In The Times last week Andrew Wilson, chairman of the SNP’s Sustainable Growth Commission, sought to justify his belief that the latest Scottish expenditure and revenue figures showed a problem to which independence must be the answer.
I was reminded of a scene in Blackadder in which our hero visits the quack Dr Leech. After a cursory assessment the doctor announces that a cure has been developed for exactly this problem. Edmund interrupts, asking wearily: “It wouldn’t have anything to do with leeches, would it?”
For Scottish nationalists, the diagnosis is irrelevant because the prescription is always the same. In the 1980s, by laying claim to the riches from North Sea oil, they argued that Scotland was a large net fiscal contributor to the UK.
