Sturgeon’s economic plan will hurt Scots

Poor old Nicola Sturgeon. The news agenda at the start of this week was meant to be dominated by her new economic prospectus on independence. Then along comes Jeremy Hunt with his scrapping of the mini-Budget, which ensured everyone’s attention was on Downing Street rather than Bute House.

If you did miss it, yesterday saw the First Minister set out the latest – and what was expected to be the most substantive – paper on the economic plan for exiting the UK (or Scexit, as Nationalists don’t like to call it). Did it live up to expectations? Of course not. Putting together a sensible economic case for making Scotland the first part of an advanced economy to cut itself off from its established monetary and fiscal base, all while putting in place trade barriers with its most important trading markets, is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.