NOW that the annual kerfuffle over the GERS figures has mostly passed, it’s probably as good a time as any to consider where it leaves us.

First, some history. As everyone reading this is hopefully fed up of being reminded by now, GERS was conceived in the early 1990s by Conservative Scottish secretary Ian Lang, who in an infamous memo to then-prime minister John Major described it as a way to “score over all our opponents” in the constitutional debate.

GERS, then, was a classic exercise in engendering fear, uncertainty and doubt – or “FUD” as the marketeers abbreviate it to. And while Lang’s main target at the time was the emerging plan for devolution, perhaps no-one should have been too surprised when Labour went on to embrace it post-1997 as a tool in their fight against independence.

For that reason, the SNP in opposition used to put quite a bit of effort into debunking the outrageous political spin that was placed on GERS by political opponents – most notably through highlighting the fact that so many of the tax receipts allocated in GERS at the time were likely underestimates; that spending was significantly over-estimated; and that it was nonsense that a UK regularly in deficit could be said in any way to be “subsidising” Scottish public spending.

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Then came 2007. Famously, Alex Salmond’s first act in office as first minister was to rename the Scottish Executive to the Scottish Government. Given the way GERS had been weaponised against the SNP and independence as a means of sowing that fear, uncertainty and doubt, it’s still baffling why his second act wasn’t simply to throw a pitchfork through the whole exercise and be done with it.

The only reason I can think of is that at the time, it might have been just too politically tempting not to persevere with it.

In those early days, the minority SNP needed to choose their battles with particular care. They also needed to show that the party could govern well and responsibly, not just because that’s something all governments need to do, but also to help grow confidence in the idea that a devolved Scotland run well could in time be an independent Scotland run even better.

It was also a time of strong North Sea revenues, which due to the fact that GERS figures are always published a year or so in arrears, meant that its estimates of Scotland’s tax receipts were about to push its assessment of Scotland into a strong position when compared with the rest of the UK.

So, if Scotland was seen to be outperforming the UK in the GERS calculations so beloved of political Unionism and doing so under the limited powers of devolution, then surely, we could do even better with independence and full control of all these resources?

You can see the attraction, especially when it comes to debunking some of the more strident and ideological critics of independence.

But those same critics – or at least, their arguments – haven’t gone away. And having gone through 17 years of government and one independence referendum without taking the chance to do so, it’s arguably a bit late to just stop producing GERS now. It’s certainly not too late to try and come up with something more useful, though, so here’s a suggestion.

We’d all benefit from having better information about the Scottish economy and how public spending works in Scotland.

So let’s have a better set of figures, starting with making sure that all revenue figures are out-turn figures, and that the spending figures give a true reflection of what is actually spent in Scotland by the UK Government on reserved matters, rather than what is arbitrarily allocated in GERS as being for our “benefit”.

It still wouldn’t tell us anything conclusive about independence, but it would tell us a lot more that’s useful about Scottish tax revenues and shares of public spending across the UK, which Scotland contributes disproportionately towards but receives proportionately less of in many policy areas.

While we’re at it, the level of debate would be much improved if people better understood just how much the resources that the Scottish Government operates with are determined by policy and spending decisions taken by the UK Government for England.

Kate Forbes

That’s something which Kate Forbes set out very well in her evidence to the Covid inquiry. And we know that Wes Streeting kind of gets it, given his blurting out on TV that all spending roads in Wales lead back to Westminster.

So, let’s also have a clear annual breakdown of how UK Government spending decisions have affected Scotland’s budget each year, and deprive Labour of the ability to claim simultaneously that while their spending cuts in England are the fault of the Tories, the knock-on impact those cuts are set to have in Scotland will somehow be the fault of the SNP.

I wouldn’t be so crass as Lang as to say that such a publication would let us score over our opponents.

But it would certainly force them to bring some honesty and objectivity to the discussion about Scotland’s present – something which can in turn only help go on to benefit discussions about Scotland’s future.