An independent Scotland could pay its own way<a id="fck_paste_padding"></a>

The Economist has some fun with Scotland this week, running a cover suggesting my motherland would go bust if it was independent. The map has lots of gags: the Outer Hebrides is renamed ‘Outer Cash’, ‘Edinborrow’ twinned with Athens etc. But it suffers from one central defect: the thesis is nonsense. Saying that Scotland would go bust without English subsidy is the clichéd unionist attack line, which has lost force over the decades because it is demonstrably untrue. The emergence of new nation states, many much smaller than Scotland, has shown it that small is viable (something that wasn’t as evident in the 1970s) and even the Economists’ own story has data showing Scotland as the third most prosperous part of the UK, in terms of economic output per head. This rather makes a mockery of The Economist’s cover. Strip out London, and it’s richer than England. Add a slice of the oil, and would Scotland go bust? Of course not, and unionists like myself have learned to stop suggesting otherwise.