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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
Andrew Sparrow

SNP's economic plan for independence means 'decade of austerity', says Scottish Labour - Politics live

The Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon receiving a copy of the sustainable growth commission report from commission chair Andrew Wilson.
The Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon receiving a copy of the sustainable growth commission report from commission chair Andrew Wilson. Photograph: Gordon Terris/The Herald/PA

Here is some more reaction to the SNP’s sustainable growth commission report.

From the Scottish Liberal Democrats

From Richard Murphy, a tax justice campaigner whose ideas were popular with Jeremy Corbyn when Corbyn was campaigning for the Labour leadership in 2015

Here is the Times’ columnist Kenny Farquharson on the SNP’s sustainable growth commission report.

SNP growth commission report - Severin Carrell's analysis

The long-awaited Scottish growth commission report has been touted as a prospectus for Scotland’s independence. But if voters or activists hope for a full assessment of Scotland’s spending, liabilities and its economy, it falls well short on several key and significant points.

One of the biggest gaps is in offering a full analysis of Scotland’s real economy, and the great extent to which it owned by foreign or non-Scottish companies, firms which therefore export profits, dividends and intellectual property.

Nearly all Scotland’s known oil reserves are owned by non-Scottish companies; its whisky industry is dominated by UK and overseas multinationals; its salmon industry is dominated by Norwegian and Ukrainians and its banking and financial sectors dominated by London and foreign entities.

During the last independence referendum, Alex Salmond, the then Scottish National party leader, put a huge stress on Scotland’s apparently buoyant GDP figures. When Scottish revenues were inflated by high oil prices, Salmond used Scottish government civil servants to produce boosterish data sets which showed at one stage Scotland’s GDP was in the global top 10. Once oil revenues evaporated, those boosterish Scottish government reports suddenly stopped coming.

After reading detailed criticisms of this from independent economists, the Guardian did an assessment in 2014 of Scotland’s actual domestically-held wealth using a measure called gross national income (GNI) which accounted as accurately as possible for the high degree of foreign ownership.

An analysis by John McLaren, an economist who gave advice to this SNP study, and Jo Armstrong, found the country’s actual wealth (based on what Scottish companies, institutions and individuals owned) was nearly £3,000 lower per head than its headline GDP figure.

The truth is that Scotland has a branch economy, a subsidiary of the UK and global economy, far more so than many of the small wealthy countries the SNP growth commission reports cites as models today.

The growth commission report also puts heavy emphasis on the UK debts and liabilities without doing any analysis of Scotland’s own debts and liabilities. Those liabilities linked directly to its devolved policy areas, which have mushroomed during the SNP’s tenure and are therefore directly relevant to the SNP’s economic stewardship so far.

In 2015, the Guardian estimated those liabilities, both public and private, would hit £50bn. Rail debt for Scottish railway investments were forecast to reach £5bn by 2019 (although that figure has fallen lately); local government debt hit £15bn two years ago while the Scottish Futures Trust, which specialises in a new form of private finance initiative-style school, roads, hospitals and college buildings contracts, has added another £6bn in liabilities to the Scottish sector’s books since Salmond set it up. At the same time, Scottish households were forecast to owe up to £6bn in student debt.

That leads to a third odd omission: there is no discussion about the absence of and need for whole government accounts in Scotland, which cover all the country’s devolved debts and liabilities and assets. This is central to any informed discussion about the financial health and sustainability of Scotland’s public sector, and therefore the SNP’s own economic competence.

The Wilson report talks at length about the UK’s whole government accounts, which provide an extremely detailed assessment of its assets, liabilities and debts. So why not get the same for Scotland? There have been long-standing complaints about their lack from Caroline Gardner, the auditor general for Scotland.

A spokesman for Wilson said:

The commission’s research included a full analysis of the assets and liabilities of the UK government, including the assets and liabilities directly associated with the Scottish government and with other Scottish public sector organisations. As with all other parts of the report, it is a summary of this that appears in the report.

