by Mark McHugh

At the time of the last finance bill, the first in the history of Holyrood which necessitated a reduction in overall spending, there was a lot of noise made about the moves to protect capital spending.

This was predicated on the idea that, in a recession, government should spend on infrastructure projects. Which is true, from an empirical perspective, as far as it goes.

But, and there’s always a but, that’s not the whole story. As the man said “I’ll think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that”.

It’s true that there’s an important role for government spending to play in mitigating the worst effects of an economic downturn through capital spending. When businesses and individuals are reigning in spending and reducing aggregate demand it’s important that the government does as much as it can to avoid what Keynes identified as the paradox of thrift.

It’s also true that the best way for a government to increase the amount of demand it puts into the economy is through capital spending. It’s a very efficient transmission mechanism between government and the private sector and, provided they’re properly considered, the end product of capital investment continues to benefit the country after the recession ends.

Simply, it’s better to pay people to build cycle paths and schools than it is to drop bags of cash from helicopters.

But, I told you there was always a but, that’s not what the Scottish Government did last year.

What happened was that John Swinney diverted revenue spending into the capital budget, essentially relying on the increased efficiency of the transmission mechanism to boost the Scottish economy.

That might work for a year, but the differences in how government spending on services and on infrastructure affect aggregate demand aren’t that large and will even out over time, there’s no real difference in the levels of fiscal entropy. When Keynesian economists argue for increases in government capital spending they’re typically arguing for an increase in the total spent, not in one aspect of spending at the expense of another.

There’s also questions to be asked about whether what’s classed as capital spending really represents a better long term investment than revenue spending. The short term effect of the decision to prioritise, say, duelling the A9 instead of providing college places for thousands of young people is probably negligible but I’m not convinced that building more roads is a better bet for the future than teaching people.

We’ll see what the finance bill proposes soon enough, but I’m not optimistic it will offer more than smoke, mirrors and platitudes. A truly bold budget would use the powers Holyrood has to actually increase government spending rather than shuffling money from column A to column B.

It was all a bit low key really. Indeed, the Scotsman didn’t even bother reporting it on their website until a couple of hours ago. Thank goodness for the BBC though eh? Where would we be without it and its live blog.

Actually, you know what, don’t answer that.

The bills shall number a hefty fifteen for the 2012/13 parliamentary term, quantity rather than quality some have muttered, but let’s have a look at them shall we and decide for ourselves:

1. Referendum Bill
2. Budget Bill
3. Procurement Reform Bill
4. Bankruptcy Bill
5. Better Regulation Bill
6. Land and Buildings Transaction Tax Bill
7. Landfill Tax Bill
8. Adult Health & Social Care Integration Bill
9. Children and Young People Bill
10. Post-16 Education Reform Bill
11. Forth Estuary Transport Authority Bill
12. Marriage and Civil Partnership Bill
13. Victims and Witnesses Bill
14. Tribunals Bill

There is of course one in that mix that stands out in the eyes of the SNP, and most of the party’s detractors, against all others. Yes, the Forth Estuary Transport Authority Bill, I never thought I’d see the day *wipes a tear from the eye*

No, the coming year will be all about the referendum and bill number 1 above. I rather fear that progress towards an agreed format will be slow in forthcoming, to the point that this time next year questions over questions shall remain unanswered, though Salmond did promise to publish the consultation results “next month”. So we’ll leave that bill to one side.

Highlights therefore are really as follows:

– Marriage and Civil Partnership Bill – Probably historic and possibly hugely inconvenient for Alex Salmond as he seeks to step softly towards 2014 without annoying too many people. However, the right thing to do is the right thing to do and within the Parliament this Bill will glide serenely towards becoming law, even if there’ll be a right old religious rumpus outside

– Children and Young People Bill – A very welcome commitment to delivering a minimum of 600 hours free early learning and childcare provision was included, particularly notable for me because (no, not for that reason!) a colleague returned to work after extended paternity leave this week and casually mentioned the £1350 he forks out a month for childcare. Ouch. Scotland can and must do better than that.

– Forth Estuary Transport Authority Bill – I jested before, but this is serious business. Billions of pounds of our money will be spent on a new bridge that potentially may not be necessary. If dehumidification of the cables in the Forth Road Bridge is a viable option, I’d have no problem with the number of bills dropping from 15 to 14 this year. Time will tell but I rather fear most MSPs have set their face to the wind on this one.

