Stop lying about GERS

With the SNP’s conference now taking place, shortly after the annual Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland Report (GERS) has just been published, now is an ideal time to stop nationalists’ lies and misdirections and their dismissals about the state of Scotland’s finances.

These dismissals follow the same forms:

GERS is produced by the UK Government to discredit Scotland
GERS does not give a real picture of Scotland’s finances

These are followed by two self-serving arguments:

Scotland’s oil and gas subsidises the rest of the UK
If that’s not the case, then why doesn’t the UK let Scotland go?

Who produces GERS?

It takes but a few seconds to find out who produces GERS. From the Scottish Government’s website:

Who produces GERS?

GERS is produced by Scottish Government statisticians. It is designated as a National Statistics product, which means that it is produced independently of Scottish Ministers and has been assessed by the UK Statistics Authority as being produced in line with the Code of Practice for Statistics. This means the statistics have been found to meet user needs, to be methodologically sound, explained well and produced free of political interference.

That’s more than clear enough. There is no UK plot: the statistics are free of UK and Scottish Government interference. So we’ll move on to the numbers.

What does GERS say?

The core finding is the same as in recent years: Scotland spends more on public services than it raises in taxes. Scotland spends £112 billion on public services, but raises only £86 billion in taxes. This leads to a nominal deficit of just under £23 billion. The UK Government pays the entire £112 billion, covering the shortfall. In other words, Scotland gets £23 billion extra per year more than it raises for Scotland’s public services.

Scotland makes up around 8.2% of the total UK population, but 9.1% of UK public spending was in Scotland. Although some excess may be expected, due to the remoteness of many communities in Scotland, the Scottish Government does not need to fund defence, international affairs and other reserved matters.

This means that every person in Scotland gets £2,417 more than the UK average, helping to protect the NHS, schools, and communities.

Where does the money come from?

This deficit is covered by taxpayers outside of Scotland, primarily those who are living in London and the South East of England.

Scotland had an estimated nominal gross domestic product (GDP) of £218 billion. By contrast, the GDP of London (including London City and the wider metropolitan area) is slightly more than £1.5 trillion. London’s GDP is over nine times bigger than Scotland’s GDP. That GDP generates more taxes and those taxes are spent in the rest of the UK.

If Scotland is such a drag, why don’t they let us go?

This is surely the most tiresome of all dismissals. First of all, who are ‘they’? Of course, the implication is that ‘they’ are the English. However, the decision to fund Scotland is taken by representatives of the entire UK, in the UK Parliament, by the UK Government.

This dismissal is made by those who don’t believe in GERS. They think that the English are holding on to Scotland because of its ‘rich resources’. How many times have we seen the meme that gives a list of Scottish resources, from water, through forestry to, of course, oil, that somehow prove that Scotland is a rich country. But these resources mean nothing if they don’t generate taxes. GERS is the measure of those taxes, and, despite all those resources, there still isn’t enough taxation to cover spending.

But, if we’re talking about regional deficits, why don’t ‘they’ also let go: The North of England, Cornwall, Wales, Northern Ireland and anywhere else outside London and The South East, because they are all supported by the latter two regions’ tax revenues.

But surely ‘oor oil’ is supporting the rest of the UK?

The oil argument is yet another SNP-sponsored myth, like their often repeated ‘Scotland subsidises England’ assertion. Of the £218 billion GDP mentioned above, just £4 billion comes from oil and gas extraction.

But, more importantly, it wouldn’t matter if Scotland contributed £100 billion. The oil never ‘belonged’ to Scotland. It was, and is, UK oil. It was, and is, in UK territorial waters. It was, and is, licensed for extraction by the UK Government, and was, and is, taxed by the UK Government. The oil argument is one purely based on greed: ‘Our region of the UK has become rich, but instead of sharing with the rest of the UK, we want to separate, build a wall between us, and keep the money for ourselves.’

Despite oil revenues dwindling to a trickle, nationalists are still trying to say Scotland is stealing, although, these days, it has moved on to water and electricity. This is because the underlying psychology that drives nationalism is greed. Greedy people always think someone is stealing from them. Usually, though, it doesn’t become an entire political movement.

We are actually better together

GERS underlines the collective economic strength of being in the United Kingdom. The pooling and sharing of resources across the UK means that Scots benefit by £2,417 more per head in public spending than the UK average, which equates to substantially more money for schools, hospitals and other public services.

Separating Scotland from the rest of the UK would mean the end of such fiscal transfers and so, vastly less money for Scotland’s public services, coupled with ultra-austerity in order to finance the risible services that would exist.

England, or the UK, doesn’t steal Scotland’s money. Scotland pays its share into the collective UK pot, like England, Wales and Northern Ireland do, and that significantly increases the UK’s overall economic standing in the world by several places.

But it is important to note that the UK is not a collection of regions held together by fiscal transfers. In addition to our shared financial support, the UK benefits hugely from shared political, social, cultural, and military institutions and heritage.

They deny it because it’s real

Separatists deny GERS because the truth hurts. Rather than create a plan for economic growth, they would rather mislead their followers by indulging their grievances that the English are stealing from Scots, when in fact, nationalists are the ungrateful recipients of financial transfers that can only happen by pooling and sharing across the entire UK. It’s time they stopped denying reality and put their greed-driven fantasies and Anglophobia away.

House of Commons Library: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04033/

The Office for National Statistics: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/publicsectorfinance/articles/countryandregionalpublicsectorfinances/financialyearending2023

Scottish Executive (Holyrood) website: https://www.gov.scot/publications/government-expenditure-revenue-scotland-gers-2023-24/

Written by Stephen Bailey. Stephen is a commentator on UK constitutional issues.