Basket case

Stan Grodynski (Letters, 21 
September) claims that 300 years of the Union have 
rendered Scotland an “economic basket case”.

This is rather at variance with the opinion of the Scottish 
Government, surely no lover of the Union, which states on its 
official website (State of the Economy, August 2015): “The Scottish economy has had its longest period of uninterrupted growth since 2001.”

It also says that employment is “now hovering around record levels”; that there has been “a pick up in productivity growth and rising real wages” and that “forecasts expect growth in the economy to be around 2.4 per cent in 2015”.

This hardly sounds like an economic basket case.

One could argue that the current economic success described by the Scottish Government is a result of the Union and not in spite of it. Perhaps we do have rather more to lose if we lose the “chains” of the Union (to paraphrase Karl Marx).

Would such an economic Nirvana be heralded in by the shattering of these oppressive links that the current situation would indeed, by comparison, seem an “economic basket case”?

John Scarlett

Kirkhill Gardens

Gorebridge, Midlothian