Yet if any observer wanted a deep and detailed understanding of the economics of independence, you need a deep and detailed understanding of the country’s current economics. The SNP never talks about GNI; it never talks about the scale of devolved own debts and liabilities and it is only now working on Scottish whole government accounts. Some 20 months in the making, this report has not filled any of those gaps.

Peter Kellner, the polling expert and former YouGov president, has written a fascinating article for Prospect. He has been looking at the data from 14 YouGov polls on Brexit this year, involving responses from more than 23,000 voters, and he claims the figures show that “public opinion is stirring” and that “significant numbers of younger Leave voters, as well as those supporting Labour in last year’s election, no longer think Brexit is right for Britain.”

A normal poll does not contain enough responses from sub-groups (eg leave voting women under 40) for the data about how opinion in that group is shifting to be valid. But, by looking at the results from 14 polls, Kellner thinks he has been able to pick up valid information about how certain groups have having second thoughts. He explains:

While movements have indeed been small among many sections, they have been much larger in some politically important groups.

Consider Labour voters. They divided two-to-one for remain in the referendum. The large number of Labour leave voters in party strongholds in the North and Midlands is one reason why the party leadership and some of its MPs are wary of proclaiming a pro-European stance. However, YouGov’s combined data, which includes 7,671 people who voted Labour last year, reveals a marked shift. While only 7 per cent of Labour remain voters are having second thoughts (changing their minds or saying “don’t know”), as many as 28 per cent of Labour leave voters no longer back Brexit. Now Labour’s voters divide almost three-to-one in saying Brexit was the wrong choice. Pro-European Labour MPs have less reason to fear the views of their constituents.

This chart sets out the figures.

How different groups have changed their views on Brexit
How different groups have changed their views on Brexit Photograph: Prospect

Kellner also argues that demographic changes have increased the chances of people voting to remain in a second referendum.

Since the referendum around 1.2m electors have died, while 1.4m have joined the electorate. If we extrapolate from YouGov’s data from the youngest and oldest voters, and take account of variations in turnout by age, then I reckon that around 600,000 leave voters, and 300,000 remain voters have died; while 650,000 young remainers and 150,000 leave supporters have joined the voting population. Combine these figures, and these demographic factors have given us 350,000 extra remain voters and 450,000 fewer leave voters.

In the 2016 referendum, the 17.4m Leave voters outnumbered the 16.1m Remain voters by 1.3m. Demography has already reduced that lead by more than half.

Kelner concludes:

Indeed, given the softness of the Leave support among Labour voters, it is possible that, IF there were a new referendum and IF the Labour party campaigned actively to stay in the EU, then the remain majority could be substantial.

Of course, those are both colossal ifs. At the moment neither seems probable.

The SNP does not seem over-keen to talk about the sustainable growth commission report.

This morning the Good Morning Scotland presenter Gary Robertson tweeted this (in response to someone who complained about why there was not a senior SNP minister on the programme.)

Sturgeon has tweeted about the report.

But she also tweeted this a few hours later.

She was commenting on this announcement.

Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Conservative leader, told the World at One that the plan in the SNP’s sustainable growth commission report for an independent Scotland to carry on using the pound would mean it would be using “the currency of what would then be a foreign country without asking, without their own central bank and without any backstops”.

She also mocked the decision to make attracting more immigrant workers a key feature of the SNP’s economic blueprint for independence.

The issue in Scotland is that we have a third of the landmass of the UK, we have 8.3% of the population, we have only a fraction of the people that come to the UK wanting to come to Scotland - I think in the last figures this was about 4%. Why is it we are not as attractive as some other parts of the United Kingdom in the same year that we have whacked taxes up so we are the highest taxed part of the UK?

