Talking-up Scotland

As the Scottish media hang on grimly to the supposed negative economic picture for Scotland revealed by GDP and GERS figures, a continuous flow of evidence of real strength comes in.

Today Insider online business magazine reports:

The number of businesses failing in Scotland last year dropped to lows not seen since the onset of the financial crash in 2008, new figures have suggested. According to statistics gathered by accountancy group KPMG, there were 832 corporate insolvencies in Scotland in 2017, the least for nine years, when 803 were recorded.’

https://www.insider.co.uk/news/business-failures-scotland-lowest-2008-11892829

This news is just the latest of a series of reports revealing underlying and growing strength in the Scottish economy, actively supported by the SNP administration, such as:

England ran a massive trade deficit in 2014 and 2015 too. Scotland had an even greater surplus in those years. Who knows how much we’ve been subsidising the UK balance of payments and reducing debt over the years?

Business booms in Scotland under SNP-rule

77% of Scotland’s small and medium-sized businesses report success as Scottish Government reports record numbers exempt from rates and in the wake of figures revealing much greater signs of distress among rUK businesses.

£226 million given in relief to small businesses in 2017-18 as part of most generous scheme in the UK

40% increase in number of new Scottish businesses mainly under SNP government

There are many more comparable reports on the site. Just search for ‘business’ if you’d like to access them to win an argument. These are factual, evidence-based reports unlike GDP and GERS. Both are heavily based on estimates rather than actual measures because the latter are not available for Scotland on its own. See this on GERS:

25 of the 26 GERS income figures are estimates and not the real figures!

As for GDP, even the DAVOS elite have turned against it. See this from 2016:

‘Three leading economists and academics at Davos agree: GDP is a poor way of assessing the health of our economies and we urgently need to find a new measure. Speaking in different sessions, IMF head Christine Lagarde, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, and MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson stressed that as the world changes, so too should the way we measure progress. A country’s GDP is an estimate of the total value of goods and services they produce. But even when the concept was first developed back in the late 1930s, the man behind it, Simon Kuznets, warned it was not a suitable measure of a country’s economic development: “He understood that GDP is not a welfare measure, it is not a measure of how well we are all doing. It counts the things that we’re buying and selling, but it’s quite possible for GDP to go in the opposite direction of welfare.”’

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/gdp/

Despite this, the Scottish media continue to use these unreliable and inappropriate figures to undermine the case for Scottish independence because they’re all they have.