by Rab Bruce’s Spider

The SNP have voted to increase the Old Age Pension to match the OECD average of £355 per week if and when Scotland becomes a normal country. On current figures, this would produce an increase of £225 on the current UK weekly Pension.

Naturally, the first response from the anti-independence lobby is to ask how Scotland could possibly afford that level of Pension since we are, obviously, far too wee and too poor. As always, though, this is the wrong question.

Just think about the figures for a moment. An increase of £225 per week still only brings you up to the level of the OECD average. That’s a sad indictment of the way the UK treats its pensioners, and what we really should be asking is why the fifth richest state in the world still claims it cannot afford to pay its pensioners a weekly sum which is so miserly that it sits at the bottom of the OECD table.

The truth is that, for a nation which controls its own money supply, spending is not so much a matter of affordability as a question of priorities. The UK can always find a magic money tree to bribe the DUP or squander on cross-Channel ferries which don’t exist. It will gladly shell out billions to fund renewing Trident or HS2, but it won’t spend on pensions or the NHS despite any vague promises Boris Johnson might have made recently.

If Scotland becomes a normal country and introduces its own currency, then reinstates taxation levels on the North Sea Oil companies to match what they pay to Norway, then funding pensions is unlikely to be a major concern. Plenty of other countries who don’t have the natural resources available to Scotland currently pay significantly higher pensions, and nobody accuses them of being too wee and too poor to do so.

Furthermore, if Scotland remains in or re-joins the EU, and if we then develop our ports and airports to facilitate trade, our economy will soon begin to grow at a faster pace than it has ever done when controlled by Westminster. Admittedly, there may well be issues with the English border if England does not agree a trade deal with the EU, but trade will not stop. Look at how Ireland has transformed its export profile so that it is far less reliant on the UK than it was when it first became independent. As part of the EU, Scotland will have far more trading opportunities than it will if it remains part of post-Brexit UK.

There are plenty of other opportunities too. Instead of giving our surplus electricity to England, we could sell it to them. We could use funds raised from North Sea Oil revenues to develop our renewable energy sector which has the potential to be the most productive in the EU. We could develop our ship-building industry once again and, above all, we could use the talent and inventiveness which has been a hallmark of Scotland for centuries to invent and develop other new technologies.

So let’s not ask how we can afford to do things that other countries manage perfectly well. Instead, we should be asking how we can afford not to do them.