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Scottish education’s trust fund.

Oct 13

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

I wrote recently about some of the challenges and opportunities facing Academia in the context of both the independence referendum and in the drift toward an economistic approach to higher education more generally.

One of the ideas regularly turned to by the Better Together campaign is the idea of Scottish research excellence being inhibited through withdrawal of UK research funds and in the more abstract but equally important concept of somehow being external to the research community.

It is not without irony that the President of Science Europe is the St Andrews academic Paul Boyle, an Englishman working in Scotland who now resides in Brussels. He is also head of the ESRC, the body responsible for allocating state funding to economics and social sciences in the UK.

Science Europe exists as part of the European Research Area, an initiative of the European Union designed to facilitate a single market in higher education research. The use of the word market in EU parlance is slightly misleading, as the ERA exists to increase the movement of academic labour and knowledge exchange over encouraging universities to shop around. It is designed to facilitate a Europe-wide knowledge economy in which the benefits of world class research can be spread across Europe as well as providing support for Europe’s existing research capacity.

Furthermore, there is a long and noble tradition of academics moving away from the UK to work at leading centres elsewhere, whether it be the Max Planck institute in Germany, MIT in America, Sciences Po in Paris or Asia. For what it is worth the University of Edinburgh currently occupies 17th position in the QS World University Rankings, due in large part to its consistently high research impact as typified by the recent Nobel Prize award to Professor Peter Higgs.  As the jokes went around the internet with Alex Salmond and his magic pocket flag superimposed on Peter Higgs, they illustrated that knowledge is not  bound by national borders. This can be applied to both to the hypothetical new Scotland and the watertight, unitary British state that opposes it. That Professor Higgs’ work on particle physics was proven in an international underground superlab that actually straddles an international border is a case in point.

There is another truth not told here too. Both Oxford and Cambridge keep their reputations and mead cups topped up via huge amounts of private funding. Don’t tell anyone, but Edinburgh also has a lot of money down the back of the sofa and the University of Aberdeen has in recent years proactively pursued sources of income external to the British state funding model with a high degree of success.  The amount of funding allocated by the state to universities in the UK is also below other countries. Denmark spends 2.4% of its GDP on research compared to only 1.7% in the UK.

We are also, it is to be hoped, entering an age in which the open provision of scientific and intellectual knowledge can lead to an international commons. The neo-liberal model of globalised university education assumes that knowledge and its producers exist in a Malthusian universe of finite elites who can be bought and sold. The structures of knowledge creation, however, can be replicated. Scotland’s enduring commitment to publicly funded education means that it is slightly further toward advancing that generalist dream of the knowledge commons in which everyone might participate.

The knowledge economy is a misunderstood concept which in its clumsiest articulation makes it sound as if you can put a direct price on research skills. Although it can be monetised in some cases, academic research does not take place on an investment and returns basis, and both the Scottish and European knowledge economies rely on their citizens spending money on things they do not understand in the belief that there is a good to be had in facilitating such output.

Paul Boyle summed up the challenges and potential of Europe-wide research in a recent editorial for the journal Nature, writing “The European Research Area should be an evolving, flexible and creative space in which researchers, ideas and knowledge can circulate freely to respond to society’s challenges. At its heart will be trust.”

So in this new Scotland we may have a social contract, and hopefully a renewed working relationship with both The United Kingdom of England, Wales and Northern Ireland alongside the rest of Europe. All will be relationships built on a belief and trust in the ability of intangible things to produce tangible benefits that go beyond the bottom line. That’s an educational paradigm we should all believe in.

 

The Scottish Greens’ Nordic Future

Oct 10

Posted by Dom in Constitution, Culture, Democracy, Economy, Education, Environment, Equality, Europe, Health, Holyrood, Ideology, International, Local government, Society | 1 Comment

Patrick Harvie's Swedish opposite number Gustav Fridolin. Notice the dissimilarities from Alex Salmond and Johann Lamont

Patrick Harvie’s Swedish opposite number Gustav Fridolin. Notice the dissimilarities to Alex Salmond and Johann Lamont

The Scottish Greens’ conference in Inverness last weekend was dominated by one theme, and one question. Why is Scotland not like its neighbouring Northern European countries in terms of living standards, life expectancy, wellbeing and sustainability?