Boris Johnson says Russia must accept responsibility for downing of Flight MH17

Britain has backed international demands for Russia to be held accountable for the downing of a Malaysian Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine nearly four years ago, killing all 298 people on board. In a statement following yesterday’s announcement by international investigators saying they have established that a Russian military missile was responsible for bringing down Flight MH17, Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, said the attack was “an egregious example of the Kremlin’s disregard for innocent life”. He said:

The Kremlin believes it can act with impunity. The Russian government must now answer for its actions in relation to the downing of MH17. The UK fully supports Australia and the Netherlands in their request to the Russian Federation to accept state responsibility, and to cooperate with them in their efforts to deliver justice for the victims of this tragedy.

Instead of seeking to undermine the investigation through the deluge of disinformation we have seen from Russia about MH17 in the past, the Russian Federation must fulfil its obligations under UN security council resolution 2166 to provide any requested assistance to the investigation. To do otherwise would be a violation of the UN’s resolution, and to deny the families the justice they seek for their loved ones.

A damaged missile is displayed during a news conference yesterday by the joint investigation team inquiring into the downing of MH17.
A damaged missile is displayed during a news conference yesterday by the joint investigation team inquiring into the downing of MH17. Photograph: Francois Lenoir/Reuters

Updated

Scottish Labour says SNP's economic plan for independence means 'decade of austerity'

The Scottish Labour party says the SNP’s sustainable growth commission report amounts to a blueprint for austerity because it envisages up to a decade of deficit reduction. This is from the Scottish Labour leader, Richard Leonard.

This was branded the growth commission, but it’s really a cuts commission.

Proposals to cut Scotland’s deficit by almost two thirds over a decade would result in a level of austerity that not even George Osborne attempted.

The people of Scotland cannot afford another wasted decade under the mantra of deficit reduction.

Key arguments around currency and debt simply sum up why leaving the UK would not be in the interests of Scotland. The SNP suggest that a separate Scotland would pay the rest of the UK £5bn a year to hold and service our debt. That is the equivalent of the entire education and justice budgets.

And this is what Leonard said about the proposal for an independent Scotland to carry on using the pound.

On currency, the SNP has outlined a plan which would mean Scotland has less independence, not more.

A separate Scotland outside of the UK seeking to use the pound is a recipe for instability and is the economics of dereliction. We would give up our say over interest rate policy, exchange rate policy and inflation.

The plans would leave an independent Scotland as a rule taker not a rule maker.

The SNP is proposing a decade of unprecedented austerity and no control over the value of their wages, rent and mortgages.

Richard Leonard (left) with Jeremy Corbyn in Glasgow earlier this month.
Richard Leonard (left) with Jeremy Corbyn in Glasgow earlier this month.
 Photograph: Robert Perry/Getty Images

Four politics books worth reading

One of the perks of my job is that quite a lot of new politics books land on my desk. Most of them get read, and I try to ensure the good ones get a plug. Here are four that that have been published recently that I would strongly recommend.

Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain by Robert Saunders: This is outstanding - probably the most impressive book on Britain’s relationship with Europe since the Hugo Young classic This Blessed Plot, which in some respects it challenges. It is primarily a book about the 1975 referendum campaign (about which Saunders seems to have read everything ever written), but what makes it topical is the way Saunders anchors that campaign firmly as part of the long story of our out-in-out engagement with the EU. Scrupulously neutral, it helps explain 2016. And it is also exceptionally well written.

Sample quotes

It did not help that the Antis themselves insisted on talking of the ‘common market’. This was a conscious tactical decision which was intended to rally left-wing opposition. Portraying the European project as a capitalist enterprise that was incompatible with socialism was useful in mobilising the left, but made it harder to argue that what was truly at stake was the distribution of power. The idea that the public had been sold a lie in 1975 - that they had voted for a ‘common market’, not a political project - would become central to Euroscepticism in the 1990s; but it was the ‘Antis’ themselves who had framed the issue in this way.

