partly by the UK Government and partly by the Scottish Government if Scotland voted to leave the UK. That clarification was to reassure the holders of the debt and has no implication whatsoever for the fact that behind that guarantee the parts of the UK if it were to break up would need to shoulder their share of the burden.

The farcical position of the SNP that Scotland could separate itself from the rest of the UK without taking its share of the debt is just embarrassing. Do the SNP think the UK Government is some sort of charity and the Scottish electorate are idiots? Our share of the UK National Debt is about £40,000 a person or roughly £100,000 for every household in Scotland.

If we must endure more education on this boring subject we need the truth not fantasy and fibs.