It's taken me a wee while to get round to this, but never mind.
Back in June 2009 Jim Murphy's Scotland Office put out this paper on the relationship between oil revenues and public spending in Scotland.
I blogged about it here; concluding that they were absolutely right to state that Scotland has had all the oil revenues that it could possibly ever have claimed, and more, spent in Scotland. Wrong however to try and over-egg things by adding up a long time-series of money numbers without correcting for inflation. Sort of like adding up apples and helicopters to see how many bananas you have.
They followed up with a sequel in January 2010, which, basically does the same thing again, with more of a focus on the post-devolution period.
Ho hum.
But the response they provoked from the Nats was quite interesting and very useful.
"Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland is the official report, and it contains the real figures for 2007-8 ..."
(Plus a lot of financially incoherent drivel, claiming that capital spending doesn't count because, er, it doesn't. It's also obvious that the quotes in that story couldn't have come from Swinney because we know that under pressure he starts spouting management-consultant bolleaux and sounds like Kryten out of Red Dwarf; the belligerent tosh on display bears rather the signature of Salmond's own spin-thug, Kevin Pringle.)
But isn't this a marvellous, and possibly very clever (if deliberate) thing for Murphy to have done?
He provoked Swinney (or at least Pringle pretending to be Swinney) into endorsing GERS as being factually correct.
After all these years of the Nats denouncing GERS as being "distorted", "flawed", "lies", and so on.
Dishing, irretrievably, the idea that somehow there are all these "lost" or "stolen" billions which would somehow transform the finances of Scotland if "independence" were to happen.
No, we'd just have to plod along with the same amount of income, while incurring all the extra costs of duplicating things like DWP and the Treasury, and setting up vanities and fripperies like embassies and a Foreign Office, and paying £300m a year more to the EU as we lost our share of the existing UK rebate.
Attractive?
Thought not.
Like I said in the title: Clever Jim, Silly Swinney.
4 comments:
Ah, I see.
So that's where the £9Million Scotland Office Budget and the additional £1.2 Million Decoration of Dover House have went.
Providing glistening offices for Baron Murphy and his hatchet men to (and I quote) add "apples and helicopters to see how many bananas you have."
Those wonderful boffin's, why exactly are the public paying for Jim Murphy to 'interpret' agreed national statistics like GERS?
Yes we know what the SoS puts out its called propoganda like PM brown telling blatant lies about MOD funding its what nuLabour is expert at.
"agreed national statistics like GERS"
Ker-ching!
Another (small) victory for the Murph.
I look forward to quoting you to the effect that GERS indeed constitutes "agreed national statistics".
Is anyone disagreeing with the GERS figures?
Sure, there are still discrepancies but it's the best way to at present to see how Scotland performs as a part of the United Kingdom.
Quote away Sm753, I've never disputed the GERS figures, I've only ever criticised them for their often incredibly bad assumptions and generalisations which mark them as useless for projecting how an independat Scotland would fare.
One wonders whether the recent readjustments made to the figures would have happened at all under a unionist party.
Do any unionists claim that the GERs figures previous to 2007 were at all accurate?
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