– Bankruptcy Bill – Pictured

– My personal favourite is the Procurement Reform Bill which will aim to “deliver community benefits, support innovation, consider environmental requirements and promote public procurement processes and systems which are transparent, streamlined, standardised, proportionate, fair and business-friendly”.

This bill used to be called the ‘Sustainable Procurement Bill’, so perhaps as an out Green, I shouldn’t be getting too excited, but it’s definitely one to find more detail about.

Reactions were predictable. Johann Lamont bemoaned the lack of substance while ironically not coming up with any tangible suggestions herself. I wonder if Kezia Dugdale on Newsnight Scotland this evening will pick up from where her leader left off.

Johann also likened the announcement to “a 1970s ladder ‘fine as far as it goes'”. I have no earthly idea what she is getting at. But I’m an 80s lad, so what do I know.

Willie Rennie had an interesting, if I personally think unworthy, point to make regarding Scottish Water and the missed opportunity to take the £1.5bn windfall from the public body to pay for new shiny things. After the past couple of decades of household greed, PFI and sovereign debt crises, how anyone thinks heaping more debt upon the public purse is the answer is beyond me. Perhaps Willie should heed Ed Miliband’s warning about our ‘fast buck’ society.

Ruth Davidson chose not say anything but instead jumped up and down and occasionally pointed. (She actually said “run out of steam, run out of ideas and fails to live up to the ambitions of Scotland’s people”. Run out of steam and ideas? More irony then)

The Greens strongly backed the referendum and equal marriage bills, but also urged that a progressive vision be coupled with the pursuit of economic recovery making me, not for the first nor the last time, wistfully lament the lack of a formal SNP-Green coalition at Holyrood and the near-perfect balance it would bring.

No, the most drama this afternoon came from Labour MSP Neil Finlay who accused Alex Salmond of tweeting inside the Chamber, seemingly unaware that it is well known that the First Minister’s staff update his account and Alex always signs his ‘own’ tweets off with “AS”. Sharp as ever, Mike Russell raised his own standing order – how did Neil Findlay know, while inside the Chamber, that the First Minister’s account had been updated?

Quite. And so the tone was set for the coming year.

Well, nearly. I spent the last week in Stranraer on holiday. By day exploring the Rhins on bike (well, until an unfortunate coincidence of a flat tyre on a stretch of moorland and two tyre levers with an amazingly consistent mean time between failure left me dependent on the kindness of strangers) and by night enjoying the faded grandeur of a hotel that was last refurbished in the early 80s at best but which serves coffee in a silver pot at breakfast and handmade tablet in the drawing room to round off dinner in the evening. After which I customarily retire to gaze across an empty harbour at sunset.

Also just in time to watch another British woman beat the crap out of some foreigner to win a gold medal at the Olympics (I promise I won’t mention The Subject, it’s ok, you can keep reading).

Stranraer finds itself at a juncture in its history. Up until the 19th century, I’ve recently learned, most of the shipping from Ireland landed at Portpatrick to the west and, as such, it was was a bustling, thriving locus of trade. Changes in the scale and importance of commerce, and the strong westerly winds, led to most of the shipping heading to the more sheltered  waters of Loch Ryan instead. Around this time the hotel I presently sit in was built as a private home for Sir John Ross, Arctic explorer. Today, however, goods shipping has long gone and the passenger ferries have recently moved up Loch Ryan to a new terminal at Cairnryan. From my window I can see the idle cranes, piers, loading bays, car parks and Ulsterbus garage that serviced the shipping which made this the one place in this part of the world with shops other than a general store. Unlike Portpatrick there are other industries here – dairy processing mostly. I think that’s one of the things that endears this place to me. I spent many summers in Carmarthenshire and between the single track back roads, rolling hills, industrial decline and sheep shit it reminds me of there.

Essentially, the half-bucolic, half-post-industrial country that we saw given euphoric, spasmodic, self-assured and confused expression in Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony a fortnight ago.

And like the South Westerly hinterlands of Wales and Scotland, the Olympics have shown a country at a turning point in it’s history, unsure of who it is and where it’s going. No, I’m still not talking about The Subject. The Olympics, from my comfortable armchair, are a London-centric celebration of the confident, self-aware but comfortable Britain that developed from the mid-1990s onwards – think Spice World & Lock, Stock vs Trainspotting and Brassed Off. A wholesale rearrangement of how elite sport was funded occurred then – this generation of athletes have been ruthlessly selected based on results and the successful have had access to some of the best training available. Black and mixed race women from Leeds becoming the focus of a nation’s Will To Power alongside the unexpected Jones-the-kick-to-the-head from North Wales and the equally unexpected, if slightly more establishment, Golds in dressage. Not to mention the bloodbath of the velodrome. Really should ban those scythed wheels, most unfair.

