Poor, poor Iain Gray. You have to feel sorry a man whose economic illiteracy has been so painfully exposed twice in less than a week. On Thursday, First Minister Alex Salmond laid bare Gray’s apparant failure to know the difference between cash injections into banks and support for the general money system, having moments earlier shown up Gray’s total ignorance of the structure of Norway’s economy. If Iain Gray is serious about becoming Scotland’s First Minister next year, he’s going to have do some serious clueing up regarding basic economics. It is worrying that the man who wants to lead a country with significant oil and banking revenues if flummoxed by simple facts about the operation of those industries in countries of similar size and economic structures to Scoland. How can Iain Gray stand and oppose the establishment of a Scottish Oil Fund (against the opinion of Nobel Prize winning economist Josef Stiglitz http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LnPL96D72M&feature=player_embedded ) when he doesn’t even know how the Oil Fund in Norway is structured? How can Iain Gray make any judgement about the level of state support for Scottish banks if he cannot tell the difference between money given to individual banks and the support given to the financial system in general?
Here is Iain Gray being given a basic lesson in economics: http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/scotland/default.stm
And it gets worse for the leader of the Labour Group in the Scottish Parliament. Gray, and his party might well expect to be attacked by Mr. Salmond - he is, after all, the leader of a different political party. His criticisms, however valid, will doubtless be ignored by them (if not by the general public). But it’s a different matter when Marc Coleman, one of Ireland’s leading economists and the economics editor of Newstalk, weighs in and lays bare just how poor Gray’s understanding of the Irish economy is (http://newsnetscotland.com/economy/728-ireland-economy-defended-after-attack-by-labours-iain-gray?awesm=fbshare.me_AUPAL ).
With regard to Labour’s oft repeated rhetoric about the “arc of insolvency”, by the way, just how well do they think Unionist Great Britian is going to emerge from the upcoming Tory cuts? And just how well would Scotland fare under those cuts if a man with Gray’s poor economic understanding was at the helm?
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