Doing sums

Who would willingly be a member of the Scottish Parliament's enterprise and culture committee? Alf Young in The Herald comprehensively dismantles (here) the claim in their latest report of an annual £8.5 billion shortfall in Scottish capital investment:

"An all-party committee of MSPs has allowed itself to be captured by a rather fanciful account of Scotland's inferior investment performance, when the evidence of their own eyes, as they went about their constituency business, should have set alarm bells ringing. No-one is suggesting we should swing from unwarranted pessimism to embrace a mood Alan Greenspan famously described as irrational exuberance. But desperately we need some rational balance in this vital discourse. The Scottish economy faces many challenges. But it has great strengths, too. Despite all the shocks it has endured in the past half-century, it is no basket case, as Alex Neil and his colleagues might have discovered had they taken what witnesses were telling them with a bigger pinch of salt."

I'm not in a position to judge the matter but, if Mr Young is correct (and he seems to be backed by such heavyweight figures as Professors Ashcroft and Bell), then the Committee has dropped a very heavy brick.