Three of the plenary speakers chose variations on the theme and all of them spoke glowingly about the potential for moving away from the Anglo-Saxon obsession with big economics and moving toward a government and financial system more similar to Scotland’s Northern European peers.

The effervescent Lesley Riddoch has made it her mission in recent years to persuade Scotland of the advantages of decentralisation, localism, empowerment and Nordic levels of public service provision. In the Greens she has obviously found a receptive audience. She was joined by Mike Danson  from Heriot Watt University whose time seems to have finally come after years of proposing alternative economic models of Scotland, and Robin McAlpine of the Reid Foundation fronting the work done by a team of academics and researchers to develop a blueprint for an autonomous Scottish parliament.

The Reid Foundation’s Common Weal project is gaining momentum, and Robin McAlpine paid the Greens a compliment in saying that they already have the policies to make it work. The challenge lies in convincing the SNP and Labour of the validity of such an approach or making sure that the Greens gain enough seats at the next Holyrood election to at least begin to implement it in government with another party.

Talk of the Arc of Prosperity may have vanished from the lips of the First Minister, but over in the Green and Independent corner of the chamber the vision is very much alive, and it is hard to argue against Scotland pursuing such a course when all the evidence suggests it would lead to a decidedly better country for everybody.

The list of potential polices is almost endless, but the Greens are committed to increasing investment in strategic public transport infrastructure, re-regulation of bus services to give local authorities more say, increased basic wages to both help people and increase tax yields for investment in services, municipal energy companies and education reforms based on Finland’s proven globally leading example.

The Common Weal project is a welcome addition to the Scottish political scene with its stress on common consensus rather than socialist revolution, and its use of existing similar states to Scotland which clearly illustrate that it is possible to tackle some of Scotland’s endemic problems in an inclusive and democratic way.

The Greens now find themselves in the strange position of having a more cohesive and coherent vision for Scotland’s future than almost any other party in Holyrood, the SNP included. Next time you’re stuck in a traffic jam on the way to pick up your kids from an overpriced nursery and worrying about the 8.2 per cent price rise your energy company have just foisted upon you, take a moment to consider that Scotland has an alternative modern future ready and waiting.

The benefits of a unified government

Oct 1

Posted by James in Constitution | 11 Comments

pulledDuring the 1980s, pressure for a Scottish Parliament stemmed largely from the view that devolution might be able to protect Scotland from the worst excesses of Thatcherism. The last fourteen years have certainly confirmed that logic, even if some of that Thatcherism was being pushed at Westminster by New Labour. The decisions taken at Holyrood by this administration and its predecessors have almost all been either better than Westminster’s equivalent decisions for England or at least no worse. That’s why the idea of abolishing the Scottish Parliament, as floated by the occasional fringe voice from the Tories or Labour, is now utterly inconceivable.

The current Coalition is engaged in a direct assault on the poor across the UK, particularly through tax and benefits, and on immigrants – all areas that are primarily reserved, even if Holyrood can make some difference on all of them. Although independence is for keeps, not just to block this particular Tory/Lib Dem administration, this kind of policy agenda certainly helps make the case for independence.

But it’s not just “if Holyrood had powers over these areas it’d be making better decisions”, even though that seems likely to be true no matter who’s in power at Holyrood. It’s also a broader issue of coordination and direction. Is it really in Scotland’s interests to have the key policy issues that affect us all divided between two legislatures and two lots of Ministers, Ministers who will so often have radically different objectives? Does it help Scotland to have social policy pulled in two directions at once? Even on economic issues, where the SNP are closer to the Westminster consensus than I’d like, the two administrations aren’t exactly in lock-step.

