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“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right..”

May 28

Posted by James in Constitution | Comments off

Today has been a bad day for the indyref debate, with weak arguments from governments in Edinburgh and London, and a shared frame that could have been designed between them to drive down turnout. The offences aren’t the same, mind: from the SNP side we have speculative handwaving designed to appeal to pure selfishness, while on the Coalition side we see downright dishonesty and misrepresentation.

To start with the latter, the UK Government put out information about the “cost of independence”, based on research from the LSE’s Professor Patrick Dunleavy. The data in it was then utterly destroyed by one Professor Patrick Dunleavy, as initially reported in the Financial Times and now belatedly elsewhere. The doomed Danny Alexander claimed the costs would be £2.7bn, then rowed back to £1.5bn, about seven and a half times the upper end of the Professor’s estimates, and ten times the lower end.

Here’s a bit more from the Lib Dems on what the Chief Secretary to the Treasury had to say.

“In his speech, Danny pointed out five factors that would affect Scotland’s finances if it were to become independent:

1. New institutions would have to be set up in Scotland, costing the country millions of pounds.
2. Scotland would have to pay higher interest rates to borrow, resulting in around £500 million per year in additional debt interest costs.
3. The Scottish government’s new policies would cost at least £1.6 billion every year.
4. Revenues from oil and gas production would fall by around 95% over the next 20 years due to the decline in North Sea oil production.
5. The shrinking number of working age people would have to pay for Scotland’s growing number of old age pensioners.

Danny mentioned that all of these factors would be worth £1400 per person in Scotland each year for the next 20 years, something that would be easily avoided by staying in the UK.”

Let’s look at those all in a little detail.

1. Clearly true, although “millions” is a bit of a further row-back from the billions they were initially claiming. £150m-£200m isn’t a lot of setup costs, to use the Professor’s figures: it’s about an eighth of the money Scottish Ministers are already squandering on a single unnecessary road bridge. No biggie.
2. Unknown and unknowable prior to independence. Just don’t.
3. Depends on what kind of Scottish Government we elect in 2016, and if the Lib Dems still exist then they’ll be free to propose a low-tax war-on-the-poor style system for Scotland akin to the one they’ve helped the Tories deliver in reserved areas. So therefore unknowable.
4. Utter unmitigated bullshit: yes, oil and gas revenues will drop sharply from around 2016, they are already well below the 1999 peak (see graph below), and cannot in any case be a sustainable basis for a future Scottish economy. But aside from the last of those, the issue here is geology, and staying in the Union can’t undo the fact that oil is finite and we’ve already extracted most of it from the North Sea.
5. Again, it depends. Will an independent Scotland stick to the kind of anti-immigrant policies the Tories and Lib Dems are delivering, or will the more positive position shared by the SNP and the Greens win out? Can’t have this both ways, Danny.

The offences on the other side are less glaring, and not blatantly dishonest, but still, in the interests of fairness, they have to be pointed out. Here’s the argument. It relies on speculative better productivity gains in Scotland than in the rest of the UK (the equivalent of the empty politicians’ call for “efficiency savings”), speculative better employment rates than the rest of the UK, and speculative Scottish population increases.

All of these are the same sort of unsubstantiated arguments as Danny’s final point above (much as I hope an independent Scotland will welcome more immigration), and it’s also tactically poor. Confusing independence with some sketchy estimates of outcomes from vague policies won’t persuade people to vote Yes. Independence is about the people of Scotland making our own decisions, not it being set in stone now, even if it could be.

Incidentally, on page 18 of the full document, the Scottish Government uses 2016-17 as the reference year for oil receipts. As per industry research from May 2013, that’s around the post-1999 peak. Their figures on page 26 are, shall we say, bullish.

oil-chartAnyway, the document is full of dubious hypotheticals, and reads like an expert group of civil servants weighing something they can’t see while keeping a thumb firmly on the scales. Sometimes it goes beyond that. Imagine using the word “will” here rather than the word “would”: “Higher productivity growth will boost public sector revenues as increased economic output leads to higher tax receipts” (p36).