For the Six, membership was associated with the extraordinary growth rates of the post-war decades, known variously as the “trentes glorieuses’, the ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ and the ‘miracolo economico’. For states like Spain, Greece and Portugal, membership was associated with the transition from military rule and fascism. For the former Eastern bloc, the EU had eased the transition to democracy and a market economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Had the UK developed such a story, it would presumably have centred on the economic transformation of the late twentieth century, as the struggling economy of the 1970s reinvented itself as one of the most dynamic participants in the global market. This this never happened owed more to the domestic politics of the 1980s than to the inherent viability of such a narrative. The right preferred to credit the government of Margaret Thatcher and an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ economic model that seemed at odds with the culture of western Europe; while the left viewed the Thatcher era as a time of economic failure, scarred by deindustrialisation, mass unemployment and inequality.

Yes to Europe! by Robert Saunders
Yes to Europe! by Robert Saunders Photograph: PR

Punch and Judy Politics - An Insiders’ Guide to Prime Minister’s Questions by Ayesha Hazarika and Tom Hamilton: PMQs has been a Westminster fixture for more than 50 years but, surprisingly, no one has written a proper book about it until now. But it was almost worth the wait because this one is first-rate. Hazarika and Hamilton are former Labour staffers from the Miliband/Harman/Brown eras, but they have interviewed a lot of other figures who have had to prepare for PMQs and, although the book contains a bit of history and some nice gossip, mostly it is devoted to a remarkably shrewd, well-argued and plausible assessment of what works and doesn’t work at this key encounter.

Sample quotes

One of the most surprising things about Corbyn’s early PMQs prep sessions was his own surprise at the ability of the stand-in to predict David Cameron’s answers. He remarked on this several times in his first few months, slightly to our embarrassment. Corbyn acted as if this was some form of telepathy, rather than the product of being interested in politics and paying attention to what Cameron and the Tories were saying about things ... Addressing people who didn’t simply take it as read that the Conservative party was bad and wrong seemed to be a new experience for him.

The case for PMQs is not that with a few deft questions a leader of the opposition, or even a backbench MP, can expose the hollowness of a government’s entire programme and bring down a prime minister. That would be to expect too much of it, and to misunderstand its role. PMQs is a weekly routine check-up, not major surgery. It helps governments to discover weaknesses and problems, and to take action to rectify them. It helps both sides to test arguments that they will later make elsewhere ... In a world in which much of politics consists of two sides making their case independently of each other to separate audiences, it forces a direct clash of arguments, and of the skills of the two people entrusted by their parties with making those arguments, in the same place at the same time.

The End of British Party Politics by Roger Awan-Scully: People talk about British politics but at the 2015 general election, for the first time, and then again in 2017, four separate parties won in each of the four nations of the United Kingdom. This short book explains how that came about and why it matters. It is not much more than an extended essay, and it is not a history of nationalism, focusing as it does on party politics and elections, but Awan-Scully, an academic, presents a compelling case, and even readers who know this territory well will learn something new. If a chunk of the UK does fall off at some point in the next few decades (as seems very possible, but not probable), this will be one of the key books that explains why.

Sample quotes

Indeed, in some respects the House of Commons increasingly resembles the European parliament - whose members are all democratically chosen, but from a disconnected series of separate national contests. This, it will be argued in the concluding chapter, is deeply problematic for the long-term unity and integrity of the UK. In the absence of a genuinely British party politics, the British state may have a limited life expectancy as a continuing and united entity.

Less than a century ago, the UK lost a greater proportion of its core territory - through Irish independence - than Germany lost a few years previously via the Treaty of Versailles. And less than five years ago, the UK narrowly avoided what was not so much another bullet as a large piece of artillery munition, when perilously close to half of those voting in Scotland voted for independence. The political history of what is now the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not remotely the story of continuity and stability that many would like to think it is.

Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan: I don’t normally plug fiction but I’m making an exception because a) Vaughan is a former Guardian and lobby colleague and b) this is excellent. It’s a political/legal thriller about the rape of a parliamentary aide. The research and the detail are good, and Vaughan describes a certain political character type well, but the main virtue of the book is that it’s totally, utterly gripping.

