Despite its name, Gers Day is not an annual celebration of the Ibrox side that makes up one half of Glasgow’s notorious Old Firm. If only it were that uncontentious. In fact, Gers stands for ‘Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland’, the Scottish government’s yearly report on public finances. In a normal country, the publication of 76 pages of data tables and accountancy prose would go largely unremarked upon, so naturally in Scotland we have to turn it into another front in the independence wars. Because we really have nothing better to do.

This year’s figures, like last year’s, reflect the unprecedented Treasury interventions during the Covid pandemic. However, they paint an otherwise familiar picture. Scotland’s notional deficit stands at £23.7 billion or 12.3 per cent of GDP, double the UK’s fiscal shortfall of 6.1 per cent. Public spending in Scotland is now £1,963 higher per head than the UK average. The ‘Union dividend’ — the value of higher expenditure in Scotland set against its lower tax revenues — comes out at £2,184 per capita. In raw fiscal terms, Scotland continues to get more out of the UK than it puts in and an independent Scotland would be confronted with a public finance balance sheet that would necessitate either economy-slugging tax rises or services-devastating spending cuts.

The debate on these fiscal realities plays out every year but goes nowhere. For one, a large section of grassroots Scottish nationalists and even some elected SNP politicians are Gers Truthers. That is, they do not believe the Gers report is an accurate representation of Scotland’s public finances, which they say are much more robust but being covered up by sinister forces, with the Treasury typically fingered as the culprit. You might think the fact that Gers reports are researched, compiled and published by the SNP-run Scottish government somewhat undermines this theory, but then you’re probably in on it, too. As reported in The Spectator last May, 57 per cent of pro-independence voters in Scotland claim the Gers figures are ‘made up by Westminster to hide Scotland’s true wealth’.

Even the more lucid nationalists downplay the significance of Gers for the finances of a breakaway Scotland, unlike their Unionist opponents who are only too keen to bring the subject up time and again. Douglas Ross, leader of the Scottish Tories, calls the ‘Union dividend’ figure ‘a devastating blow to Nicola Sturgeon’s push for indyref2’. That sentiment is echoed across the spectrum of Unionism in Scotland. This is, I fear, a mistake.

The SNP might be committed to ending the United Kingdom but no one talks down the Union as much as Unionists. It is not the SNP that reduces the UK to cash transfers and national defence, as though it were a ménage with first-strike capability. It is not the SNP that, having cleaved the Union every which way with devolution, now laments that only the Chancellor’s chequebook seems capable of keeping the country together. If the best argument you’ve got after three centuries is two grand, you might want to dial back your criticism of the case for independence.

The Union dividend is what you reach for when you have nothing else. It’s not an argument against secession; it’s an argument for more fiscal prudence and pro-growth policies north of the border. Countries are not bound together by lump sums but by history, loyalty, culture, heritage, belonging, and love. Touting the Union dividend every August does three things that supporters of the UK should recognise as unhelpful. First, it frames Scotland’s place in the UK in terms of monetary value gained. Fine, but what happens if the differentials in public spending across the UK were to narrow or disappear one day? A future government, under pressure from voters elsewhere in the UK, might scrap Barnett in favour of equal funding per person or another formula that cuts back on the Treasury’s Edinburgh-destined largesse. Having told Scots to stay for their annual bonus, the case for them doing so reduces in line with that bonus.

Second, what Scottish Unionists call a Union dividend, someone living in England might regard as a ‘Scottish subsidy’, an annual taxing of the English public purse to pay for goodies like free prescriptions and the absence of tuition fees. For all that UK ministers like to boast about lavishing more resources per head on Scotland than England, there are Englishmen and women not quite so masochistic in temperament. After all these years of the Scots enjoying disproportionate levels of public expenditure, surely it’s only fair that the English get a dividend of their own. £2,184 per head could pay for a lot of nurses, or cops or even tax cuts. If the Union only exists as a subvention mechanism, what happens when one part of it — by far the largest part — gets fed up subventing another part that is forever threatening to walk away?

Third, while it may be frustrating to be a subsidiser, it is more than a little embarrassing to be a subsidy-taker. Gers Trutherism may be garden-variety Scottish nationalist conspiracy-mongering but it could also be a flash of pride. No country likes to admit it is dependent on another financially, especially not one with as oversized a superiority complex as Scotland. ‘Humility is the root of charity and meekness the fruit of both,’ wrote the Scottish Presbyterian theologian Hugh Binning, but while meekness might be good for the soul, it doesn’t do much for national self-worth. The implication of the Union dividend argument — go independent and you’ll have to pay your own way — is true and would bring many an independence voter to a rude, albeit belated awakening. But it frames Scots as charity cases and no one likes to think of themselves as a mendicant. There is an honest, respectable Scottish nationalism that says it’s better for Scotland to accept responsibility for its own finances, whatever the consequences, than to continue being doled out pocket money by Westminster.

Making the constitutional debate about the Union dividend not only fails to appeal to Scots as something more than Scots, it encourages them to feel bad about being Scottish. The case for the UK needs to be about more than pounds and pennies but glance around the leadership of Unionism and it’s not obvious anyone is up to the task.