Has Ronald McDonald been living under a rock?

Or perhaps a golden arch?

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The Better Together campaigner and neoliberal economist Professor Ronald McDonald claims that thanks to Scots voting to remain in the UK (but did they really?), austerity was avoided.

Has he been living under a rock these past eleven years? Any half-sentient being knows that Scotland’s economy has deteriorated (along with the rest of the failing UK) over this period precisely because it’s still in this godawful union.

The professor is mired in 2014 when Alex Salmond naively believed Scotland could use the English pound after independence. He should have known the English ruling elites would never allow it. Pre-union, England consistently undermined Scotland, from boycotting trade during Darien to the 1705 Alien Acts which treated Scots in England as aliens. Then came the coup de grâce, the Treaty of Union, which dissolved The Scottish Parliament and made Scotland an English vassal for the last 318 years.

What Salmond missed was that sterling would be Scotland’s pound only as long as it remained in the union. Once it left, however, it would need its own sovereign currency, not the currency of its former coloniser, to be economically independent.

Today, all pro-independence parties have accepted the principle that Scotland should have its own currency, so please keep up, Professor McDonald.

The professor is also wrong that Scotland would be like Greece (although most Scots wouldn’t mind some of their weather). Greece was part of the eurozone. It used the euro because it gave up its own sovereign currency, the drachma. Because Greece’s national debt was denominated in euros, it was dependent on the European Central Bank (ECB) to create more of them.

But Greece couldn’t earn enough euros to repay its debt because Germany controlled the ECB and refused to waive enough of Greece’s debt so that it could manage from the euros it was likely to earn. (Germany chose to forget a large portion of its post-war debt was forgiven by the US under the Marshall Plan, which helped its economy recover and prosper.) So Greece was forced to act like a household which has blown its budget - it imposed ruinous austerity upon its population.

By contrast, a sovereign Scotland using the Scottish Pound could create as many as it needed for its economy and people to thrive. A currency’s value is determined by the nation’s wealth, i.e., what it produces. Since the rest of the world wants much of what Scotland produces, be it energy, whisky, education or satellites, the Scottish Pound will have value.

Professor McDonald should recall what Professor Gavin McCrone said in his 1975 report about Scotland’s oil wealth:

The country [Scotland] would tend to be in chronic surplus to a quite embarrassing degree and its currency would become the hardest in Europe, with the exception perhaps of the Norwegian kroner… the Scottish pound [would] be seen as a good hedge against inflation and devaluation and the Scottish banks could expect to find themselves inundated with a speculative inflow of foreign funds.

The bitter lesson from the McCrone report is that if it is to prosper, Scotland must take back control of its land and resources (which would give its people a reason to remain and not emigrate from their homeland) from the failing British state, corporations and foreign governments, and put it firmly in the hands of the Scottish People.

And that, Professor, is how you avoid austerity.