The chickens are finally coming home to roost for Alex Salmond and the SNP's grossly over optimistic "False Prospectus" white paper called "Scotland's Future" . A nation might have expected it's senior Politicians to have produced an honest document for a nation to base its decision about its future direction on with perhaps a little bit of "gloss" attached but what it was actually produced was no more than a fantasy using over optimistic Oil "spot" prices, over optimistic Oil revenue growth figures and over optimistic industrial growth predictions while there really was no good economic evidence for doing so.
They were produced for one reckless reason and one reckless reason only ...to try and impose the SNP's singular idealogical reason for existing... Independence. It can now clearly be seen too, if what was for all purposes merely a reckelss gamble, meant risking ruining Scotlands economy for decades and the entire whole economic wellbeing of it's people for their life terms then that for the SNP seniors clearly can be now seen to have be of little primary concern. First and foremost the SNP aim was to win Independence and therefore economic competence and responsibility was the first sacrifice thrown to the wind. Any economic fallout from failure of course wasn't going to hurt highly paid MP's, MSP's and other highly paid members of the SNP political new Scottish establishment near as much as ordinary hard working people, hard working people who with a failed SNP economic plan would have to work harder for longer and pay higher levels of income tax to help bail out the Scottish economy while supporting the SNP failed plans engineers and so called "visionaries" wages and comfortable pension plans.
If the vote had been a YES and Scotland's economy and its people's livelihoods were headed like Lemmings over the cliff of financial ruin what might have Alex Salmond then said ? Well for this we may be able to look to past History because Alex Salmond did actually play more than a bit part in the ruin of the massive and powerful Royal Bank of Scotland by actively encouraging Fred Goodwins reckless behaviour during the takeover of ABN bank just prior to the financial crisis that happened in 2008 (an event strangely that SNP supporters like to blame on Labour) his words were " With Hindsight he would have done things differently" does the man have no shame ? See more here Would he perhaps have used the same phrase and simply walked away into the shadows with a shrug of his shoulders when Scotlands economy had went into meltdown after the massive fall in Oil revenues had left Scotland with a huge spending deficit to fill... its currently about £8-9 billion which if we had voted for Independence would have meant an additional 16% income tax on top of what we already pay or a 14% cut in Welfare support and other spending (including hopefully Gaelic roadsigns but with SNP priorities one never knows) or combinations of both including taking on crushing debts in the money markets for our Children and Grandchildren to have to pay for in future Generations (Think of Greece's experiences recently) This would have been the reality of a YES vote.
Thankfully because the nation voted NO..we really did "dodge a bullet" and our now precarious financial state will effectively be baled out by the larger UK government using the "pooling and sharing " arrangement that we benefit by from being part of the overall Union of the United Kingdom, this essentially means that the Westminster Government will continue to fund our over extended Scottish budget spending deficit thus saving us from hugely painful income tax rises and spending cuts that would have made anything the Tories had inflicted up till now feel like Christmas every day.
If you want to learn about the Scottish economy and how "pooling and sharing" works... watch Kevin Hagues excellent video's here http://chokkablog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/chokkablog-videos.html
Newspaper Article extract on this subject is below
"The SNP’s energy spokesman Callum McCaig has admitted that the Scottish Government will never see the “huge income” from oil revenues that were predicted as the cornerstone of an independent Scotland’s economy.
Aberdeen South MP, Callum McCaig, insisted the industry was still “fundamental” to the country’s fortunes, but that it was now in a “different stage”.
His comments – which will cast major doubts on the economic case for independence – came as the Chief Executive of Oil and Gas UK admitted estimates that 65,000 jobs would be lost in the sector now seemed “conservative”.
Last night, Conservative MSP Alex Johnstone said Scottish people would be “breathing a sigh of relief” that they did not vote Yes “based on the false promise of a second oil boom”."
Mr McCaig told a fringe meeting at the SNP’s conference in Aberdeen yesterday: “We are probably at a different stage in terms of taxation.
Despite admitting that tax revenues would never be what they were predicted to be, Mr McCaig said he was confident the industry would bounce back from its current downturn.
He said: “We are in a different stage in the industry now.
“The exact make-up of that is to be resolved over the coming months as the exact oil price is worked through.
