The National posted this video by me on their channel this afternoon:
This is the transcript:
Let me be clear about this. The Scottish government balances its books.
Every local authority in Scotland is required to balance its books.
Every agency whose accounts are included in the statement is required to balance its books.
In other words, the state of the public finances in Scotland is very simple, clear and straightforward. The Scottish government and its agencies balance their books. That is the only story that there is to tell.
In that case, if, according to the data produced today, the public finances in Scotland show a significant deficit, and that is what the statement does say, then the entire responsibility for this is down to the UK government in Westminster.
They are the people who are failing to balance their books for Scotland.
And, worse than that, it is my straightforward suggestion, but they do not want to balance the books for Scotland for their own, very obvious, Unionist reasons.
The address includes costs that Scotland would never occur.
Scotland would never pay for nuclear power stations which are white elephants because it has a power surplus.
Scotland would not pay for a great deal of the wasted defence expenditure of the UK, but let's Keir Starmer still pretend that he can posture on the world stage.
Scotland would not pay for HS2.
Scotland would not pour massive amounts of money into the Southeast of England.
If Scotland was an independent country, it would have the bonus from having its own capital, and that always increases GDP.
In addition, Scotland could ensure that all the profits earned in the country were taxed in the country.
And, all the interest paid in the country would similarly be taxed upon receipt by a bank or other person in the country.
And Scotland could ensure that all the VAT paid in Scotland was truly collected within Scotland.
Scotland could even take steps to ensure that the billions of pounds lost as a consequence of the failure to control the operation of small companies in Scotland would be collected in tax.
But the UK government does none of these things. As long as it can dump the cost on someone else, the Westminster government is happy to waste enormous amounts of money and blame the people of Scotland, as well as the people of the north of England, and Wales and Northern Ireland, for the losses as if they had nothing to do with the incompetence seen in London.
I could argue forever that the figures in GERS are wrong, and if you want an explanation as to why that is the case I did do a video on that subject last year for The National.
Instead, what I'm pointing out is that what the Scottish government has produced today is, in reality, a measure of the inability of the UK government to manage its finances and of its willingness to dump its costs on Scotland, wholly inappropriately.
There is nothing in today's GERS statement that in any way implies that Scotland is running a deficit of the level that is implied by the reported data, because that data represents utterly unreasonable apportionments of costs decided upon by Westminster, which it says Scotland must bear responsibility for without having any means to control it.
And today's statement is a measure of the fact that the systems to truly reflect the income of Scotland that would be enjoyed if it were an independent country are not in existence, and the economy of Scotland is not that which it would have if it were to be independent, because things would be very different in that case.
So how can I summarise GERS? Yet again, I fall back on the acronym that I created a long time ago to describe precisely what this statement is, which is that it is CRAp, or a completely rubbish approximation to the truth.
The unionists will love this data, because they always do.
The Scottish government should be deeply embarrassed that it puts this information out as if it is of use to the people of Scotland, when it isn't.
The embarrassment is that Scotland can still not replace this information with something better, and the SNP should really be doing something about that, as I have said year in, year out.
But most of all, we should just treat this data for what it is, which is CRAp. It's rubbish. It's untruthful. It's misleading.
And what I know is, Scotland can do a lot better than this.
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Thank you for pointing that out.
“Scotland would never pay for nuclear power stations which are white elephants because it has a power surplus”.
The current power surplus produced by Scotland’s current renewables isn’t even used by the UK Government to reduce its own energy deficit, and its ludicrous overpriced, gas-based international market pricing, disaster policy; in which the energy providers are protected and rewarded for monopoly pricing (having decimated the suppliers through its failed, fake ‘free market’ policy), and the consumer is ripped-off.
Apparently Scottish renewables are producing big electricity surpluses; and the suppliers are being paid not to produce the surplus. This amounts to no less than 37% of Scottish renewable output is effectively going to waste (providers being paid to switch off supply), for three apparent reasons:
1. A network grid that cannot transfer the surplus.
2. Technical storage problems.
3. A seriously defective energy strategy.
The Scottish Government has just signed off on the Berwick Bank offshore wind farm, which is believed will produce 4 gigawatts (GW) of electricity; sufficient to supply all Scotland’s domestic needs, twice over. Scotland is already producing a surplus. Scotland is trying to produce cheaper electricity (cheaper than future Nuclear will be); and the UK can’t cope. Presumably Europe would be glad of the new supply, but will the UK Government do anything to achieve it, and the potential income? Almost certainly not.
Thanks
Further to my immediate preceding comment (I could not submit the full comment, presumably because of the word limit). The two comments, which are really one, will not appear as joined up, but as two separate comments.
In any case, here is the background on renewable energy and the disastrous confusion at the heart of energy policy, for those who just believe the UK just cannot be so deeply, impenetrably, irredeemably incompetent.
“The electricity grid was built to deliver power generated by coal and gas plants near the country’s major cities and towns, and doesn’t always have sufficient capacity in the wires that carry electricity around the country to get the new renewable electricity generated way out in the wild seas and rural areas.
And this has major consequences………
Ocean winds was paid £72,000 not to generate power from its wind farms in the Moray Firth during a half-hour period on 3 June because the system was overloaded – one of a number of occasions output was restricted that day.
