Last month, the Scotland in Union team highlighted some of the great work which they did as an immediate response to the SNP’s ‘Growth Commission’ report. Here I’d like to return to that report, and some more recent and more detailed responses to it.
In particular, I’d like to recommend an excellent paper by the think tank ‘These Islands’, which highlights several of the SNP report’s failings, and can be found here. The paper was authored by Kevin Hague, founder of These Islands, and reviewed by a number of respected academics, with their reactions covered on the first page of the paper. It’s an impressive piece of work.
Further bolstering the paper, I think, has been the nationalist reaction to it. The usual cybernats have piled in with ad hominem attacks on the author and attempts to smear These Islands. We even had SNP MP Peter Grant calling Kevin Hague a ‘dog food salesman’, as though that would denigrate the paper. (For anyone not already in the know, Kevin is a successful businessman with several business interests, including the recently-sold cycling firm Endura and an online pet supplies company, PetPlanet). What’s been completely lacking in the nationalist response so far has been any substantive challenge to the paper itself. And there’s been a defeaning silence from Andrew Wilson, the SNP report’s author. That, to my mind, speaks volumes.
On the subject of reactions to the ‘Growth Commission’ report, I hope it won’t seem immodest if I also highlight my own review of the defence sections of the report. Defence only features in a few paragraphs of the 354-page report, but it is such a fundamental subject, and dealt with so poorly in the report, that I felt it merited some specific focus. My article was originally published by the UK Defence Journal, and can be found on the SIU website here.
I hope you enjoy it!
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