How can anyone be as economically-ignorant as the Scots?

Our country will probably never recover from the economic devastation wreaked on us by the financially-incontinent, economically-illiterate recidivist liar Gordon Brown.

He not only set the scene for disaster through a ruinous orgy of wasteful public spending while in power, but by massively increasing salaries and pensions of public-sector workers and with over £300bn of catastrophically expensive PFI contracts lasting for up to 30 years, he has burdened us with huge liabilities into the future. Hence our national debt has now hit £1.5trn and will have topped £1.7trn (100% of GDP) by the middle of the next parliament, whoever crawls into Downing Street on 8 May.

However, Scotland may have now produced a politician even more economically-illiterate than the worthless Brown. On Radio 4’s MoneyBox yesterday, there was an interview with some idiot who was deputy leader of the SNP and the party’s economic expert. This buffoon explained that the SNP would demand “an end to austerity” as a condition for supporting a minority Labour government.

(One might be tempted to wonder how a government spending £90bn a year more than it takes in taxes and increasing our debt by over £5,000 per second could be called “austerity”)

When questioned by the presenter, Paul Lewis, the SNP’s economic spokesman explained that their proposed economic policy would allow both an end to austerity and an increase in public spending, funded by borrowing, while at the same time reducing our deficit and national debt.

Hopefully, I don’t need to explain what is wrong with the Scotsman’s grasp of the meaning of the words ‘deficit’ and ‘debt’?

With total incredulity, Paul Lewis asked how the national debt could be reduced if we still had a deficit.

For a moment the great economist from the SNP was baffled by the complexity of the question, but soon recovered and replied that what he meant was debt would fall as a percentage of GDP even if it increased in real terms.

This is beyond ludicrous. Our current deficit is about £90bn. That’s about 5.3% of GDP. So, our national debt is rising by around 5.3% of GDP each year. If the brilliant SNP managed to “end austerity” while keeping the deficit at £90bn a year (heaven knows how they could do that), then the economy would have to grow by more than 5.3% a year for debt to fall as a percentage of GDP. The British economy has never grown by anything like 5.3% a year and never will. But if the opinion polls are right, this idiot might end up working with the equally clueless Ed Balls running our country’s economy.

You might have thought that Scotland could never produce a politician as financially-illiterate as the awful Brown. If so, you were wrong. The SNP’s grasp of economics is even worse than Brown’s. Interesting times ahead.