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UK Treasury ‘Bizzarely Inaccurate,’ Claims Scottish Independence Start-Up Cost of $2.5 Bln

© Flickr / Jimmy MacDonaldUK Treasury ‘Bizzarely Inaccurate,’ Claims Scottish Independence Start-Up Cost of $2.5 Bln
UK Treasury ‘Bizzarely Inaccurate,’ Claims Scottish Independence Start-Up Cost of $2.5 Bln - Sputnik International
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A senior academic whose research was “badly misrepresented” by the UK Treasury is demanding an apology after British ministers used his work to falsely claim the start-up costs of an independent Scotland would be £1.5 billion ($2.5 billion), when the real cost is around £250 million ($419 million).

EDINBURGH, May 28 (RIA Novosti), Mark Hirst – A senior academic whose research was “badly misrepresented” by the UK Treasury is demanding an apology after British ministers used his work to falsely claim the start-up costs of an independent Scotland would be £1.5 billion ($2.5 billion), when the real cost is around £250 million ($419 million).

Professor Patrick Dunleavy of the London School for Economics (LSE) told RIA Novosti “the UK Treasury haven’t yet apologised to us for misrepresenting the numbers.”

Dunleavy said he had been in contact with Treasury officials to demand they reveal how they reached the vastly inflated figures on the costs of Scottish independence.

“I have discussed with the UK Treasury about how they got to their numbers and they seem to have done what we thought they had done,” Dunleavy told RIA Novosti.

“We did a study based on the costs of creating UK Whitehall departments,” Dunleavy said. “A Whitehall Department is like the Rolls Royce of a Government administrative regime. It’s top-heavy and has a lot of expensive things in it.”

“Scotland only needs to create a small number of such departments after independence, but what the UK Government have done is to apply the cost of creating a Rolls Royce, big style, department to what they claimed were 180 bodies which the Scottish Government would have to set up,” Dunleavy added.

The LSE Politics Professor told RIA Novosti that the basis of their dissent with the UK Treasury was based on their “bizarrely inaccurate” misrepresentation of “our very impressive and interesting study.”

Meanwhile Alex Salmond, the Scottish Government’s First Minister and leader of the pro-independence Scottish National Party, on Wednesday said independence would make Scots more prosperous than people living in Japan, France and the rest of the UK.

Speaking to journalists at a media conference in Edinburgh, the first minister said “Scotland is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, more prosperous per head than the UK, France and Japan, but we need the powers of independence to ensure that wealth properly benefits everyone in our society.”

Salmond also unveiled a new Scottish Government paper that detailed the future finances of an independent Scotland, which he said would be £5 billion ($8.4 billion) better off than the rest of the UK by 2030, the equivalent of £2000 a year more for every family in Scotland.

The Scottish first minister told journalists “the latest figures show that by using the powers that only independence will bring, we can deliver an independence bonus with increased revenues for Scotland.”

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