Donald Trump is as good as Keynesianism and better than a sovereign wealth fund. Spending £1bn on a Scottish golf course for toffs is an ideal way to offset recession.

The Scottish parliament was right to reject environmental concerns and finally approve the US businessman’s desire to build a links course outside Aberdeen. Perhaps last year the birds just had the argument, but with the economy shrinking, this is now just the sort of project the UK needs.

Recession has concentrated Scottish political minds: Mr Trump may previously have seemed a diversion they could do without but Scotland now needs him as much as he wants it.

The £1bn cost of the course will come from abroad – and from the private sector – and work will start early in 2009, making this a quick injection of capital into the Scottish economy. It will mean 6,000 jobs, a quarter of them local and permanent. And it will bring spending – much from overseas - into a part of the country that needs to replace its dependence on North Sea oil.

Mr Trump may not be willing to build courses across the whole country so that we can play our way out of recession, but this is a model of a private-sector solution that can be used for projects elsewhere. It is Keynesian without using state funds and, unlike foreign investment in Barclays of Manchester City, it invests in infrastructure assets rather than shares.

If the golf course turns out to be less successful than Mr Trump hopes, he will still have spent the money and invigorated the Scots economy. The loss would be his, not Scotland’s or the taxpayers’. And the birds that lose their habitat will survive the recession too: there is plenty more coast for them.

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