Archive for category Constitution

Commonwealth and Common Weal: The shape of things to come.

According to Nicola and Alex the world is watching, but the truth is that Britain isn’t even watching. If 2014 does turn out to be a momentous year for Scotland it will happen with a whimper down south. Although it still looks like the No campaign might win it, the Yes side has moved the debate on from where we were two years ago. Some kind of positive outcome for Scottish democracy now seems inevitable, and it can either be done consensually or by splitting the Labour party down the middle and further undermining its already wobbly legitimacy. Anas Sarwar and friends won’t go gently from their 80,000 a year at Portcullis House, especially with the outside chance of getting to sit at the big table and play around with some of those cool nuclear submarines.

There’s also a European election this year. It looks like the SNP and Labour will get two seats apiece and the Tories will likely hang on to theirs. The real battle of interest will be between the Lib Dems in their first election test since the massacre at Edinburgh City Council in 2012, the mustache bearing armchair army of Jaguar driving UKIPers and the Greens. Given that the Greens exceeded expectations last time around and have historically performed better in European polls, it is not too much to expect that Maggie Chapman will be ensconced in Brussels come next summer. From the left of what is already Holyrood’s most left-wing  party, Maggie will be hoping to attract the core Green vote combined with disenfranchised Labour and SNP supporters and the rump of the Socialist left to push past George Lyon and whichever Top Gear audience member UKIP plump for.

A European breakthrough could signify a big year for the Greens, now fairly well established in Edinburgh and Glasgow but still hovering on the edge of several wins in central Scotland and the Highlands. The increased profile given to them by the Yes campaign has allowed Patrick Harvie to more clearly articulate what separates them from both the SSP on the one hand and sandal-wearing Lib Dems on the other. With Alison Johnstone bedding in following the retirement of Robin Harper, the Euros and the long lead in to the Scottish general election of 2016 will be critical in determining whether Green politics in Scotland can copy the relative success achieved in its North Sea neighbours. The dominance of the SNP and the apparent inability of Labour to put one foot in front of the other means that Scottish politics is crying out for a torch bearer for floating progressive voters.

It will also be the year in which Scotland gets equal marriage legislation, in what has been a needlessly drawn out process. One of the side effects of the equal marriage campaign has been to further erode the influence of the Catholic Church in Scotland. The Church has not covered itself in glory in the past twelve months for all kinds of reasons, burning bridges with many progressive Catholics in the process.

Celtic will, somewhat inevitably, storm the SPL. Fingers crossed Aberdeen will come second, one of the few clubs with the resources and fanbase to do something with their European place and the financial bonus it would bring. The game would appear up for Hearts, hamstrung by a combination of apparent corruption, a global financial crisis and the inability of the Scottish Football Association to keep watch on the game. The irony of their Wonga sponsorship won’t be lost on the fans who have had to watch it all unfold from the stands and in the newspapers. Scottish football is still in a fairly sick state, and until the men with suits and 1990s playground haircuts are replaced at Hampden then it probably won’t get better.

Then there’s the Commonwealth Games, Scotland’s mini Olympics. No doubt there’ll be a lot from Glasgow City Council about putting the place on the map, showing it is open for business and reminding us that people make Glasgow, just like people made the dual carriageway to the East End and the over budget motorway that cuts a swathe through the Southside like the spaceship hovering ominously in Independence Day. The sceptic in me says that Commonwealth and Common Weal are different things, but it is to be hoped that some of the shine stays at least once the G4S guards on temporary contracts and the BBC mobile broadcast vans have chugged off south again.

One thing for 2014 is certain though. Peter Capaldi is going to be brilliant in the TARDIS.

Ayes to the Right

njFew people remember Nick Johnston‘s career as a Tory MSP, which ended more than twelve years ago. But his decision to come out for a Yes vote today is still telling, not because he’s personally significant but because it demonstrates that the desire for Scotland to do better with self-governance does indeed span the conventional left-right spectrum, just as the No campaign does.

To be fair, though, his arguments aren’t exactly outside the independence-minded mainstream. Anyone from the Radical Independence Convention or the SNP or the Greens could have said that “while problems and opportunities with particular resonance in Scotland can go by the board at Westminster, it’s just not possible for that to happen in a Scottish Parliament“, or noted that “inequalities inherent in British society fester even more strongly in Scotland, leading to despair and often apathy“. Wanting a “a more dynamic economy, or measures to tackle poverty” is hardly bloodthirsty Thatcherism.

