The people of Scotland have been lied to for over 30 years as to the true wealth of their nation, writes Jim Mather
Kevin Myers seems a little bitter about Scotland in An Irishman's Diary. I wonder whether we Scots have slighted him in some manner in the past.
Scotland has severe social problems as a result of years of decline under the Tories and their successors, but Mr Myers's argument and logic, from someone I presume has borne witness to the Irish economic miracle, is absurd.
He creates an image of my country which will offend hard- working Scots and betrays his lack of knowledge of the Scottish economy, history, psyche and politics. Like any other country, Scotland has problems. In our case they are problems which are being exacerbated by a union that is failing Scotland, but magnifying and generalising symptoms of poverty that have become endemic in some parts of the country is a disservice which ignores the real wealth and potential of Scotland.
Scotland's potential is its people.
There are 2.4 million Scots in employment, some in educating our children, caring for our sick and maintaining our infrastructure; some even in the bureaucracy of the civil service and quangos. Our public sector however is seeking full efficiency and to play a full role in honing our national competitiveness.
That is matched by a growing realisation that such an objective would be far easier to reach if Scotland was responsible not just for spending taxation but for raising and generating it too.
Mr Myers repeats the discredited myth that: "It is now the national pastime for the Scots to complain about the very country [ England] which subsidises them".
The UK Treasury is correcting its figures on the Scottish budget after years of double counting and recent revelations show that Scottish oil revenues have been subsidising England for decades. Gordon Brown's recent North Sea oil raid shows this is not about to change.
We recently exposed the efforts of UK civil servants and unionist politicians to hide the true extent of our oil wealth and the transforming power this could have had on my country.
As one Treasury official put it: "The Scots have really got us over a barrel here . . . An independent Scotland can go it alone, provided there is not a disastrous collapse in the world oil price. The prospects for a separate English, Welsh and Ulster economy on the same assumption must look pretty grim. Perhaps we should all start to think the unthinkable."
We now know that the people of Scotland have been lied to for more than 30 years as to the true wealth of their nation.
Mr Myers's attempt to perpetuate that shameful situation is as unwelcome as would be the suggestion that Ireland should return to the UK.
Mr Myers says that "not coincidentally the decline of Scotland went step by step with the death of the Scottish Tory Party", putting the cart before the horse.
Scotland's modern economic and manufacturing difficulties come from the failures of successive unionist governments and, more pointedly, the 18 years of Thatcherite rule in the 1980s and 1990s bolstering the southeast of England at the expense of other areas.
Unlike Ireland, Scotland can take no fiscal measures to offset this imbalance.
The Tories early neo-con agenda left thousands unemployed and has been soundly rejected by the people of Scotland, who still place the egalitarian ideals of the Scottish enlightenment at the heart of our civil society. Ideals that mean we not only believe in the development of enterprise but also the development of community and equality.
This ethos has led to the development of a policy of free personal care for the elderly - something that has yet to be replicated elsewhere.
Mr Myers rightly highlights our current powerlessness but fails to recognise the culpability for the problems he has chosen to magnify and distort. We have a very clear idea of where that culpability belongs and it is not with the poor and dependent.
Mr Myers is right to highlight Scotland's contribution to the global economy, the work of Adam Smith and our inventive past. Perhaps he deliberately chose to ignore the Nobel Prize winners living and working in Scotland, the major developments in new technologies, bio and life sciences taking place at our universities, which despite our lack of autonomy offer major prospects for future Scottish success.
I am a Scottish nationalist and have spent my life campaigning for Scottish independence so that Scotland will once again have the power to stimulate enterprise in order to emulate the economic successes of nations such as Ireland and act in our national self-interest.
We, like W Edwards Deming, the man responsible for the quality revolution that transformed Japanese and world manufacturing, know that government and industrial senior management are mainly responsible for the performance of their respective "systems". Senior management of any system dictates the outcomes and performance by as much as 97 per cent.
Progress comes from improving the system and that includes setting worthy goals that would remedy problems, involving all stakeholders, learning from elsewhere and keeping the score with accurate objective data.
That process will work. It is called independence and it is the basis for perpetual improvement in Scotland as elsewhere and for a more positive audit of Scotland.
Michael Collins posited that devolution "gives us freedom, not the ultimate freedom that all nations desire and develop to, but the freedom to achieve it". That's where Scotland is heading - I hope Ireland will welcome us when we arrive.
Jim Mather is shadow enterprise minister in the Scottish Parliament and a member of the Scottish National Party