In June, the Scottish Government dramatically downgraded its estimates of oil revenues, with the lowest estimate being slashed by 80% compared to pre-referendum predictions.
North East MSP Mr Johnstone said: “Everyone remembers Alex Salmond saying there was ‘little doubt’ Scotland was on the cusp of another oil boom, but the truth is, it was one of the SNP’s biggest cons during the referendum campaign.
“For months they’ve avoided publishing their own projections, because they knew they were vastly wrong and now we have one of their own MPs admit that fact.
“A huge amount has happened in the oil industry over the last year, not least the massive drop in oil price. Scotland will be breathing a sigh of relief that we didn’t vote Yes based on the false promise of a second oil boom.”
Deirdre Michie chief executive of Oil and Gas UK said: “In our report, we estimate a reduction of jobs in the sector of around 15%. Since the publication of the report we have seen more job losses and we now know that figure is likely to be a conservative one.
“It is always important to remember that these people (losing their jobs) are real people with mortgages and families to support.”
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Alex Salmond was also caught out lying another time during the Independence Referendum notably on the issue of having obtained "legal advice " on Scotland being able to re-join the EU...see text from article below:-
"On almost every critical point raised during the debate about Scotland’s future, Salmond was deliberately misleading. I’m not just thinking of his claim that he’d received legal advice reassuring him that an independent Scotland wouldn’t need to reapply for membership of the European Union. When the Information Commissioner ordered the Scottish government to respond to an FOI request to disclose the advice it had received, Salmond’s ministers spent £19,452.92 of public money appealing the decision, only to admit later that the ‘advice’ was a figment of Salmond’s imagination. So the First Minister misled the Scottish people on this point and spent taxpayers’ money to try to conceal the fact.Then there were the SNP’s fictitious claims about the economic impact of independence — and I’m indebted here to the blogger Kevin Hague, who has devoted years to unpicking the SNP’s rhetoric. For instance, there was the assertion that Scotland sends more money to Westminster than it gets back, thanks to North Sea oil.
If you factor in its share of oil revenue, Scotland has been a net contributor to Britain’s coffers in three of the last 15 years. For the other 12, oil hasn’t been sufficient to offset the fact that the Scottish government spends £1,450 more and raises £250 less per person than the rest of the UK. This makes Salmond’s claim, repeated ad infinitum, that ‘oil is just a bonus’ and Scotland could get along perfectly well without it, even more absurd. If you add the £1,450 and £250 together, you get a per capita gap of £1,700, which means that, without North Sea oil, its deficit would be £9.1 billion higher than it is as part of the UK. It turns out that oil revenue is critical to offsetting the deficit gap, which is presumably why Salmond wildly over-estimated it in the SNP’s white paper on Scotland’s future. In it, he claimed that revenue from North Sea oil in 2016/17 — the first year of Scotland’s independence — would be between £6.8 billion and £7.9 billion. In fact, it’s likely to be around £600 million.
If you deduct the £600 million from the £9.1 billion, that means Scotland would be facing an annual deficit gap of £8.5 billion in its first year of independence and there’s no reason to think that would change over the next ten to 15 years. In order for Scotland to be better off out of the UK, oil revenue would have to increase by several thousand per cent, or the Scottish economy would have to grow by a faster amount than the rest of the UK — around 15 per cent faster. For Scotland to wash its own face would mean massive public spending cuts. Far from imposing austerity on Scotland, the British government is saving Nicola Sturgeon from having to find Greek levels of savings. Who would have thunk it?
The SNP is, by some margin, the most dishonest party in Britain."
For whole article click here
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During the recent SNP conference Andrew Neil of the Daily Politics TV programme interviewed Stewart Hosie and asked him what the SNP would have done to fill the now existent £8-9 billion deficit gap if they had won a returned YES vote at the Independence Referendum....watch here how Stewart Hosie tries first to bodyswerve from providing any answer on this issue and when cornered produces a lie by trying to blame Westminster (yet again) for having higher Oil price prdeictions than the SNP did, this is a lie that can easily be seen by checking the SNP manifesto yourself. Watch him squirm and lie here
The well respected economist David Smith from the Economist also produced an article on "Scotland dodged a bullet" the whole article can be read by clicking here
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