At the same time, 44 miles (70km) east of London, the Grain gas-fired power station on the Thames Estuary was paid £43,000 to provide more electricity.
Payments like that happen virtually every day. Seagreen, Scotland’s largest wind farm, was paid £65 million last year to restrict its output 71% of the time, according to analysis by Octopus Energy.
Balancing the grid in this way has already cost the country more than £500 million this year alone, the company’s analysis shows. The total could reach almost £8bn a year by 2030, warns the National Electricity System Operator (NESO), the body in charge of the electricity network.
It’s pushing up all our energy bills and calling into question the government’s promise that net zero would end up delivering cheaper electricity.
Now, the government is considering a radical solution: instead of one big, national electricity market, there’ll be a number of smaller regional markets, with the government gambling that this could make the system more efficient and deliver cheaper bills.
But in reality, it’s not guaranteed that anyone will get cheaper bills. And even if some people do, many others elsewhere in the country could end up paying more.” (BBC, ‘Britain’s energy bills problem – and why firms are paid huge sums to stop producing power’; 9 June 2025)
And of course the BBC trotted out that it showed that an independent Scotland would be worse off than in the Union.
The Scotland GERS deficit 2025 is £26.5Bn. At the same time, as you point out Richard, Scotland balances its Budget. It has to do so evry single year (unlike the UK), because it has virtually no substantive borrowing powers. This means most of the deficit is in traasfers from the UK (accounting entries based on abstract calculations, often on population share whether or not any of the money is actually spent in Scotland).
The UK doesn’t actually produce a direct GERS. Therefore, you cannot even compare Scotland with the UK, or anywhere else in the UK, or how it is shared.
The closest we can compare (but we do not know how precisely), is the OBR, ‘UK Spending and receipts in 2024-25’; and there we find the deficit there for the UK is £137.5BN. This means Scotland is carrying a deficit that is 19% of the total UK deficit, for a country that has just over 8% of the UK population (but supposedly responsible for a fifth of the total UK deficit); but Scotland, of course is the only part of the UK dissected, defenestrated and hung out to dry in this peculiar and lopsided way; with no explanation why there is not a full UK GERS disclosure, on an equal basis (still less reconciled with Government accounting).
I leave you all to ponder what it may be that is going on here, that we cannot see plainly and in full.
You identify the implausibility of the numbers, John.
The easy test of the data is to look at (alleged) defence spending assigned to Scotland, 4.2% of (alleged) GDP, and compare it to the UK spend, 2.3% of GDP.
Does anyone really believe that Scotland has the a defence spending almost twice that of the UK? Higher than the US?
If they’re lying about that, what else are they lying about!
Well observed. The oddities are everywhere. The second largest source of expenditure, behind only health and far above the spend on education, for example is – ‘Accounting adjustments’. Accounting adjustments amount in total to over £12Bn; 10.3% of the Scottish Government’s total expenditure. Think about it: 10% of total spend, just for shuffling journal entries. That requires a lot of explaining.
GERS is a bean-feast of oddities. We are given a huge deficit, in part through accounting adjustments; but revenue per person is £16,471; £91, or 0.6% above the UK figure. Scotland outperforms UK on a per capita basis, but within the Union we are a financial basket case; proved by the ‘accounting adjustments’.
And so it goes on. Forever.
Agreed
The problem is endemic because as long as you have market capitalism where capital is controlled in its deployment by an elite then that elite will always be tempted to put profit before morality and to the extent of also seeking to control government decisions to that end. Where the nation is dependent on certain essential services or forms of production democratic accountability appears to be the only viable alternative and that means nationalisation.
Having read this article also the one in the National also your very good take down of the BBC presenter the other week thank you for debunking the the Westminster take that Scotland is so poor that we should be thankful to England for looking after us.
Just a thought why not challenge Douglas Fraser BBC Scotland to a debate on GERS
The BBC issue the invitations, not the other way around.
Any respect I might have had for Douglas Fraser has gone out the window after his performance on the early Scotland news last night. Just following the party line.
I thought this post was going to be about football…
(frae an exiled Weegie) 😉
The GERS name is deeply politically laden….
Oh, I fully understand that!
But leaving unionist sectarianism on one side for a moment (which is slmost impossible in Glasgow), there’s a fascinating money story there too. For another day.
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/rangers-money-17million-loss-uncovered-33996261
I admit that even I was staggered by the degree of venom that was directed atme on Twitter yesterday. It was quite staggering in scale, and volume, andall of it was, of course, total nonsense postedby unionists who hate everything about Scotland.
Richard, some of it may have been posted by Scottish Unionists. There is almost an element of comic absurdity about the level of hysteria. None of this has anything to do with rationality; but I confess I am beyond surprise about this matter. It was the same three hundred years ago. The same.
It was very obviously co-ordinated unionist claptrap
Your analysis focuses on the cost side. The revenue side is as important. Scotland does not receive the revenues from natural resources located in its territory. Canadian provinces own the oil and gas, hydro and other natural resources in their territories. As a Canadian, Scotland seems to suffer from a flagrant injustice.
I am not sure that is entirely fair. The cost side is important, but I did mention the difficulty in capturing taxes within Scotland on profits, on mineral extraction, on energy generation, on rents and on interest and I think that all of these are almost certainly understated in GERS because the data to ensure that they are properly allocated to Scotland does not exist.