Pity Stewart Hosie, the SNP’s deputy leader. He appeared on the Daily Politics today to defend the party’s North Sea oil revenue projections and its record in government on health spending. He seemed rather unprepared. When questioned by Andrew Neil on the SNP’s comically inaccurate projections for oil revenue (it expected over £8 billion by now; only £500 million emerged), he was asked how on earth he would have filled that gap. Would he have cut spending by 14 per cent, raised taxes by 16 per cent — or a combination of the two? ‘We didn’t win the referendum, Andrew,’ he said — as if that were an answer. He then went on:
‘Every time I’m on this programme, you seem to want to fight last year’s referendum…The gap that requires to be filled at the moment is at a UK level because every penny of oil and gas revenue ever has gone and still goes to UK exchequer… I think more important that the hypothetical of what if we’d won is where are we now’.
But there is nothing hypothetical about the simple fact that the SNP based its prospectus for independence on oil price projections that were 16 times higher than the outcome.
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