Scottish Greens 'buried' damning report into currency options for independent Scotland

dailyrecord.co.uk:

The Scottish Greens have been accused of burying a report which warned of “disastrous” currency options for an independent Scotland.Ronald MacDonald, the academic who wrote the dossier, said he presumed his report was never released because Patrick Harvie’s party “didn’t like the conclusions”.Labour MSP Daniel Johnson said: “This shows what we have known all along - the Scottish Greens refuse to face the truth about the consequences of their obsession with division regardless of the price working people would pay for it.”The Scottish Government, which includes SNP and Green Ministers, recently published a paper that attempted to reboot the economic case for independence.They backed the pound for an undefined period after independence before the move to a new currency.

But this plan, dubbed ‘sterlingisation’, has been panned by critics who believe it would be economically catastrophic.MacDonald, a Glasgow university professor, was tasked by the Greens with writing a report on currency and he handed it over in early 2016.

The work was never published and the damning conclusions on sterlingisation stayed hidden.He told the Record: “Post-2014 the Scottish Greens commissioned me to write a paper on currency.

I just told it the way it was. I presume they didn’t like the conclusions.”In his report, he concluded that an independent Scotland going for sterlingisation would have been “disastrous”, resulting in a “severe austerity programme”.He wrote: “We give some estimates of the costs of getting the exchange rate regime wrong in an independent Scotland and particularly sticking with a form of fixed exchange rate such as some form of sterlingisation.“And these range from £25bn to £100bn with ongoing knock on effects that would