Anatomy of a Scandal Sarah Vaughan
Anatomy of a Scandal Sarah Vaughan Photograph: PR Company Handout

Jeremy Corbyn with Professor Deirdre Heenan (centre) and shadow Northern Ireland secretary Tony Lloyd (right) during a visit to Lifford Bridge on the Irish border
Jeremy Corbyn with Professor Deirdre Heenan (centre) and shadow Northern Ireland secretary Tony Lloyd (right) during a visit to Lifford Bridge on the Irish border Photograph: Liam McBurney/PA

More from my colleague Severin Carrell on the sustainable growth commission report.

Here is his news story about the report.

And this is how it starts.

An independent Scotland would need to cut spending, delay launching its own currency and offer tax cuts for migrants, a long-awaited Scottish National party report has said.

The sustainable growth commission report warns that Scotland would need “robust” controls on public spending in the first five to 10 years after independence to cut the country’s large deficit to less than 3% of day-to-day spending.

The paper, commissioned by Nicola Sturgeon, argues that Scotland should aspire to match the economic growth of other small wealthy nations, such as Denmark or Finland, but cautions that it could take a generation to do so.

Updated

Commenting on the sustainable growth commission reports, David Mundell, the Scottish secretary, said:

Scotland voted decisively in 2014 to remain part of the UK. That decision should be respected. The public do not want another divisive independence referendum.

We want to work with the Scottish government to maximise the opportunities our exit from the European Union will bring. We should all put our energies into making sure we get the right deal for Scotland and the rest of the UK as we leave the EU.

My colleague Severin Carrell has more from from sustainable growth commission report.

On Thursdays local council byelections take place. There were six yesterday. Britain Elects has the results.

Sturgeon says she hopes SNP report on 'challenges' posed by independence will trigger debate

In a statement Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, says the sustainable growth commission report “doesn’t shy away from the challenges” an independent Scotland would face. She says:

This report rightly doesn’t shy away from the challenges we face but presents ways in which those challenges can be addressed - and sets out recommendations on currency - which as a country we should all debate and discuss.

Scotland is now in a very different political and economic situation to 2014. There is no status quo and we know that being taken out of Europe and out of a market around eight times bigger than the UK market alone will hit our economy.

That is why it is time to begin a fresh debate and to replace the despair of Brexit with optimism about Scotland’s future.

We look forward to debating the report’s recommendations - both within the SNP and with business, trade unions and communities across Scotland.

Nicola Sturgeon receiving a copy of the sustainable growth commission report from its chair, Andrew Wilson.
Nicola Sturgeon receiving a copy of the sustainable growth commission report from its chair, Andrew Wilson. Photograph: Gordon Terris/The Herald/PA

Here are some excerpts from the SNP’s sustainable growth commission report.

These are from the BBC’s Nick Eardley and the Telegraph’s Simon Johnson.

A new anti-Brexit party that was set up only last year to try to capitalise on what its founders viewed as the neglected ground of British politics has become embroiled in turmoil.

Chris Coghlan, a former counter-terrorism officer and diplomat who was one of the co-founders of Renew, said that he was standing down as its leader and leaving “with a heavy heart”, citing difference with other senior members.

His resignation came as the party’s 17 approved local election candidates passed a no confidence motion in the executive committee and board of the party, which has managed to garner about 7,000 supporters.

A statement issued on their behalf expressed serious concerns over alleged poor governance and financial oversight as well as other issues.

Coghlan said that he was resigning from the party because those in control of the party had refused to recognise the concerns that had been raised.

“The last thing that this country needs is another divided party, so it rather defeats the purpose of Renew I think,” he said, when asked if the party would survive.

Theresa May has spoken to the leaders of British overseas territories with large financial centres following a recent UK law change that will force them to become more transparent, the Press Association reports. She held a conference call last night about the impact of the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act, which came into force on May 23, Downing Street said. An unopposed amendment to the Act means UK territories like the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands will be required to establish public registers of the beneficial ownership of firms in their jurisdictions by the end of 2020. MPs and campaigners have said public registers would make it easier to uncover money-laundering, corruption and tax-dodging.