The fact is that any ambitious young centre-right politicos should be seeing the opportunity Johnston sees. It’s impossible to see a strong future for the Tories under devolution, particularly given the current positions adopted by the SNP. A party that combines a degree of social liberalism and protection for public services from privatisation with a centre-right position on tax and spend will always hoover up their votes, especially if that’s a credible alternative Scottish government to Labour.

An independent Scotland will almost certainly keep voting to the left of the rUK, on average, despite the polls showing a smaller gap than many think, but independence will open up space for everyone to get out from under Westminster’s stifling influence and for our politics to be reshaped.

The Fergus Ewing wing of the SNP and the Johnston end of the Tory party aren’t that far apart (and independence would force the Tories to cut their ties to London and adopt the Murdo Fraser plan: Murdo coincidentally succeeded Johnston), the SSP might stage a comeback, Labour might rediscover an interest in something other than the constitution, and Greens, well, I think we’re already winning mindshare from SNP supporters and others on the left who want something more radical than NATO, the Queen and the pound. And the SNP itself: some of its activists and MSPs would go home – job done – but the rest would find other things to work on, new alliances to make based on issues other than the constitution. I can’t wait to see it unfold.

Our Friends In The North: The Nordic dream without the navel gazing

It was with trepidation that I sat down to watch Our Friends in the North, BBC Scotland’s attempt to address the Nordicism that has crept into the independence referendum. It is an important part of the debate and the closest Scotland can get to imagining an alternate reality. Alex Salmond doesn’t really seem to get the Nordic countries in anything other than economistic terms, but as a former oil economist maybe that is to be expected. What Our Friends in the North and its host Alan Little did so well was demand answers to the questions created by the rhetoric. It is very easy to project your dreams onto something you don’t know much about, and is easy to imagine the First Minister sitting at home with a big Norwegian flag on the wall like a teenage boy staring wide eyed at a poster of Che Guevara he’s bought off the internet.

The programme asked a fundamental question: Is the Nordic economic model one Scotland can follow? There was some mention of shared heritage and attempts to problematise Scotland’s position bridging the gap between the British and the Northern, but it was largely an economistic view of events.

The excellent Alan Little began by popping off to Finland to find out about Nokia and childcare. There was an admirable attempt to situate Finland as a post-colonial country like Scotland might become. There was discussion of the economic crash of the early 90s due to dependence on the Soviet Union and a mention of how Scandinavian economies are not that diverse, but parallels could be made with the collapse of the largely London-based UK economy after the last financial crisis – in Finland at least the government had the tools to come up with a policy tailored to the country.

The childcare aspect was a detour into social policies, and these are perhaps the hardest to replicate. It also began a theme for the rest of the show that was never explicitly articulated. Many of the people encountered or interviewed were professional women enjoying high levels of access to both professions and childcare. The integration of educated and working women is one of the things that truly divides Scotland from its easterly neighbours, but as gay marriage so happily proved, that kind of equality is about mindset as much as money. You want it and then you fund it, rather than deciding you have the spare cash for such luxuries.

Next up was Sweden, and Alan Little went to speak to The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson. In London. Nelson is a man who knows very little about Sweden and not an awful lot more about contemporary Scotland. He gave the Cameronite line on the country, painting  the Swedish New Moderates and their liberal coalition partners as guardians of a progressive society. He claimed improved economic performance and employment, ignoring the fact that since the Moderates have been in power there have been serious tax cuts and in increase in temporary, lower paid jobs. Youth unemployment has increased and educational reforms, including the Free School concept, have created myriad problems. Stockholm is also suffering from an acute housing shortage due to the refusal of the Moderates to build accessible housing rather than suburban developments.

Alan popped back to Scandinavia to interview Lars Trädgårdh, a Swedish academic who has spent a lot of time in America and become a bit of a talking head for this kind of thing. Lars took Alan up onto the roof of the Higher Education where he works and pointed at the headquarters of the tax authorities. The problem was it isn’t the headquarters of the tax authorities and has not been for quite some time. I know because I used to live in it, but seeing as the tallest building being the tax headquarters is an established narrative trope in any guide to Sweden it seems a shame to get caught up on it.

 There was an assertion that Sweden doesn’t have a generous welfare state, which was a bit of a lie. It has an extremely generous welfare state, but it is built on a more expansive understanding of welfare than state unemployment benefit. This includes paying people to not work when they have young children, wage-linked unemployment funds and more robust attempts at education and retraining than that provided by either the current or previous Westminster governments, or by Britain historically for that matter. Alan Little’s assertion that “This isn’t the Sweden many on the left imagine” is true in part, but it almost seemed like it was too good a discovery to not make a point of. The truth of the matter is that many of the tenets of Scandinavian welfarism find no points of reference in British models or parlance. It isn’t Robin McAlpine’s William Morris inspired consensual welfarism, but neither is it Fraser Nelson’s utopia of hard work and sticks over carrots.

