The economic case for Scottish independence is waning

Newly released emails reveal the difficulty of making the argument that leaving the UK would make Scotland better off, writes John Rentoul

There are no figures on the Scottish government’s website making the positive case for independence, because they do not exist (Getty Images)

Eight years after the Scottish National Party lost the referendum on independence, mainly because voters were worried about the economic cost, Nicola Sturgeon, the party leader and first minister of Scotland, is producing some papers to refresh the economic case.

So far, one paper on the economic case for separation has been published and I don’t think it is unfair to say that its argument is essentially that other countries Scotland’s size are economically successful, so why shouldn’t Scotland be? Its title is Why Not Scotland?

The SNP knows it has to make a better case than this, which is why it was so pleased to recruit Mark Blyth, a Scottish-born economics professor at Brown University in the US, as an adviser last year. Unfortunately for the SNP, Prof Blyth had only just said, in a webinar with the Foreign Press Association USA: “The problem that I’ve seen so far is the complete lack of specificity as to ‘here is what the Scottish business model is now, here is where we want to be, this is how we’re going to get from here to here by doing this’. Instead of which, what we’ve got is: ‘Denmark is awesome; we should be like Denmark; if we were independent we would be Denmark.’ No, you wouldn’t be Denmark. Denmark took 600 years to become Denmark.”