Milton view Anti indy sums ‘wrong’
Dear Editor In a recent letter Raymond Knight did his best to paint a miserable picture of Scotland’s finances.
If one took on board all his points you would be as well pulling the covers back over your head every morning.
Scotland sounds like a dreadful, run down place - “no shipbuilding, steel, coal”. Well, whose fault is that, if not successive Westminster governments? Not entirely accurate though, is it? We still have shipbuilding, though many jobs are dependent on the type 26 frigates order promised before the independence referendum.
Many workers on the Clyde voted No because they believed their jobs depended on future orders from the UK Government and they now face an unnecessary sweat to see if these orders will be delivered. And maybe the news that the Scottish Government recently helped save the steel plant in Motherwell did not reach him in Shropshire.
He places a lot of faith in what Westminster said pre-indyref. Job losses at government offices for instance. But the obvious response is that a newly formed Scottish state would require thousands of new jobs in their departments. Similarly, a new Scottish military and navy would keep existing jobs and likely create many new ones.
Faslane would not close for instance when we get rid of Trident, it would become a conventional naval base and the joint HQ for defence forces of an independent Scotland.
Major banks and businesses threatened to pull out pre-indyref; then after we did what they wanted us to do and voted No, decided to scale down their Scottish operations anyway. On September 19th 2014, as Scotland woke up to a No vote, it was reported in The Independent that “banks and financial giants refused to give concrete guarantees to retain their headquarters in Scotland despite the No vote” and indeed in February of this year it emerged that Scottish Widows had transferred billions of pounds of its long-term insurance business to London.
The Sunday Times said this move “rekindled fears for Scotland’s standing as a financial centre”. Never trust the banks, might be a useful motto to live your life by!
As for his point about Scotland being responsible for the infrastructure of the nation, well, of course it would. That’s the point of being independent and Scotland is surely better placed to run it assuredly and progressively than Westminster, where we will never be the number one priority. Other countries the world over somehow seem to manage it or does Mr Knight see Scotland as being singularly incapable of looking after itself? Many of these successful countries are also landlocked and have no oil fields or the potential, as Scotland has, of a massive new tidal energy boom.
As for joining the EU, (and of course we were told adamantly that to stay in the EU we had to vote No), there may well be costs involved but being independent also saves us some money. For example, Scotland’s current nominal defence budget is £3.3bn a year. The SNP in their White Paper planned to spend £2.5bn. That would have freed up £800m every single year.
Scotland is also due to contribute it’s population share of the cost to the HS2 rail link between London and Birmingham. The cost of the link has spiralled from £42.6bn in 2014 to £56bn today and we are expected to contribute £4.7bn over the course of the project, but watch this space as the costs are only going in one direction.
The current 28 EU nations (not 26 as Mr Knight stated) are extremely unlikely to make an independent Scotland wait “10/15 years”. A bit of googling would confirm German Social Democrat Thomas Opperman, top MEP and key ally of Angela Merkel, Manfred Weber, Spanish foreign minister Jose Manuel Garciamargallo, the Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny, and many others making very encouraging comments. A typical one came from Austria’s honorary consul John Clifford who said “it is clear that were Scotland to become independent, it would be welcome in the EU. There would be no question about that”.
Here’s a good news story from the last month that Mr Knight may have missed. Scotland’s Food and Drink sector generated a record annual turnover of £14.4bn in 2014. It increased at nearly twice the rate of the UK average from 2008-2014.
Maybe instead of talking down Scotland, Mr Knight should have a bit of faith in Scotland and open his eyes to the amazing wealth we would have at our disposal.
Scott Harrison,hamilton