Last up was Norway, though Denmark wasn’t allowed a mention for some reason. Norway is the most prosperous of the Nordic countries, and as Alan strolled around Oslo’s redeveloped waterfront of speedboats and yuppie flats straight into the Nobel Peace Centre everything looked rosy. Norway is undeniably a great place to live, and definitely a much better bet than contemporary Britain by all kinds of measures. He visited a former industrial area reborn through a private business school. At an employment fair members of Norway’s so-called ‘dessert generation’ (because they are young enough to have only turned up for the sweetest part of the country’s journey from poor to rich and are known for wanting to have their cake and eat it) flocked to tables to become investment bankers or recruitment agents. The conclusion though was fairly unambiguous – even a tiny public oil fund would do wonders for Scotland’s economic and social rebirth.

There then came a very important question: why couldn’t Scotland pursue this Nordic model with further devolution? It was a question Little did not try to answer, but looking back over what was said some of the conclusions were self-evident. Could devolution make a Scottish oil fund, help protect Scotland from the economic collapse of a larger neighbour or allow it to radically reform its welfare and monetary policy? Probably not.

The best contribution though came in the show’s final lines. Alan Little is in the privileged position of speaking as a Scot who has gone not just to London but all over the world. He understands the context of change and political evolution, and his final question was the right one to ask. Should we not see the referendum in its broader, European context? Is this cutting Scotland off, or is it a repositioning at the nexus between two sets of neighbours?

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From complacency to place to place. The referendum is changing Scotland whatever happens

I’m on the train to Inverness as I write this, reading the very interesting post in the Spectator by Alex Massie about complacency in the anti-independence campaign. Massie’s basic point, that London’s journalistic and political class do not understand what is going on in Scotland could not be truer. I was down in Scotland’s other capital last week talking to the political editor of a popular website. He’s someone I’ve known a while and who I have a fair amount of respect for, even if we don’t see eye to eye politically, but he downright refused to heed my warning that he should pay more attention to the referendum and to what was going on outside of the media. His defence, as so often, were the opinion polls. You can’t argue with the polls as polls, but as the campaign goes on it is becoming apparent just how soft the vote is in some areas.

I was also recently invited to take on a Better Together rep in a debate at Napier University. The debate ended with a vote of 80-20 to Yes, though even the most optimistic fan of full powers would struggle to imagine such a result in the real referendum. Some of the students who came to take part, including ones who still plan to vote no, admitted to being surprised by the content of what was going on. This is because the Yes campaign is increasingly determining the issues on which the referendum is fought. Cineworld and the slightly cringy videos featuring the SNP’s favourite word of yesteryear – destiny – seem a world away. I don’t know whether they sacked Pete Wishart as musical director or whether it was an elaborate bluff to convince the No side it would just be the kind of identity politics most people run a mile from. Whatever the truth, it is Better Together who are increasingly falling back on metaphors of national family whilst Yes, in all its incarnations, makes the running.

This is to say nothing of the SNP who, for all the hard work on independence, are doing a moderately worse job in government than in their first term. This can be attributed in part to the hubris created by that magic majority, the absence of an effective opposition and the shifting around of resources so that important portfolios such as transport, climate change and education are occupied by people lacking much of a coherent vision or passion for what they do. The inaction on land reform and the readiness with which everything is reduced to a constitutional question do not help either. Perversely, the Greens are being invited on TV to talk about independence in a way they are rarely allowed to talk about their actual policies, and the thousand flowers approach is already showing promising growth. People who for ideological or identity reasons are unable to vote for an SNP future have found in the Greens and some of the other non-SNP campaigning groups a way of relating to the idea of independence that makes no demands on party lines or parroting press releases. I am one of those people, and any independence built on faith in a single party would just be as dispiriting and intellectually empty as people blindly signing up to join Glasgow Labour. You can’t leave the 49 per cent behind in a democracy, even if you’re in government.

