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Better Nation

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.

 

Labour and the SNP are out of touch

May 5

Posted by James in Economy | 5 Comments

Over the weekend some Labour candidates wrote to the papers in support of cautious and gradual rail renationalisation. According to that same piece, “Ed Balls is said to be resistant to anything that would be portrayed by Labour’s opponents as anti-business or a lurch back to the pre-Thatcher era of nationalised industries.” And yet, at a hustings I attended, when the candidates were asked which of their own parties’ policies they would change, the Tory said, without hesitating, rail privatisation, and that he accepted it had been a disaster. Policy lurched right on this. Even many in the Tories think a moderate lean to the left now wouldn’t be a bad idea. But Labour remain just too timid.

As I read this weekend’s coverage I thought to myself about how great it would be if someone had some polling on this just lying around unpublished. Then I remembered that I did! As part of my ongoing polling series with Survation, the Daily Record and Dundee University’s Five Million Questions, last month we asked whether the Scottish public would like to see the train companies renationalised, and the result was 71% for, 29% against (excluding don’t knows: full figures yes 59%, no 24%, don’t know 17%). It’s like I cleverly saved the data for the May Day weekend.

So, by a factor of more than two to one, the Scottish people are to the left of the current positions held by both of our supposedly social-democratic parties. Which means, sadly, this popular policy is offered by only one of the Holyrood parties, the Greens. Much as it’s nice to have such another unique selling point, we’d be a lot more likely to see public control restored if one of the two larger parties felt inclined to outflank the other to the left and adopt a policy with such clear majority support.

While I was at it, I thought I’d establish how far the Scottish people want to see public control over the rest of the commanding heights of the economy. These were the results from Survation (summary table including don’t knows here).

Would like to see nationalised

Would not like to see nationalised

Royal Mail

  74%  26%

Gas and electricity companies

  72%  28%

Train companies

  71%  29%

Private prisons and prisoner transport services

  68%  32%

Bus services

  59%  31%

Airports

  49%  51%

Land-line phone companies

  47%  53%

High street / retail banks

  41%  59%

Investment banks

  36% 64%

Mobile phone operators

  29%  71%

It’s quite impressive, really, the scale to which the public are to the left of the SNP and the three Westminster parties. Clear majorities want to renationalise Royal Mail, the power companies, the train companies, the bus companies, and to end private prisons and prisoner transport. The only one from that list where any of those four parties is in line with public opinion is the SNP’s welcome commitment to bring Royal Mail back into public ownership. Ed Miliband gets slated for his policy to cap energy costs as if it’s too left-wing. The truth is it’s too timid and too impractical, and a massive majority of the public want to go much further and overturn the Thatcher-era electricity privatisations completely.

And beyond that, more than 40% of the Scottish public would even nationalise all the high street banks, those we don’t yet own. Despite no political party pushing renationalisation of BT as a monopoly landline operator (effectively those landline services would be close to free, given the true costs of operating them now), the majority against this idea is slim. It’s hardly surprising opinion is divided: we traded one pretty incompetent nationalised industry for several pretty incompetent private firms. Personally if we must have incompetent phone companies I’d at least prefer vast private profits weren’t being made from us.

Overall, though, this is what a radically under-served left-leaning electorate looks like. We know the Tories and the Lib Dems will always be wrong on public ownership: but what excuse do Labour and the SNP have?

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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