As the US shutdown illustrates, a single national government doesn’t always lead to coordination and efficiency, or even common sense. But I’d rather we didn’t have to have a Scottish Government which spent a chunk of its time either complaining about Westminster’s poor decisions or considering how to work around them. I’d also rather that when people have a problem they need help with they don’t have to check Schedule 5 of the 1998 Act to work out if they need to speak to their MP or their MSPs.

We need a single Parliament, fairly elected, responsive and transparent (and yes, one which devolves more power down to communities too), one which deals with every national issue, and which holds to account a single government which drives policy in a clear direction: whatever direction it was elected to take us in. Given we’re not going back to unitary rule at Westminster any time soon, that can only come with a Yes vote next year.

The Westminster Party – what’s their record?

Sep 19

Posted by James in Constitution, History, Holyrood, Parties, Westminster | 7 Comments

4159787227_1513c4f155Scotland’s vote in a year’s time is too important to be decided by who looks likely to win the UK General Election the year after. This isn’t about party politics, it’s about the broad sweep of history, and it’s about the institutions we vote for and which then rule over us.

Anarchists are fond of the phrase “it doesn’t matter who you vote for, the Government always get in”, which is what makes the referendum such a rare and fascinating thing. For the first and probably last time in my life I’ll have a vote on whether I want the Westminster government as a whole in my life or not. So let’s put party to one side, or rather, let’s take a look at Westminster’s record as if it were a single political party, the good and bad.

The Westminster Party, for want of a better name, has been in power all my life. In fact they have (for the purposes of this argument) ruled without a break since the mid-19th century. So let’s go back a bit, rather than just looking at the last five or ten years: perhaps the last 40-50 years? What have they delivered over that period? I’ll do my best to be fair and pick a few areas to consider.

Democratic reform: Progress here has been limited at best, with the highlights being the Scottish Parliament itself and the other devolved assemblies. On the minus side the Westminster Party has defended its own interests over the decades by retaining an electoral system that’s non-proportional, outdated, and frankly favours the party’s own self-interest. The only time they’ve offered us a choice on replacing it, the alternative on offer was the smallest tweak possible, still non-proportional, and not something any of the party’s factions has ever even supported. Despite the cautious removal of some of the hereditaries from the House of Lords, we are still ruled in broadly the same way we were back in the 1860s. Oh, and the Westminster Party looks unlikely ever to offer us the option of an elected head of state. Compare to the Holyrood Party – the only level of democracy they could reform under the Scotland Act was local government, so they acted, and we now have a properly fair electoral system for our Councillors. The flaws in the Westminster Party’s record this area shouldn’t be regarded as something just of interest to wonks, either – it’s the foundation for all the policy issues below.

The economy: There’s no nice way to say this. Boom and bust, plus inequality: those are the Westminster Party’s trademarks. The booms have been unsustainable and delivered most of the benefits to the already better-off, to the city, and to London and the south-east, while the busts have been at the expense of the poorest, of manufacturing, and of the North of England in particular. It’s almost as if the Westminster Party’s policies over the last forty years have been designed to deliver instability and ever-widening inequality. Key public services have been handed over to the City, too, and so public money goes to support the lifestyles those who own the companies, rather than the services we use.

Health: If you go back a bit further than 50 years, you’d see perhaps the Westminster Party’s most shining achievement in this or any other area: the NHS. However, over the last 20 years, despite the massive popularity of a publicly-owned and publicly-run health service, the Westminster Party has chipped away at it, brought in private competition, charged for built new hospitals through dire PFI contracts, and weakened it perhaps permanently. They still charge for prescriptions and eye tests, for goodness sake. Fortunately, Scotland has missed the worst of this: the Holyrood Party, in power here since the start of devolution, has protected the NHS in Scotland from the worst excesses of this marketisation.

