GERS does what it is designed to do

I’m fed up hearing about GERS, and I’m fed up writing about GERS. 

It seems to come round quicker every year, like a Tim Burton-inspired Christmas where the tree burns down and ghoulish skellingtons (sic) steal yer new Xbox and puke in yer fireplace stocking. The pace at which this annual reminder of all things bah-humbug to the perfectly ordinary, and what should be non-controversial, aspiration of normal self-government and sovereignty comes round is alarming. It makes me feel I’m getting older too quickly, highlighting to me the urgency of the need to see this damn journey to independence completed before I’m gone.

The Private Frazer’s of the media are out in force. We’re doomed, doooomed I tell ye! Scotland would collapse in on itself and drop into a huge sinkhole never to be seen or heard of again if we even have a sniff of governing ourselves. Not again!

Surely to goodness even the very many of us who pay only the minimum amount of attention to politics or domestic news of the day on a regular basis, preferring to fill their time with, you know, life, must be starting to spot a Groundhog Day pattern emerging? 

Surely they are becoming familiar, and comparing, (from the rotational grim financial report of public spending, followed by the equally as grim serious-faced nodding heads of the Fraser of Allander Institute, and umpteen representatives of the branched locally London Tories and their lite versions of the pseudo- socialists and Liberals in Scotland, howling like banshees, that Scotland would be a third world country without the loving embrace of the bountiful all-consuming Britannic numen) with their real lives, and wondering is Scotland really such a basket case?

Keeping it very simple, everything, and I mean everything that feasibly could be said about this annual British nationalist propaganda skelp-a-thon of the idea that the people who live in Scotland cannot possibly look after their own cumulative financial wellbeing, has been said or written before, from whatever angle you want to look at it.

However the stretchiest of stretchy stretchable stretches of stretchiland would need to be deployed to start to meaningfully compare GERS, the cumulative financial income, public spending outgoings and maintenance of commitments made by the limited powers Scottish Government, and the UK Government, on ‘Scotland’s behalf’, (on the priorities they think should be prioritised in Scotland on their own behalf, where 72% of the revenue raised in or by Scotland remains reserved and controlled by Westminster, and 40% of the spending of Scotland’s money, the monies spent “on Scotland’s behalf’ remains under London control) with how an independent Scotland would manage its own finances. It’s like comparing apples with Edinburgh Rock.

Indeed logic would dictate surely, then, that if the dire straits that Scotland has gotten into financially are to be given credence, according to the banshees of union, a state we’ve gotten into under their control, why the hell aren’t we independent already, to escape from the clear extravagance, incompetence and financial mis-management of another country that has gotten us into this position in the first place?

The publishing of GERS on an annual basis is just a regular excuse to spout British nationalist propaganda, straight out of the playbook. It’s all about how far they can get away with convincing the public that Scotland is poor (it is not). Apart from a few years earlier in this newish century where the figures didn’t support the myth GERS works exactly the way it was designed to work when it was created by Tory Secretary of State for Scotland Ian Lang. 

Undermining confidence in self-determination is what It is for. Falsely promoting the idea that the prospect of an independent Scotland would be irrational and destructive is its aim.