There’s a downside which was also represented. The utterly objectionable verbification of the perfectly good noun “medal”. John Inverdale’s daily progression in more obscene fake tan to try to obscure the fact this is the only time we ever see a panel without any white people on it. The authoritarianism and militarism (however well intentioned) of the UK government by uniformed troops working as security, albeit due to the wretched incompetance of private sector provision of public services, another theme of last 20 years. Admittedly this was balanced by members of the armed forces being free to wear their uniform off duty, something which would never have been possible without serious risk to them and anyone around them until relatively recently. The lingering sexism in Jade Jones’ coach’s comment that “she’s like a man”, however well intentioned the acres of post-hoc justification tried to make it out as.

The post-industrial period is over, the ship(yards) aren’t coming back, farming’s been in deep trouble for decades, the all-party fetish for finance capitalism has proven disastrous and we can’t all open doors for each other. In many ways it’s the last hurrah of the New Labour period, with all the good and ill that implies. Like Stranraer, like Carlisle, like Tenby or Ullapool or Whitby or any of hundreds of other towns the country that was on show at the Olympics is already dead in it’s current form, and as Lallands Peatworrier postulated earlier today, it’s high time we started thinking about what’s next.

Oliver Milne is a freelance journalist and editor of the Glasgow Guardian,the University of Glasgow’s Student Newspaper. He tweets nonsense as @OliverMilne.

Photograph by glasgowamateur

Today we saw two Scotlands. Through twin media narratives we saw to the heart of what is a deeply fractured society; at once progressive and deeply conservative. For Scotland, within the United Kingdom or without, to fulfil its true potential for its citizens we need to forcefully challenge bigotry in our civil society.

Tartaglia’s hateful and ignorant tirade on the death of the much respected David Cairns MP presents a much bigger problem for Scotland than the political struggle which will accompany any equal marriage bill. Religious observance, or at least organised religious observance, is experiencing a dramatic decline in Scotland today. Despite only 1 in 10 Scots attending religious services we are still the the most religious of the nations that make up Great Britain and the social and political influences of our religious organisations are not to be ignored.

The bill will pass, and most likely with a comfortable majority, even if Cardinal Keith O’Brian lives up to his promise of pouring £100 million into lobbying and campaigning against it. The success of the law,however, is greatly diminished when the religious organisations which make up a huge section of our civil society preach intolerance and hatred, and disguise it as morality. As citizens, religious or otherwise, we have a duty to our polity to ensure equal protection for all members of our society. This means when necessary denouncing entrenched religious groups who wield their considerable influence – directly through lobbying or indirectly from the pulpit – not to enrich our society or protect their practitioners but to demonize and harass.

My relationship with religion is a deeply contradictory one but I could be described as a lapsed Catholic. The Catholic church has a simultaneously horrendous and honourable history. It has ruined lives and oppressed those it considered different leaving painful and visible scars on our social fabric. But it is also responsible for the largest non-government directed foreign aid program and the education of children in parts of the world where few NGOs dare venture. One does not cancel out the other, like most institutions it exists in shades of grey.

When in the 11th century the Catholic Church clamped down on the ability of priests to buy positions of power (simony) or to marry (nicolaitism) they did so largely because it reflected not only scripture but a sense of a deep injustice felt by the people of Europe. In short, the church has always adapted to reflect the injustices confirmed to them by their congregations and wider society.

With this in mind we must not let this opportunity pass. I will be writing to Archbishop-Elect Tartaglia to express my horror at his sentiments and to ask that in light of seeing the hurt his comments have caused that he considers his own unjustifiable prejudices and the unjustifiable prejudices of the Catholic Church in Scotland.

This battle isn’t limited to Catholics. As ordinary Scottish Muslims observe Ramadan they too should reflect on the hate expressed on their behalf by their Imams and speak out against intolerance. The Kirk has argued that the Scottish Government has moved ahead of the will of ordinary people of Scotland. I think that’s nonsense and that we should tell them so.

Today we saw two Scotlands but both need not survive. If ensuring a bright future for the progressive Scotland after the equal marriage bill means forcing a frank but respectful debate about equality with the other Scotland then I’ll see you early Sunday morning.