Originally Posted by Chris

As part of the U.K. it doesn’t have to be good. Pooling and sharing ... what every nation state does. Wealth is transferred from rich areas to poor ones. What a lot of Nats haven’t realised is that as an independent state, rather than as a nation that is a constituent part of a larger state, pooling and sharing occurs only within its own borders and out of its own resources.

Scotland is still a top 20 economy in world terms, but it has a top 5 expenditure. Living within its means would prove painful, and not just for the first few years. This is something the Nats have worked very hard to obfuscate but, largely since 2014, the truth is now quite widely understood amongst Scottish voters and one of the reasons Sturgeon hasn’t gone hell for leather after another referendum is that she knows a lot of work must first be done on building an economic case that sounds credible.