From this morning's National newspaper as Scotland awaits the latest annual publication of Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland, the statement that has always been designed to show the Scottish financial position in the worst possible light:
I will doing a live stream on GERS for The National at 11.30, here. Please join us then.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
The new GERS figures will show a massive deficit double the previous years calculation as they will include funds provided for COVID support.
From the Scottish Government’s own website it is stated that in 2020/21 £8.8B + £1.1B was received in direct COVID support. The NAO now admit that:
https://www.nao.org.uk/overviews/covid-19-cost-tracker/
£376B was provided by QE for all of the UK. This £376B could be higher as ‘BOJO the oligarch’ stated at one point in the house that his chancellor had spent £408B in COVID related support.
It will interesting to compare the COVID support provided to Scotland with the EU support of €740B for 450m citizens and the actual COVID support figure provided for Scotland for it’s 5.4m citizens. I strongly suspect the figure will be less than the 8.3% population share of £376B yet massively more than the EU average support and may include provision for the losses from the UK budget overall.
The EU support would be more inline with the real costs of COVID as the UK’s £376B include the costs of T&T, PPE VIP and massive losses resulting from Sunak’s inability to implement any kind of Governance on the distribution of these funds as stated by Lord Agnew during his resignation 24.01.2022 as an additional cost of £29B p.a. in fraud.
Regards
Vincent
Every year without fail we are subjected to this rubbish, and every year without fail here’s Richard again pointing out the glaring errors.
Thanks Richard.
Probably not going to analyse it here today as there really is nothing new to say
I covered it all in the National yesterday
Oh, didn’t expect you to do so Richard, you’ve done it so many times before and it’s much the same story.
You’ve got enough work to be getting on with
And now The National announces that “Deputy First Minister John Swinney has welcomed a ‘huge fall’ in Scotland’s deficit” after the latest GERS figures were released. Why is he still playing the stupid GERS game, exposed yet again by Richard in the same newspaper?
I wish I knew