SNP nonsense about UK paying Scots' pensions after independence suggests they are giving up – John McLellan

The SNP-Green government’s promise to wreck the property market is real enough, but the same can’t be said for senior Nationalists’ insistence that England would continue to fund Scottish pensions is the increasingly unlikely event of independence.

Independence supporters should consider the future of their pension payments (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

As many commentators have pointed out since last week’s repeated assertion, state pensions are not paid from a pot but from general taxation; no matter how much National Insurance you may have paid in your working life, the reality is your state pension will be paid by current tax-payers.

After separation, existing pensions would be subject to negotiation but new Scottish pensions will have to be funded by Scottish tax-payers, just one of the many costs an independent Scotland would have to meet while the new government tries to cover a gap of approximately £15bn between revenue and expenditure.

Why the SNP have chosen to raise this now is hard to fathom, but it does give a hint of the level of scrutiny its financial claims will receive if there was ever to be another referendum.

As well as the impact of the deficit, the implications of post-Brexit reality for the break-up of Britain have never been properly put to the test because the arguments were different in 2014.

The best that the SNP’s 2018 Growth Commission could promise was that years of hardship would be worth it for the sake of an indeterminate goal sometime in the future, but that’s not the basis of a winning strategy.

And neither is crushing the value of our homes and misleading us about pensions. Anyone would think they were giving up.

John McLellan is a Conservative councillor for Craigentinny/Duddingston

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