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Blair McDougall

20 Oct, 7 tweets, 2 min read

https://twitter.com/zsstevens/status/1318634705919594498

Yet another SNP MSP is pretending to believe (God I hope he’s pretending) that leaving the UK is like retiring to Benidorm & that the rest of the UK will pay for our pensions. The idea is that we won’t have to pay for the single largest item of public spending. So, a thread. 1/8

https://twitter.com/zsstevens/status/1318634705919594498

Firstly, pensions are paid for from existing taxes not previous payments. 2/8

Second, even the SNP leadership aren’t daft enough to pretend that pensions would be paid by what would then be another state. 3/8

That last one was black and white but some pretend to think this means a Scottish pension agency will administer the pension but the rest of the UK will meet the cost. The pensions document Nicola Sturgeon launched (p109) didn’t assume any savings from pensions. 4/8

By the way, in that same document NS said that because (in the year the paper was published) GERS showed we had relatively better finances than the rest of the UK it meant pensions were more secure with Indy. Since then the opposite has been true of our finances. 5/8

The larger point is that when Nationalist MSPs, and even some ministers, have to pretend that we won’t have to pay for pensions in order to even get close to making the economics of leaving the UK work, it should make us all think twice. 6/8

By the way, if they want to go into any future referendum promising not to find the state pension, it would be *brave*. 7/8

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