Education: You could almost say the primary policy of the Westminster Party here has been change for its own sake (another feature of their NHS policy): endless reorganisations, often without a clear purpose in mind. Having said that, the 1990s saw a period of significant investment at the primary and secondary level, which is to be commended. Unfortunately, at the same time the principle that higher education should be based on ability rather than bank balances was first threatened. Now the English university sector is effectively unaffordable for those who aren’t from wealthy backgrounds or prepared to get deep in debt, a principle which the Holyrood Party also ended in 2007.

Defence: This should really be billed as Interference. Or perhaps Profligacy. Defence is the only part of public spending that never gets challenged by the Westminster Party, who have also been committed to nuclear weapons for as long as nuclear weapons have existed. They never saw a military boondoggle they didn’t want to waste money on, and there’s hardly an American-led war (notable exception: Vietnam) they didn’t support or even actively take part in. Some of those interventions (e.g. Sierra Leone) have gone better than others (two recent disasters hardly need to be named), but the record here is pretty brutal, to say the least.

The environment: Despite an unexpectedly early expression of interest in the late 1980s, it’s been all coal and new motorways and business as usual. The Westminster Party leadership knows it needs to talk as if it cares about the environment, and set some meaningless targets to miss (a flaw it shares with the Holyrood Party, to be fair), but they have achieved literally nothing substantial that might protect the environment either here in the UK or internationally.

Overall, the Westminster Party’s failures of policy and governance could hardly be more clear. This what we’ve had to put up with over the last 150 years, but if Scotland votes No, it’s also what we’ll face for the next 150 years. I regret the fact that the rest of the UK isn’t being offered an opportunity to vote the whole lot of them out out, especially my friends in England who (outside London) don’t have the benefit of devolution.

But that can’t be helped. We have a chance in Scotland to push a domino over next year. Perhaps others will fall after it.

pic credit

Class, Nation & Socialism

Sep 16

Posted by Guest Blog in Constitution | 14 Comments

A guest today from Tommy Kane, who works at Holyrood for Neil Findlay MSP, both of whom have been setting out left arguments against independence ahead of the referendum. Tommy’s the co-editor of the Red Paper discussed below, alongside Pauline Bryan.

Tommy KaneReaction to ‘Class, Nation and Socialism: The Red Paper on Scotland 2014’ confirms, as the old saying goes, you can’t please all of the people all of the time. Amongst the critiques has been the accusation that the Red Paper Collective has been indulging in ‘fantasy politics’. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Red Paper has quite deliberately sought to do the opposite.

This book isn’t about whether we should be Scottish or British; rather this is a book about class. It should be no surprise to find then that a central supposition of the contributors is that, whatever the constitution, powers must have a purpose. Namely, that we have to start addressing, substantively and not just paying lip service to, the deep inequities, which shamefully still exist in the Scotland of 2013.

It is also contended that Scotland won’t tackle the multitude of problems it faces with a border, a flag or even a list of powers – it will only do through a radical political agenda which seeks to radically challenge the perpetual failure of the dominant neo-liberal orthodoxy, a failure which has revisited us again in the guise of an austerity programme precipitated by a fundamental failure of the market system. It is against that backdrop that the thinking of the Red Paper Collective has developed during discussions over the past two years.

Featuring people who every day work for, and in the interests of, working people it should be no surprise to hear that the group who made up the Red Paper concluded early on that an assessment of what model would best serve and advance the interests of ordinary working people was needed prior to next year’s referendum. This included considerations of the status quo and some form of enhanced devolution, as well as independence. Posing this hypothesis necessitates, in fact demands, an answer grounded in political and economic realities: a direction in tune with the natural instinct of nearly all of the contributors, who in their daily working lives simply cannot afford to pander to fantasy.

A political reality is that the SNP Government won’t dissolve; they will carry on under the guise of Scotland’s party fighting Scotland’s corner. Initially this will include them writing a constitution, which will be hard to undo, and that no doubt will incorporate membership of the EU, a UK currency union (impacting on tax raising and public spending policies), remaining loyal to the monarchy and reducing corporation tax so as to attract the inward investment that can only result in a race to the bottom. Such a proposition could actually be interpreted as a form of federalism and not independence at all; critically, however, it would be an arrangement in thrall to neo-liberal thinking.