Furthermore, people aren’t stupid, or most of them aren’t. They know that chat about whether we’ll be better or worse off, by either side, especially when associated with exciting round numbers, is mere empty speculation. It’s also not what motivates people, from what I understand of the focus groups that have been conducted. Even assuming people want to sound more progressive when being polled, fairness is much more persuasive. Oh, and so too is “decisions will be made in Scotland, by voters in Scotland”: much more attractive than “here’s how it’s all going to be, sod the electorate”.

Conjecture from Yes, downright lies from No: the Scottish public deserves better than this.

 

More Options Than Constitutional

May 14

Posted by Malc in Constitution | Comments off

Thanks to Malc Harvey, much-missed editor of this site (pictured below, right), for this guest post about his forthcoming book.

MalcIn a little over four months’ time, Scotland will be offered the option to become an independent country or to remain as a component nation of the United Kingdom. The constitutional arrangement is the only outcome which will be decided by September’s referendum. However, the constitutional options are only one part of the story. For neither a Yes vote nor a No vote will be a panacea, an answer to any and all economic, social or political issues Scotland faces.

There are, broadly speaking, two distinct model types which inform how states operate on a global stage, and each entails their own internal logic. The market liberal model accepts the reality of global markets, keeping their state small, de-regulating labour markets, keeping taxes low to attract inward investment, with a result that social spending is limited and inequality tends to be high. The Baltics, after independence, moved towards this type of system.

The social investment model sees public spending as part of the productive economy, levying high levels of taxation to pay for investment in education, research and infrastructure. Combined with social democracy, universal services, high levels of social solidarity and low levels of social inequality tend to be the result – as evidenced by the Nordic states.

These are, of course, ideal-types, and no state fits snugly into either model. The Baltics provided some (albeit limited) welfare spending in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, while the Nordics (particularly Sweden) have scaled back the breadth of their spending. Ireland operated something of a hybrid model, though this ran into some difficulties for various reasons – even prior to the crash, this combination of models proved unstable.

While the market liberal model has appeal for some, Scotland appears to be much more inclined towards the social investment model. The SNP, Labour and the Greens are all – to various degrees – promoting variations on social democratic themes, while the Jimmy Reid Foundation has designed the Common Weal programme to stimulate thinking about a fundamental shift in Scottish political thinking.

However, the Scottish Government’s White Paper on independence lays out spending plans consistent with a social investment model – but without the taxation levels to support it. Indeed, plans are to reduce corporation tax and air passenger duty – encouragement for business investment, to be sure, but without asking for anything in return. Herein, a lack of a bargaining system – which in the Nordics includes business, trade unions and the government – is apparent. Bargaining helps build social cohesion and trust between those institutions, and between institutions and the public. This is one basis for public acceptance of higher tax levels – and without such a system it is difficult to see how the public might be persuaded of its benefits.

Irrespective of the referendum outcome, the social investment model could be pursued. If independence is the outcome, a lot of internal change would be required (particularly with regards to wage bargaining, as alluded to above) and hard policy choices would follow. If (extended) devolution prevails, social investment could be achieved, dependent on the mechanisms made available to the Scottish Parliament. However, in either case, a social democratic social investment model is not cheap, and Scotland would have to pay the cost in order to recoup the benefits. Institutional as well as attitudinal change would be required – would Scotland be ready for such change? Time will tell.

Small Nations in A Big World. What Scotland Can Learn, by Michael Keating and Malcolm Harvey, is published by Luath Press and is available from next week. You can come along to the launch event (featuring Henry McLeish, Robin McAlpine, Juliet Swann and David Torrance) on 20 May.

