Saturday 31 August 2019

In Denial

Its the tail end of August, the kids are back at school, the evenings are drawing in, there’s a wee chill in the air of a morning and the GERS deniers are in full flow.

For the last few years we’ve witnessed the publication of GERS (Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland) and then seen the nationalist twitterati go into overdrive to rubbish it. Meanwhile Scottish ministers under whose governance these statistics are complied, calculated and published remain uncharacteristically quiet, and disappointingly undefensive when even their own MP’s discredit the work, and smear the SG employees who compile the data.
GERS was of course fine when the figures played into nationalist hands but as soon as they didn't they apparently were all part of a grand conspiracy.

One particularly idiotic meme spread this year by a number of GERS deniers was the idea that somehow the GERS figures showed that Scotland's share of defence spending was so ridiculously high that therefore the figures must be rubbish, this spread across Twitter and even made it into the letter pages of the Courier, the Tayside regional paper (ref1), but unfortunately it appears to have originated with someone unable to use Scotlands actual GDP figures (or do arithmetic) and thus coming up with completely the wrong answer, see example:







As it happens Scotlands GDP is approx £180 billion (ref 2), and thus a defence spend of £3.2 billion is equivalent to just under 1.8%, in other words pretty much exactly the same as the UK as a whole. You'll note that the letter in the Courier also then veers off into the 'port of export fallacy' something which has been proven false numerous times but keeps reappearing as a nationalist meme because it's easy to repeat and simple to grasp and fits right in with the nationalist world view, kind of along the lines of "who cares if it's wrong, it sounds like it must be right"!

However the SNP can usually scrape up something positive to spin about, but this year's spin was particularly poor as this tweet from the SNP official account (and retweeted by the First Minister) shows:



But actually when you look at the figures for the entire accounts (excluding oil, i.e. the 'onshore revenue the SNP are talking about) (Ref 3) you'll see for example that the UK's 'net fiscal balance' decreased from -2% to -1.1% a decline of 45% between the two figures. Whereas Scotlands fell from -9.6% to -8.5% a decline of 11.5%. In other words the UK overspend almost halved whereas Scottish overspend decreased by less than 1/8th. Why did the SNP claim this was "faster" well because the percentage of GDP fall was 0.9% in UK but 1.1% for Scotland, that's more right, so it's "faster"?. But the speed of deficit reduction is actually relative to the size of the deficit. Think about it, if I reduce my borrowings by 45% of the original starting amount per year then I'll be borrowing free by the early part of year three, if I reduce it by 11.5% a year it will be well into year eight; who is borrowing free the quickest?

Meanwhile esteemed nationalist rant-mag 'The National' really tried to confuse it's readers as it both promoted the positive spin, and trashed the figures in the same week:


Apparently the figures both made the case for independence, and were 'mince', mind you if they'd actually meant that the figures made the case for independence out to be mince they might be on to something, perhaps that's why Angus B MacNeil, SNP MP for the Western Isles tweeted it, who knows...

Ref 1 https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/opinion/readers-letters/966132/gers-dont-reflect-real-economic-position/ (letter from an economically confused independence supporter)

Ref 2: https://www2.gov.scot/Resource/0054/00548034.pdf GDP Quarterly National Accounts Scotland 2019 Quarter 1  (Published by Scottish Government)

Ref 3: https://www.gov.scot/publications/government-expenditure-revenue-scotland-gers/pages/1/ (Page two table S1. of .pdf)