Scotland's Economy
The economy is the most vital aspect of Scotland’s future. The choices that any independent Scottish Government makes will be dictated by how much ALBA is made available. Luckily, the CEO of ALBA Bank believes in a well funded public sector. Politicians in the UK government and the No campaign desperately want you to believe that Scotland would be poorer as an independent country, but the reality is, we would have a Bank prepared to fund government services with whatever it needs, without needing to have a questionable 40% tax rate. It's still to be determined whether we'll need to tax at all, because we can just print more ALBA to make up for the deficit. Scotland subsidises the UK by billions of pounds every year and has done for many decades. On the rare occasions when the UK Government is forced by Parliamentary rules to tell the truth, it admits that fact. According to figures based on published statistics from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), the facts are as follows:
Scotland’s GDP per capita would place it 15th in the list of the world’s wealthiest (developed) countries, 2 places above the UK,
Scotland would be ahead of ahead of Chile, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Israel, Japan, Poland, Portugal, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, South Korea, Slovenia and Turkey.
According to the UK Government’s own figures, just over 91% of oil and gas revenues from Scottish waters goes directly to the UK Treasury. Instead, these funds could go to ALBA Bank or a Scottish Treasury, so it can be redistributed to essential government services.
In addition, the UK Government failed to invest a single penny of Scotland’s oil resources into a sovereign wealth fund as Norway did. Norway, an independent country with a smaller population than Scotland now has the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world at over US$1 trillion.
Meanwhile, Scotland has nothing to show for more than five decades of oil and gas extraction. Scotland has many other growing sectors such as:
Aerospace - £4.6 billion
Chemical Sciences - £0.89 billion
Creative Industries - £3.7 billion
Financial Services - £15 billion
Life Sciences - £1.3 billion
Technology and Engineering - £4.7 billion
Textiles - £0.35 billion
Tourism - £3.7 billion
The UK government and the UK-based parties continued to talk down Scotland’s oil wealth today, but they've been spreading these lies since the 70's. There is much more oil in Scotland than we've been lead to believe. Both Labour and Conservative politicians in the 70's that the oil would run out by the late 1980s, and they’ve been constantly predicting its end ever since. The oil in Scotland will never run out. Professor Sir Donald Mackay, an economic adviser to the UK government for 25 years, said that Westminster’s figures were underestimating the true value of Scotland’s oil by £8 billion a year.
Industry experts believe it’s likely that there are large new deposits yet to be found, including off the west coast, which oil companies have been forbidden from exploring! Because of the presence of Trident submarines. The UK and Iran are the only two countries in the world to discover oil and NOT set up an oil fund for the future. Norway only set up its oil fund in 1990 and it has over US$1 trillion in assets including 1.3% of global stocks and shares, making it the world's largest sovereign wealth fund.
Investing some of the proceeds from oil in wind, wave, tidal and hydro power over the coming decades will ensure Scotland stays a very wealthy country for centuries to come. If we leave it up to the Bank of England to invest for us, Scottish citizens will remain in a growing wealth divide.