A Downing Street spokeswoman said that in the conference call, May said she understood the amendment “was a matter of great concern for the leaders and that she was conscious of the strong reactions the issue had provoked in their territories”.

The spokeswoman added:

The prime minister spoke of the government’s efforts to promote public registers of company beneficial ownership as the global standard and reiterated that we would expect other major financial centres, including the crown dependencies, to adopt public registers at that point.

She also welcomed the importance of the existing co-operation of the overseas territories with UK law enforcement agencies and emphasised the need for this to continue and develop.

She invited the leaders on the call to share their positions and opinions on the issue and made clear that the UK’s aim is to secure the best possible outcome in a way that minimises any possible risks to the economies of the overseas territories.

On the subject of bland tweets (see 9.58am), Philip Hammond, the chancellor, is something of a master too. But I think this means he was glad to offload about Galileo. (See 9.47am.)

Jeremy Corbyn is at the Irish border, Sky’s Darren McCaffrey reports.

The sustainable growth commission report website is now up.

Here is a 55-page summary of the report (pdf).

And here is the 354-page report in full (pdf).

The sustainable growth commission report is supposed to be available online at sustainablegrowthcommission.scot. But when I tried it a moment ago all I got was a locked page asking for a password.

But CommonSpace, a Scottish news website, says it has seen a copy. Its story focuses on the currency issue, and here is how it starts.

The final report of the growth commission contains no plan for introducing a Scottish currency, arguing for an independent Scotland to use the UK pound “until the government seeks to do something different” ...

The report does recommend putting in place “the arrangements and financial infrastructure that would support a move to an independent Scottish currency at such time as this was considered appropriate for the Scottish economy”. Appropriateness was defined by six key tests which, if passed, could allow the government to move to a Scottish currency “at some future date”.

Commonly known as Sterlingisation, the policy would mean an independent Scotland would be using pound sterling without any formal agreement with the Bank of England, meaning its monetary policy would be controlled by London.

Advocates say it would mean frictionless cross-border trade with the rest of the UK, Scotland’s largest trading partner, but the move would be an experiment, only being adopted voluntarily by Panama and El Salvador (in those cases utilising the US dollar). Zimbabwe and Ecuador adopted the dollar after their currencies collapsed.

Yesterday, in a briefing from an anonymous source, the EU accused the UK government of “chasing a fantasy” in the Brexit negotiations.

This morning Olly Robbins, the prime minister’s chief civil servant Brexit adviser, has responded by taking to Twitter to defend his team of officials.

The Robbins Twitter account does not have blue tick verification and these are only the second and third tweets he has ever posted. But no one seems to be in any doubt that it is the real Olly Robbins. Only a civil servant could come up with something that bland.

Philip Hammond, the chancellor, has warned that the UK will build its own satellite navigation system to rival the European Union’s €10bn Galileo project if Brussels carries out its threat to block access, my colleague Daniel Boffey reports.

SNP report sets out how Scotland should learn economic lessons from Denmark, Finland and New Zealand

Earlier this week the SNP released one of the key findings of the report; it argues that every Scot could be £4,100 better off if Scotland were able to match the growth rates of other smaller wealthy nations.

The report arrived at this figure by looking at the performance of 12 small advances economies (SAEs). They were Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland. It said that, over the last 25 years, these SAEs had grown more than large economies by around 0.7% per year. A news release issued by the sustainable growth commission said that, if Scotland could emulate this, “this would be worth additional economic output in Scotland equivalent to an extra £4,100 per person in Scotland.” The press notice did not say over what time scale.

