It's GERSMas day, the day of the annual present gifted to anti-independencecampaigners by the British state. We need to stop any pretence that the purpose of the yearly GERS (Government Expenditure and Revenues Scotland) figures is to give the public an accurate picture of Scotland's financial position.

The purpose of GERS is now and has always been to provide political ammunition for those who are arguing against greater self-government for Scotland. That was the case when GERS was conceived by the then Conservative Scottish secretary of state Ian Lang in the 1990s when the Conservative Government was trying to fend off the increasing clamour in Scotland for a Scottish Parliament and for a significant degree of Scottish autonomy.

According to the original correspondence between Lang and civil servants, which was leaked almost twenty years ago, Lang wanted a tool to "undermine the other parties" which were arguing for greater Scottish self-government, and hailed the first publication of the GERS figures in 1992, saying: "This initiative could score against all of them."

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Brian Taylor, formerly the BBC political editor, observed in 2016 that: "GERS was intended, in part, to demonstrate to the public that devolved self-government was a bad thing."

It has been known for decades that the primary purpose of the annual publication of the GERS statistics is political, not economic, and that the raison d'etre of GERS is to provide those parties arguing against greater Scottish self-government with sound bites and headlines that they can use in pursuit of their political goals. 30 years on from their first publication, the GERS figures are still providing that political service to the parties which are opposed to greater Scottish self-government, and are still being uncritically publicised by an overwhelmingly anti-independence Scottish media as “proof” that Scotland is an economic basket case with a hugely bloated deficit.

One way in which it should be obvious that GERS is a nakedly political exercise is that the figures are routinely presented with and without the inclusion of revenues from the North Sea. There is absolutely no economic justification for singling out a country's revenues from one arbitrary source and deciding to discount them. The only reason this is done in the GERS figures is to further the hoary old anti-independence narrative that "the oil is running out" and to create public uncertainty about Scotland's right to the ownership of its own national resources.

READ MORE: GERS figures show sharp decrease in Scotland's deficit

The value of the GERS figures as a propaganda tool for opponents of independence is immense. It is so weighty that any criticism of the figures or their methodology as "GERS denial" – despite even their advocates admitting the figures have little bearing on the finances of an independent Scotland – is portrayed as a conspiracy theory equivalent to the denial of climate change, the efficacy of vaccines, or evolution.

Serious economists such as Richard Murphy or Professor David Simpson, founding director of the Fraser of Allander Institute at Strathclyde University have made serious criticisms of the methodology behind GERS, with Professor Simpson calling for the Scottish Government to stop publishing the statistics. He has argued that they do not present the true economic position of Scotland and points out that they are misinterpreted every year by opponents of independence who use them as a justification for Scotland to remain in the UK.

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Professor Simpson has said that the Scottish “fiscal deficit”, which is loudly trumpeted every year by the anti-independence parties upon the publication of GERS, does not correspond to the measure of a fiscal deficit used by other countries. In Scotland's case, “expenditure” includes spending that is not actually made by the Scottish Government, which is obliged under the terms of the devolution settlement to balance its books every year, but which is allocated to Scotland by the British Government. This includes many items which an independent Scotland would not spend money on, such as Trident, or the costs of Brexit.

However, GERS is regularly used by opponents of independence to castigate the Scottish Government for its supposedly poor management of Scotland's finances despite most of the economic-financial levers being reserved to the UK Government.

Scotland requires accurate financial information, but the anti-independence propaganda of GERS is not it.