Memetic Hogwash
From the archive — published in 2016 on the original Chokkablog, kept as it was written.
This ridiculous meme first appeared several months ago and was throughly debunked at the time, but I see it's started cropping up on social media again
It is - like crime in a multi-story carpark - wrong on many levels.
"£2.8 billion whisky revenue counted as an English export (because it goes out through English ports)"
- No it isn't - not anywhere, not ever. This is simply a made up number, never sourced because there is no source. You don't need to read the other points below because the basic premise is simply made up. But if you're interested in other levels of wrongness ...
- There is no government "income" from whisky exports anyway - the economic value of this activity is captured in employment and corporate taxes which are of course correctly attributed to Scotland in the Scottish Government's own GERS figures
- Even if we're looking at export activity statistics (which have no direct impact on the £15bn fiscal deficit reported in GERS but would be relevant to an independent Scotland's current account deficit), these are of course unaffected by the port the goods happen to leave the British mainland from. Exports Statistics Scotland (ESS) figures are gathered based on customer locationa: if goods are exported from Scotland via an English port or freight-forwarder they will still be correctly recorded as Scottish exports.
- Peeling another layer of the onion and taking us further away from the specific lies in this meme, some suggest that because ESS figures are survey based they might be inaccurate. This is fair - no stats are perfect - but for what it's worth the way these survey forms are filled in makes it far more likely that they will understate "exports" to the rest of the UK than exports to the rest of the world. As a form-filler it's far easier to identify foreign currency export sales than sterling sales that happen to be South of the border
"£39.8 billion oil revenue said to be "unknown origin" added to Westminster balance sheet"
- No it isn't - The £39.8bn "unknown origin" figure comes from HMRC Regional Trade Statistics -and has nothing to do with government revenue (as reported in GERS or indeed anywhere else)
- There is no such thing as a "Westminster balance sheet" - this is concept apparently invented solely for the purposes of this meme
- If somebody was making a case for an independent Scotland's likely current account balance and missed out what would be counted as Scottish export trade by not including oil attributed in HMRC Trade Stats to "unknown region" ... then this would indeed be an issue, but I'm not aware that this has ever happened.
"I guess that will take care of the £15 billion black hole the Unionist Press goes on about"
- The £15 billion referred to here is presumably Scotland's notional deficit as reported in the Scottish Government's own GERS figuresb - that's where the press ("unionist" or otherwise) get the figure from
- Neither of the two other figures quoted in this meme have any bearing whatsoever on Scotland's £15 billion GERS deficit. Absolutely and unequivocally: no impact at all.
- Apart from anything else, how breathtakingly incompetent would you need to believe the SNP and Scottish Government to be for them to have missed these huge chunks of income when writing the independence White Paper?
"Just two examples of misappropriation of Scottish Income by Westminster"
- Neither of these figures have anything to do with income
- Neither of these figures are "appropriated by Westminster"
- er...that's it
*****
a. see official Scottish Government website here which explains "Export Statistics Scotland (ESS) is based on the Global Connections Survey". I have filled in these forms so I know, but see actual form here and note wording of question 6;
b. If we're being picky: as per 15-16 GERS figures it's £14.8bn so if the meme's using 2015 figures (as it claims) the figure would in fact be £14.3bn. The "black hole" is more correctly defined as how much worse Scotland's deficit is than that we bear by taking a population share of the UK's deficit, a figure in fact nearer £9 billion - but this is to critique this meme at a level of detail it clearly doesn't deserve.