But it did say the report would recommend 12 key lessons for an independent Scotland to learn from SAEs, with Denmark, Finland and New Zealand particularly important role models. It said the lessons are:

1. Quality of governance & disciplined public finances

2. Long-term cross partisan strategy

3. Focus on innovation

4. Competitive location for international investment

5. Exploiting Scotland’s resource endowment sustainably

6. Export-orientation

7. Migration-friendly

8. Flexible labour markets combined with fair & progressive workplace & active employment policies including reducing the gender pay gap

9. Highly skilled workforce with transferable skills

10. Taxation for economic development; not competing as low tax location

11. Inclusive growth at the heart of the strategy

12. Quality of life as an asset and objective

In a statement issued as part of the news release, Andrew Wilson, the chair of the commission, said:

As a first step there must be an acceptance that small nations can be successful and that Scotland can be one of those countries. Our work shows that small countries can be amongst the most economically successful countries in the world, with higher standards of living and lower levels of inequality than many larger economies.

There is nothing intrinsic in any of the best performing economies that Scotland does not have. To secure an improvement in our performance will take purposeful strategic effort for over a generation. We require world class policy, world class institutions and cross partisan effort if we are to achieve our ambition to create a much more successful economy and cohesive and fair society.

We have produced a design to demonstrate how Scotland can emulate the best performing economies and societies in the world sustainably. Our sincere hope is that this can raise the content and quality of debate at a time such a focus is sorely needed.

Copenhagen in Denmark, cited in the sustainable growth commission report as one of the models for an independent Scotland to copy.
Copenhagen in Denmark, cited in the sustainable growth commission report as one of the models for an independent Scotland to copy. Photograph: Alexander Demianchuk/TASS

The Scottish independence referendum took place less than four years ago, but in memory it seems to belong to another era. It featured Alex Salmond, David Cameron and Ed Miliband, and one of the more effective arguments used by Cameron and others on the unionist side was that the only way to guarantee that Scotland would stay in the EU would be to vote no to independence. Also, compared to the carnival of mendacity that came two years later when the UK voted on EU membership, it was a serious, mature campaign that, for the most part, saw the issues being debated in a responsible fashion.

And no issue was more important than the economy, and how easily Scotland would manage if it decided to go it alone. Ultimately the SNP could not persuade Scots that they would prosper financially under independence and the no side won quite convincingly. Nicola Sturgeon replaced Salmond as first minister and realised, that if the SNP were to have any chance of winning a second referendum, they would have to go into the campaign with a more robust argument on the economy.

And today we’re going to see their most significant move since 2014 towards the construction of that case. The SNP set up a sustainable growth commission, under the former MSP turned lobbyist Andrew Wilson, to draw up an economic blueprint for an independent Scotland and today that mammoth document is being published.

And overnight a key proposal has emerged. This is from the Press Association report.

An independent Scotland should keep the pound during an extended transition period after leaving the UK, the sustainable growth commission will say.

The report - which was set up by the SNP to look at future economic prospects - is to be published later on Friday morning.

It will outline that sterling should remain as the country’s currency for a period of time after any break from the union, while the first minister has said the commission will “restart the debate” about Scottish independence.

The BBC says the report envisages Scotland keeping the pound for at least 10 years after independence. The currency issue is crucial because, in the referendum in 2014, Salmond’s inability to be able to say with any certainty what currency an independent Scotland would use was a fatal handicap. (He proposed keeping the pound and having a currency union with rUK [the rest of the UK], London ruled this out, and Salmond resorted to claiming they were bluffing.)

The full Wilson report is due out at 9.30am. I will be covering it in detail.

Otherwise it is a relatively quiet day. Jeremy Corbyn is in Northern Ireland visiting the border and Philip Hammond, the chancellor, is at the Ecofin meeting of EU finance ministers in Brussels.

As usual, I will be covering breaking political news as it happens, as well as bringing you the best reaction, comment and analysis from the web. I plan to post a summary at lunchtime and another in the afternoon.

You can read all today’s Guardian politics stories here.

Here is the Politico Europe round-up of this morning’s political news from Jack Blanchard. And here is the PoliticsHome list of today’ top 10 must reads.

If you want to follow me or contact me on Twitter, I’m on @AndrewSparrow.

I try to monitor the comments BTL but normally I find it impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer direct questions, although sometimes I miss them or don’t have time.

If you want to attract my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter.

Updated

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