To say the United Kingdom is sailing through very choppy water would be the understatement of the century. But whatever happens in the coming weeks, new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is already steering the ship into calmer seas.
Britain will come through this, but First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has produced a chart which would take Scotland into an economic tempest of such ferocity it will make the last few weeks feel like an oasis of tranquillity.
Were Scotland to take the First Minster’s advice, no new resignation or election would halt the rapid descent into chaos. Independence is a once-and-for-all decision, and if recent events teach us anything it’s that markets don’t accept good intentions or sentiment as legal tender.
But with a self-assurance of those blinded by faith, the “Building a New Scotland” blueprint for independence Ms Sturgeon presented on Monday confirmed most of what critics of her plans have been saying for years.
Yes, there will be a hard trade border with England. Yes, the SNP plan is to jockey on the back sterling and the Bank of England with no control over money supply. Yes, they will try to double up with a new Scottish currency.
But no, they have no idea when an independent Scotland can stand on its own two feet. No, they have no idea how long it would take to set up a Central Bank. No, they have no idea how the £3,000-a-head deficit will be covered apart from and exorbitant borrowing and crippling taxes.
No, they have no idea how long the new country would be caught in a limbo, neither in the UK nor the EU. And no, the European Free Trade Association which numbers Norway amongst its members isn’t on her radar because the First Minister is so enthralled by EU membership.
Yes, she is prepared to throw the Scottish economy into the sea because she so loathes the UK that she is prepared to dump the Treasury, which pours billions into Scotland, so the Bundesbank in Frankfurt can call the shots.
Such is her soaring self-confidence it’s as if little things like currency upheaval and disruption to domestic trade don’t matter.
She might be happy to live in a cave like Robinson Crusoe with the other survivors of the shipwrecked Scottish economy if she ever got the chance to put her plans into practice, but whatever the uncertainties we face because of soaring global interest rates and turmoil caused by the worsening war in Ukraine, they are nothing compared to what would lie in store in the supposed utopia of Sturgeonland.
Ms Sturgeon’s breezy acceptance that “checks on certain goods generally take place physically at the border,” will mean lorry queues at Gretna and Berwick. Moving from sterling to Scottish money “as soon as practicable through a careful and managed transition” will mean a black economy like the end of the Soviet Union when everything was priced in roubles but everyone wanted paid in dollars.
Like the disastrous Darien Scheme, she is selling a journey to a land of limitless wealth but on arrival we will instead find an unforgiving landscape in which no-one owes you a living and bargains are driven harder than anything Scotland has had to negotiate for over 300 years.
