TWO weeks ago, Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader and occasional First Minister of our country, had to face the facts and accept she made a mistake. 

Although parliamentary recess is typically seen as a time to escape the stresses of being an MSP the annual GERs figures threw a spanner into the works.

The Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERs) is a yearly report that outlines the state of Scotland’s finances, how much we raise in revenue and how much we spend.

Crucially, it gives us Scotland’s deficit, the figure that paints a clear picture of just how sustainable the SNP’s economic model is. Suffice to say, last Wednesday wasn’t easy sailing for the First Minister as despite a small improvement on last year our deficit sits around 8.3 per cent of Scottish GDP.

That’s over three times the size of the UK’s 2.4 per cent and is frankly a damning indictment of the nationalists’ record in government.

Most economists will tell you that a country can sustain a deficit of around three per cent, anything higher is considered risky. To even be eligible to be a member of the European Union you cannot exceed this three per cent ceiling.

So, this sheds some light onto the economic issues that the people of Scotland are facing at the moment.

Much of this is down to the sudden collapse of North Sea oil. But, the SNP still put most of their chips onto this industry. Moreover, people are rightly upset that in the SNP’s ‘Scotland’s Future’ document (their blueprint for an independent Scotland) they predicted that in 2016-2017 oil revenues could be up to £8 billion, in reality it amounted to £208 million.

They massively missed their target by the billions.

Thankfully, because we’re part of this United Kingdom this shocking discovery has a limited negative impact, the shared prosperity of the UK will stabilise and keep our economy afloat.

But ask yourselves what would’ve happened had we voted for independence three years ago. We’d find ourselves with the largest deficit in Europe, cut off from our largest market and struggling to pay for vital public services. In short, it would be a crisis of the nationalists doing.

The fact that Nicola Sturgeon had to publicly state that she had not tried to “con” people with the official document underlines just how stark last week’s figures were.

People deserve answers on this so I will be questioning the SNP on this matter at the next opportunity in the Scottish Parliament.

But what does this mean for families in Greenock and Inverclyde? Last year each Scot received a union dividend worth £1,750.

By being part of the UK, public spending was able to reach £13,000 in Scotland. All that would have been heavily slashed as Salmond and Sturgeon tried to balance the books and save Scotland from a significant economic downturn.

All that would have been borne out on the shoulders of hard-working Inverclyde families.

The SNP got it massively wrong and saying NO to independence meant Greenock and Inverclyde didn’t end up paying the price for Sturgeon’s mistake.