These statistics show that if Scotland were independent now it would have to find an extra £1700 or thereabouts per person every year just to maintain public spending at its current level. That's because Scotland gets about £1500 p.p. p.a. more than citizens in less fortunate parts of the UK (courtesy of the Barnett Formula), and because Scotland raises about £250 p.p. less by way of tax revenue.
The first type of SNP supporter is the person who has never heard of the GERS figures, or who has but does not understand them, or who fears they may contain something nasty and would rather not look, or who understands them only too well but maintains they are inaccurate.
Then there are those who understand the figures, understand their consequences for an independent Scotland, understand what they mean for services used by the poorest Scots, but just don't care.
The first category I would class as pitiful, ignorant and/or self-deluding. I feel sorry for them, because they are dupes. But it's the second who really get up my nose; and particularly the SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon.
We are constantly being told what a clever and shrewd politician Ms Sturgeon is. Although she has done some stupid things (telling us there must be a 2nd referendum because we are leaving the EU, but then admitting that Scotland may not rejoin anyway is only one of them), I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt on this.
I also believe that she is well-informed. She is the First Minister of Scotland and she has lived and breathed politics all her adult life (and probably a lot of her adolescence too). So she will have seen the GERS figures. She will know what they mean.
She will know that iScotland will either face spending cuts of some 15% post Independence (cuts of a severity that George Osborne, on a Class A high in his gimp-suit could only dream of); or it will have to raise taxes across the board by a swingeing degree; or it will have to borrow an awful lot of money (despite not having its own currency or a central bank). Ms Sturgeon knows all this, and she knows what the consequences will be for every Scot who uses the health service, education system or is in receipt of benefits.
Here's a piece of circumstantial evidence which supports this hypothesis. The Labour leader Kezia Dugdale put the reality of Scotland's deficit to Ms Sturgeon at Holyrood the other day. Sturgeon did not even attempt to address the issue. She snapped back a phrase familiar to Holyrood-watchers. Dugdale was, she said, "talking Scotland down". If the First Minister could refute Dugdale's point, she would have. She cannot. She knows it. But she is still arguing for Independence.
Why? It is it at this point that I run out of answers. A decent person, politician or no, wants the best for his or her country. I believe that the overwhelming majority of British politicians outside the SNP want this. At some deep and grudging level I even believe it of Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage. But I don't believe it of Nicola Sturgeon or Alex Salmond. I believe that they are motivated by something far, far deeper and visceral. How else to explain their enthusiasm to take their country on a race to the bottom? I think they would rather bury Scotland in a dungheap so long they chose which one.
What it so unattractive about this is not the suspicion it arouses that Sturgeon et al hate England far more than they love Scotland. No, it's that they personally, no matter how bad things got post-Indy, will be OK. No doubt the speaking engagements, the newspaper articles, the media appearances, the non-exec directorships and finally the generous Holyrood pensions will sway comfortably into view for Ms Sturgeon. She would retire to some West of Scotland retreat amid the carnage of her country's reduced circumstances, secure in the knowledge that the consequences of her mistakes could not touch her personally. Arguing for Independence is easy for her, because she will be immune from its consequences.
Comically, Ms Sturgeon appears to believe that she holds the moral high ground. Scotland must be independent, she intones, because it operates to a superior set of values to Tory England. That may be so. But not the part of Scotland she occupies herself.
