Robin McAlpine is Head of Strategic Development at the Common Weal think tank
WHAT is really going on with the British economy during this current financial crisis, and how could Scottish independence be a solution?
The very broad answer to this is that the British economy has for a long time now lacked enough genuinely productive investment opportunities and has covered this up through a complex process of “financialising” the economy, effectively to hide the fact that it’s all a bit of a Ponzi scheme. It seems that the UK Government has now pushed this one step too far and confidence is therefore collapsing.
The reason Scottish independence is a viable solution to this is exactly because Scotland’s economy is woefully under-developed, so it contains absolutely loads of genuinely productive investment opportunities. This would enable Scotland to build precisely the open, transparent national accounts which would enable markets to have real confidence in our economy and particularly our currency.
It is this underlying productive investment capacity which means that Scotland, as an independent country, could escape the downwards spiral that the UK is currently in and create an upwards spiral instead.
The Thatcher revolution largely dismantled the UK’s manufacturing and much of its primary production base and replaced the economic activity…
