The annual release of the Gers figures always brings out the worst in the Scottish political scene.
Indy cyber warriors bunker down and expend a lot of energy outlining increasingly ludicrous arguments for denying reality. Unionists, meanwhile, try valiantly not to look too gleeful at the fact Scotland is broke. They almost always fail.
Neither is a particularly edifying spectacle and the temptation for non-political obsessives can be to just tune out. But that would be a mistake because the figures contain a lot of important information.
There’s no escaping the fact the underlining economic message is pretty bleak.
Total public spending in Scotland last year was £75billion but the country only raised £62.7billion in revenues – leaving a gap of £12.6billion.
That means our national deficit is seven per cent of GDP – far too high for an independent country harbouring ambitions for EU membership.
The picture has improved but yesterday’s Gers basically told us what they’ve consistently said since the oil crash in 2015. The initial tax take in an independent Scotland would not be high enough to maintain the level of public spending we’re used to as part of the UK.
To deal with that, a future government could cut spending, increase taxes or borrow more. Realistically, they’d have to do all three.
On the face of it, that is an extremely challenging argument for the SNP to make, although their recent Growth Commission report gave it a good shot.
Put simply, a new state with no credit history trying to plug that gap would inevitably be in for a world of pain.
The SNP are correct, however, that the powers of independence would allow a future government more flexibility to improve the situation over longer term.
The big problem for Unionists is that none of this is new. There can be very few voters in Scotland who haven’t already heard the argument that indy equals economic pain.
Yet, recent polling suggests a majority of Scots would now back independence. Boris Johnson and his hard Brexit pals look determined to inflict massive financial pain on the whole country by crashing out of the EU with no deal on October 31.
Good luck making economic arguments against Scottish independence after that.