 

Londoners and Leithers, struggling together

May 2

Posted by Dom in Constitution, Culture, Democracy, Economy | Comments off

Ocean terminal – More shops than ships

Walking around Westfield Statford City, a sweeping arc of restaurant chains and pretend outdoor highstreets with speakers pumping out Rihanna to keep the shoppers moving, you see a sports shop with England’s Wayne Rooney in the window. In front of Wayne (who is just a Wayne-sized poster) is the new England shirt, and around it in a neon crest is the motto ‘Risk Everything.’

I’m not an expert on  life guidance, but ‘risk everything’ strikes me as a particularly bad motivational slogan unless you’re on the Rangers board or are a compulsive gambler. It’s definitely a long way from the ‘work hard and you can achieve your dreams’ rhetoric espoused by Michael Owen in the popular Children’s BBC series Zero to Hero. In the latter, Owen appeared out of a lifesize poster to give the show’s young protagonist pep talks. In Westfield Stratford City Wayne bursts forth, and he seems to be asking me to remortgage my house and put the money on the ‘orses.

The particular piece of London where Westfield have set up shop(s) is a footballing heartland, with West Ham and Leyton Orient within spitting distance of the Waitrose, John Lewis and Body Shop outlets of new Stratford. This is what Glasgow City Council hope the new East End will turn into (just as was the ambition with new Leith and the rather forlorn Ocean Terminal), but you need not go far to find people with little to lose.

Fifteen minutes away on the Docklands Light Railway and you are in Beckton, the end of the line. Step off the train and there is a flat vista of car parks and slip roads ventilated by the stiff breeze of the Thames estuary. Across the street is a huge single-story ASDA, a car park surrounding a pretend shopping street where all the outlets are owned by the supermarket. In the window of the supermarket pharmacy is a display made in the run up to the 2012 Olympics by local school children. Eagerly painted flags hang in stasis over magazine collages of athletes and football stars. Presumably they’re still there because nothing has yet come forth to replace them, as if the anticipation just before the event were the high point. It is that kind of promise that can sustain people, and then comes the long tail.  Perhaps not risking everything, but investing everything in nothing is what the people of East London’s outer rim have done. The yuppie flats are changing the skyline in Stratford, but in Beckton the flags still hang limply, sealed off from the Thames breeze by plate glass.

In Scotland, the flags are all one colour. As the referendum approaches the Saltire has taken on a different significance for many people. The 18 September is the day the events kick off and Scotland undergoes regeneration on a national scale. An awful lot of people are investing their hopes for the future in a few short months. The bigger risk is not that independence won’t be achieved, but that its execution will fail to have the transformative effect its most ardent supporters promise and believe. In 2015, as money floods into Edinburgh from around the world, will the country look much different to the single parent dragging their shopping to the car at the ASDA in Newcraighall in the January wind? Will Leith’s Yes posters and fly-posted socialist battle-cries flap in the breeze as Edinburgh’s West End gears up for cheap credit, Dublin style, or will something good be made to come of it? If you’re asking people to risk everything, you need to make sure every one of those people sees the transformation their support deserves.

I, nationalist.

Apr 28

Posted by Dom in Constitution, Culture, Ideology | Comments off

I’ve never been one to call the Deputy First Minister by her first name, as if we’re just mates. The SNP freesheet with the Yes Scotland branding that popped through my door this week promised me an ‘at home with Nicola’ interview, and there she was just chilling out in a comfy jumper.  Nationalism with a human face. The whole of the freesheet was as laughable as the fake newspapers handed out by the No campaign where every headline simply read ‘[noun] better together in UK, say experts!’.

