Michael Fry: Greece with no sunshine? Scotland is much better placed

Visitors will find it agreeable in far more than the speed and efficiency with which it whisks them from Omonia to Piraeus. Cool and cavernous, the system is air-conditioned throughout. You can entertain yourself by looking at videos on the plasma screens. Unusually for a laid-back Mediterranean country, the trains run on time.

Best of all, none of this need cost even a euro – good for Athenians who are so short of them. With no barriers to prevent free entry or exit at the stations, they are requested instead to get a ticket stamped before they board the train.

Do they bother? Well, it is a laid-back Mediterranean country.

It is altogether remarkable how soon in such an environment even world-beating new installations fit into the local culture. The perks on the trains are not confined to the customers. The average salary on Greek railways is £60,000 a year, which includes cleaners and track-workers: about three times the normal pay in the private sector. While the revenue from sales of tickets is an annual £80 million, the wage-bill is £500 million. As a result, it is actually cheaper to fly the 500 kilometres from Athens to Salonika than to go by train. Except for the tourist, a cushy time is had by all.

The situation certainly puts Scotland’s troubles with Abellio into perspective. But now a Tory think-tank in London, the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), has tried to make rather more of the evidence than it will bear, and tell us independent Scotland would be bound to sink to the economic level of independent Greece.

This is basically a feeble final throw from Project Fear. It entirely ignores the fact that, unlike Scotland, Greece is only just starting to emerge from an unsuccessful defence of its previously bloated public sector. The effort geared up with the election of the leftist coalition, Syriza, early in 2015. The new Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, sent his funky Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, round the chancelleries of Europe seeking support for a halt to austerity in Greece.

Varoufakis got nowhere and resigned. Now it is Tsipras that legislates for the cuts, on the grounds of it being at least better for a Greek to wield the axe. He does so rather skilfully, as a matter of fact, to great applause in Brussels and Berlin.

Greeks have tended to blame on privatisation some economic problems that lie far deeper. The private sector is where the brunt of the austerity has been borne, and it is former employees of the private sector that we have seen on TV pathetically begging in the streets of Athens. Not that the Greek private sector is especially virtuous.

When Varoufakis met his counterpart in Berlin, Wolfgang Schäuble, he was offered 500 German tax inspectors to stop all the fiddles that go on in industry and commerce. In Germany, by contrast with Greece, both the private and the public sector usually do what they say they are going to do. Now the Greeks are getting to be a bit more like the Germans. It is good for them and their country.

A comparison between Greece and the UK is perhaps yet more instructive. The Greeks with their many publicly owned industries till recently remained stuck in a position we abandoned more than 30 years ago. Nobody would pretend that the process of privatisation in Britain was always easy, or that its results are in every instance perfect.

But just think of the times when, to get a telephone, you needed to make a formal application to a public authority (which, I suppose, could have refused it) and of now, when you just walk into a shop to pick up the latest gadget. It is the difference between an antiquated, state-run economy and an economy of the 21st century – also the difference, in the era of globalisation, between failure and success.

Scotland has fully accomplished this transition to the global economy. We export more than half of our total output: oil, whisky, financial services. Greece exports little more than a quarter of its total output, of which the biggest single sector is fruit and vegetables. It has yet to accomplish the transition to the global economy.

Only a Scotland similarly reduced to exporting kale and oatmeal could vindicate the more frivolous fantasies of CPS. But Scotland will not turn into Greece without the sunshine so long as Scotland has a much more advanced economic structure than Greece has – which is likely to be a good while yet.

Matters of economic structure are also something separate from the financial repercussions, good or bad, that may flow from them. The structure endures, the finances fluctuate.

After long mismanagement, Greece has built up official debt amounting to 180 per cent of its gross domestic product. Scotland, not yet being a sovereign state, has no official debt. This also means we are in strict legal terms not liable for any of the existing UK debt, as we have never been a contracting party to it. Accordingly, before the Scottish referendum in 2014 the Treasury announced it would honour that debt in its entirety whatever the result of the vote. Alex Salmond then promised Scotland would pay its whack anyway. We still cannot put a figure on this, as it would have been the outcome of negotiations between a departing Scotland and the UK it was leaving behind.

Perhaps Alex was being too generous. After the dishonesty of Project Fear, repeated and even magnified on both sides in the European referendum, my own advice would be that after independence we should start our debt with a clean sheet. We would be the new kids on the block, so we would be paying a higher premium on fresh borrowings anyway.

But that would induce prudence in the liberated Scotland from the start, and soon bring the cost of borrowing down. Call it austerity if you like, yet it looks far preferable to having a reborn nation continue to flounder in the financial troubles of somebody else’s past.