IT'S GERSmas day.

GERS (Government Expenditure and Revenues Scotland) is the annual present for British nationalists instituted by Conservative Scottish Secretary Ian Lang in the early 1990s in order to provide a political tool to use against those arguing for greater Scottish self-government. Thirty years later and it is still fulfilling that purpose.

The GERS figures form the foundation of British nationalist arguments that an independent Scotland would be unable to maintain current levels of public spending, far less to increase them. As such, they are fiercely defended by diehard opponents of Scottish independence who treat what is essentially a political exercise as a species of holy writ which it is heretical to criticise.

However, even the most ardent supporters of the GERS figures reluctantly concede that they tell us nothing at all about the finances of an independent Scotland – even as they use the figures to argue that they 'prove' that an independent Scotland would be an economic basket case with a huge and unsustainable deficit.

The truth is that the figures only give us a snapshot of how Scotland performed financially over the past year as a part of the UK. The entire point of independence is to give the Scottish Government the ability to make different decisions from the UK Government across the entire range of governmental revenue raising and spending.

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So, by definition the GERS figures cannot tell us anything meaningful about the financial position of an independent Scotland, not even as an initial starting point as this would depend upon how assets and liabilities are allocated during the process of negotiating Scottish independence (something which the GERS figures are not capable of reflecting). The figures do not and cannot model scenarios in which the government of an independent Scotland would have the ability to make its own financial choices.

41% of the total expenditure in the figures relates to reserved spending administered by Westminster, a substantial proportion of which consists of spending outside Scotland which is notionally on Scotland's behalf. But if much of the spending is notional, then so is the deficit which the GERS figures assign to Scotland. The headline deficit in the GERS figures is a Westminster created deficit which Westminster allocates to Scotland and then uses to tell us that we are too poor to become independent.

Every year the GERS figures claim to show that Scotland has a huge deficit and Tory and Labour politicians come crowing about a supposed "union benefit." This year that notional deficit is lower than last year thanks to increased revenues from North Sea oil and gas. However, that £9 billion in increased revenues has vanished into the maws of the UK Treasury, it will not be going to fund a just transition in Scotland to a zero-carbon economy.

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Yet the Scottish Government has very limited borrowing powers, so who is responsible for that notional deficit? In a video published on TikTok, economist Richard Murphy, a noted critic of the GERS pantomime, said: "If the Scottish Government and Scottish local authorities aren't, well it has to be the government in Westminster.

“That is the only possible answer. What GERS shows this year more clearly than ever is that the UK Government is dumping costs on Scotland, has no idea how to control them, has no one, including the Secretary of State for Scotland, who is accountable for them and as a result is making a complete mess of its Scottish affairs.

“That's what GERS says, that's what it's about, and the answer is very clearly - get rid of the influence of the government in Westminster on the affairs of Scotland."

In a nutshell, the GERS figures show only that this so-called union doesn't work for Scotland. If it was working, why is Scotland so much worse off, compared to other similar sized European nations, when it has such an abundance of resources?

Support for independence remains strong in latest poll

Meanwhile, yet another opinion poll shows that support for Scottish independence remains unaffected by the current difficulties of the SNP. YouGov, which typically reports lower levels of support for independence than other polling companies, puts support for independence up three points on 42%, with opposition at 44%, when don't knows are removed. This gives a result of 48.9% for independence.

However, YouGov is one of those polling companies which continues to weigh its poll according to the outcome of the 2014 referendum, which was nine years ago. There are good reasons to believe that this practice, which certainly aided accuracy in the years immediately after the referendum, is working to artificially deflate the true level of pro-independence support.

The same poll also shows that Labour would win 22 seats in a Westminster General Election while the SNP would be reduced to 26. The poll also forecasts that the Tories and the Lib Dems would each hold their current seats. However, the success of Labour comes at the expense of the Tories, not the SNP, and the same poll still forecasts a pro-independence majority in the next Scottish Parliament with the Greens winning ten seats.

The message is that the SNP needs to motivate the pro-independence vote to turn out for the party at the next General Election. For Labour the warning is that the independence issue is not going to go away unless it moves on from an anti-democratic refusal to countenance another independence referendum.

Russian spy or future UK cabinet minister?

Eyebrows have been raised in certain quarters over reports that a Bulgarian national based in the South of England for allegedly spying for Russia worked on providing courses in British values for migrants seeking permanent residency in the UK or attaining British citizenship.

While of course everyone is presumed to be innocent until convicted in a court of law, it is worth pointing out that there are few values that are more British than deceit and betrayal.