The fact is, a lot of the stuff kicked out by both sides is cheap and ridiculous, and rightly deserves to be laughed out of town. Now writing newspaper articles calling Alex Salmond a fascist is the other extreme to hailing him as a genius and a saviour. He is, at the end of the day, just a middle-aged man in a casual sports jacket. The problem is that people are getting increasingly defensive of things that don’t need to be defending, so when a Telegraph hack phones in some copy calling Alan Bissett an agitprop extremist, people on the Yes side defend him as if he were Scotland’s greatest living playwright, the SNP conference performance included. He’s written some pretty good novels and his Andrea Dworkin-inspired introduction to feminism was patchy but well-conceived, but he can probably look after himself. The last thing we need is a homogenisation of the voting public into two camps where Greens are the SNP with a bit of recycling thrown in and Labour are the Conservatives. The #bittertogether hashtag stopped being funny about ten minutes after it was invented.

Because we have to admit that there are ridiculous things about both sides, from Alex Salmond’s taste in substanceless ‘poignant’ art, as hangs in his office, to George Robertson’s postcard to the apocalyptic. We probably need to find amusement in the ironies of both sides at the expense of the overly zelous and the impressively naïve. We need to accept that Christopher Grieve was a gifted but often tragi-comic figure and not an unsung hero. We need to realise that Nicola’s cuffs of Ayshire lace provided an unexpected comic touch, and that the Yes Scotland film using Big Country on the soundtrack first shown at the Declaration of Cineworld was not the stuff that aspring nations are made of. Quite rightly, we should also laugh (though not in the way they intended) at whichever Better Together staffer thought the best way to respond to the National Collective Yestival was with a ‘joke’ straight from the Top Gear annual. Laugh at far-left splinter groups arguing about whether nationalism is the antithesis of communism or the path to true liberation, and take heart in the fact that the guy sitting in an armchair in Perthshire with ‘Free Scotland’ on his twitter profile is as ridiculous as the guy tweeting from his sofa in Renfrew with ‘British AND Scottish’  under the picture of his face.  We live in a country of complexities and overlaps, divided loyalties and shared values. Pretending there is a big dividing line down the middle of two exclusive groups is equivalent to the Edinburgh-Glasgow jokes trotted out every night in comedy club warm-up acts. Diversity is a good thing, and that means realising you don’t have to be part of Yes the identity, just Yes the voting preference. And if you’re reading Nicola, my favourite thing to do on a night in is cook a curry, have a cheeky glass of red and  watch Michael Fassbender films.

National or Northern? One is far healthier than the other

Apr 21

Posted by Dom in Activism, Constitution, Culture, Environment, Governance | 4 Comments

There was, for a space of about six months between the release of the White Paper on Independence and the Easter break, a huge upsurge in interest in the Nordic aspects of Scotland’s independence movement. Assorted documentaries on TV and Radio, some SNP rhetoric on ‘Nordic’ childcare and a plethora of newspaper columns ranging from the meticulously informed to the blatantly phoned-in all sought to either support or criticise the idea of Scotland’s Nordic dream.

But then silence.

Criticism of the Nordic Way (a regular and quite conscious trope of the Nordic Council) has come in from the unionist side with their talk of massive tax hikes and from the far left who see the Nordic model as a Faustian pact with capitalism hiding under a friendly veneer of Moomin and mid-century furniture. One of the big problems is that nobody is quite sure what Nordic means. If you’re a political scientist the it refers very specifically to a unique system of tax-based growth economy ploughing profits back into human capital. If you’re of a more cultural bent it is mid-century classicism and nice cakes and Carl Malmsten chairs, or on a more dubious level a perceived heritage shared by Scotland. If, like me, you occupy the that third space between the policy wonks and economists and people munching on Kanelbullar in the West End and going to crayfish parties, it is a useful tool in Scotland’s political lexicon.

What you see most of all is how Nordicness allows Scotland to articulate its own better self, and the apparent waning of interest in Northern Scotland is slightly worrying. Irrespective of how genuine Nordic Scotland is, the referendum campaign appears to be in danger of slipping back into a fight over family silver and half-truths. The Northern dream has briefly allowed Scotland to glimpse an alternative to welfare cuts and Taylor Wimpey homes, daring to speculate on a new aesthetic without recourse to nationalist shibboleths.

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