Economic realities are expertly laid forth by John Foster and Richard Leonard in the book. They show clearly how external ownership of the Scottish economy is growing. Unless I have missed something, there is no suggestion of any change on that front, unless a Lazarus-style recovery is made by those political parties who advocate appropriation. Therefore, you would have a Scottish economy still externally controlled, predominately in the city of London, but without any ability to intervene and curb that power. In such a circumstance political self-determination is, arguably, fatally undermined from the start.

The strength of the book we think also lies in its multiplicity. To take a couple of examples, Alan MacKinnon unpacks and analyses just how realistic the removal of Trident will be in an independent Scotland, particularly given the conversion of the SNP to the cause of NATO. Stephen Smellie, Vince Mills and Gordon Munro argue for an empowerment of local government, asking why within the current constitutional debate the role of councils is not being discussed.

Another section of the book considers democratic ownership of our economy. The value of this section is in the production of pragmatic, but progressive, policy ideas. Indeed, these chapters provide a pathway for progressing public ownership in various and varied sectors ranging from football to energy, but which acknowledges that this need not mean a homogenous version of public ownership. No matter the result of the referendum next year, these are chapters that offer any (progressive) government sound policy ideas.

At the heart of both ‘Yes’ mainstream and Radical Indy thinking is that there can be no British Road to Socialism. Apart from the obvious question of how and why anybody thinks the Scottish Road will be any easier this point does throw up some philosophical considerations. Is it right, for example, that we take the lifeboat strategy whereby the lifeboat escaping from the sinking ship takes only Scots without any recourse or concern for those left behind? Or, should we remain united with our brothers and sisters to fight and change from within; to this end it’s worth bearing in mind the advances made by working people and how it was class unity that helped achieve progress.

Of course, class analysis permeates throughout the book, not least the question of how working class unity would be impacted upon independence. Underpinning this throughout is the implicit belief that a bricklayer in Bathgate has more in common with a bricklayer in Bridlington than he has with the banker in Edinburgh’s financial sector. Some suggest otherwise, however, and say that we could offer a good example to the more reactionary forces elsewhere in the UK. Such an argument makes assumptions that may reflect more their own wishes than political reality.

The truth is that, as Stephen Low and Vince Mills highlight, social attitudes are very similar in Scotland and the North of England and we cannot assume that Scots are more inclined to left politics than their counterparts in England, especially those Northern regions. These arguments quite simply also ignore how class consciousness not national consciousness has been at the root of material advancement for working people across the UK.  Working class unity provides greater capacity to challenge the dominance of international capitalism and we weaken that at our peril.  Such a class analysis is, or should be, an inescapable principle of socialists that each of the Red Paper contributors forcefully remind us of.

Finally, the book suggests that perhaps an enhanced devolution settlement is something that needs considered: thus reflecting, if the polls are to be believed, the views of more Scots than those who support either of the Yes or No positions. This was a small, but nevertheless important, dimension of the book. Enhanced devolution, perhaps within a Federal system that also considers what’s best for the regions of England, amongst others, would provide us sufficient autonomy to tackle poverty and inequality but would still see us retain our link with the rest of the UK.

Such a model would also enable us to work constructively within the UK and for instance enable us to argue and fight for peace when for example the UK Government consider embarking on foreign adventures. If Scotland was outwith the UK then wars would take place regardless, Scotland might not be in them but war itself would still take place. Remaining within provides Scots with a voice to argue against war.

‘Class, Nation and Socialism: The Red Paper on Scotland 2014’ has sought to instil some class thinking into the current constitutional debate, which up until now has been sadly lacking. We recognise we have merely scratched the surface but nevertheless we have, we hope, provided food for thought, particularly thinking about what type of country we aspire to be, or should aspire to be.