Afterword to the Indyref ...

It is often impossible to be certain afterward who was right in a debate because you don't know what would have happened on "The Road Not Taken" but if I were a Scot who had voted "Yes" in the belief that this would be a recipe for a prosperous Scotland, I would be starting to be secretly glad to have been outvoted.

It's been noted in a number of threads on this blog that the very low level of inflation is partly due to a fall in the price of oil, and hence fuel costs - and also that this, like a tax cut imposed on governments rather than enacted by them, has the effect of reducing tax revenues while improving the financial position of ordinary consumers.

This changes some of the sums, and I have just been watching a discussion on the news about one particular set of sums which have started to pretty seriously unravel - the SNP case on the financial stability of an Independent Scotland would have been damaged by oil prices at their present level and shot to pieces if oil prices drop much further.

Of course, oil prices can go both down and up. One very good reason not to base much of your economic strategy on a particular assumption about what's going to happen to them.

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