The thing that the Yes campaign has come to terms with, and that the London media seemingly has not, is that although you might only need 50.0001 per cent of the vote, you have to aim to represent the interests and aspirations of more than that group of people. Instead of one-party centrism, that is more easily achieved through consensus across ideologies and groupings about the basic democratic functions of the country and what might be done with it. The conversations which are going on across Scotland are not just a question of Scottish or British, and not just a question of SNP or Labour. As the debate matures, Alastair Carmichael’s protestations about how much he loves whisky sound increasingly like Gordon Brown reeling of The Arctic Monkeys (Or for that matter, super-safe Ed Milliband choosing Hard Fi over John Knox Sex Club on Desert Island Disks). If you go out around Scotland you’ll soon see that people are willing to engage with the referendum on a more complex level that relates to their lives. Scotland isn’t on pause, but it is stopping to think.

Edinburgh may not be London, but neither is Inverness Edinburgh.Come next summer you might see panicked hacks skulking around Inverness airport in the search for the real people they are currently happy to ignore.

An urgent post-indy reform

An STV ballotIf Team Yes win the vote next year, amongst the governance changes required will be an expansion of the number of MSPs, primarily because we’ll need to staff more ministries and more Committees. Consider Westminster, bloated as its offices may be.

Starting with ministers, this page lists around 100 of them, and that’s just counting the Commons. The largest Holyrood grouping seen so far was just 73, the 1999-2003 Lab/LD coalition, down to 72 when Steel became PO. They couldn’t all be Ministers, not just because some of them weren’t up to it.

Now clearly there’s more to manage when you run an administration covering 63m people (with varying levels of devolution) compared to one which would the sole national administration for just over 5m people. But we’d need Ministers to cover pensions, social security, foreign affairs, defence, and a host of other junior Ministers too.

The same applies to Committees – currently there are 14 regular ones at Holyrood, plus a few on pieces of private legislation, plus welfare reform and one for the Referendum Bill. We’d need a permanent committee for the areas mentioned above, and there just aren’t enough MSPs to go round. Almost every MSP who’s not a Minister (or the PO, or Margo, or Johann Lamont, or Ruth Davidson) is on a Committee, sometimes two, sometimes three.

So what’s normal for an independent European country of our size? To pick the four such countries who have a population between five and six million, we find the following:

Bear in mind also that we’ll be celebrating the departure of 59 MPs who represent Scottish constituencies, plus a proportion of the 781 members of the House of Lords, however calculated. 65 would be our pro-rata share of the hereditaries and the bishops and those installed through patronage. So a Holyrood seating anything up to about 250 would be a net reduction in the number of parliamentarians representing Scotland. Oh, and we’d get more MEPs – to be honest, a greater proportional influence in the EU sounds more useful than about 95% of the peers I’ve ever taken notice of.

But 250 is excessive. Somewhere between 150 and 200 would make sense and fit that European pattern. I’m going to plump for 200 and y’all can haggle me down if need be.

So how would we elect them? The path of least resistance would be to expand the existing AMS system. Increasing both halves of the equation proportionally would give us about 113 constituencies and about 87 regional members. That’d be easiest done as regional lists of 10 rather than 7. Right now each constituency MSP represents just over 70,000 people on average (remembering that Orkney and Shetland have an MSP each, each representing around 20,000 people). Under this change each constituency MSP would represent about 47,000 people. Seems okay.

Another option would be to elect a second chamber by some other method – perhaps a national list or similar. And find somewhere else to house them (for a smaller chamber of, say, 71, the old Royal High would actually work). This is architecturally easier than expanding Holyrood, although I enjoyed being press officer for the building process and am ready to do it again if need be.

But if we’re going to do this thing, why not do it properly? Let’s get rid of the damn lists altogether, which were a compromise of their time between Labour and the Lib Dems, end the division between constituency and regional MSPs, and elect every last one of them fairly. STV works for Scottish local elections, it ends the kind of games which AMS encourages, and it allows the public to express more sophisticated preferences if they wish. Voters are already used to it, and it would reduce the number of electoral systems in play, making voter education an easier task.

The obvious way to do that (again, with tweaks for the islands in particular) would be to break each of the eight regions into five mini-regions, and elect five MSPs for each mini-region. People would complain that the constituency link would be lost, no doubt – they always do – but mini-regions like that would actually only be about twice the size of existing constituencies, and people living in each one would have five much more local representatives to talk to when they need help. Consider also the role of the Highlands and Islands list MSP just now. They represent an area the size of Belgium (as Eleanor Scott always reminded us), stretching from the most northerly point in Shetland to the southern tip of the Mull of Kintyre, a point further south than the whole of the central belt.

But I’m afraid it’s unavoidable: we’re going to need to do some building work to accommodate them all. I’m sure that’ll go more smoothly this time.

Update: By coincidence, Professor Paul Cairney wrote about this too, yesterday.