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Better Nation

Bring me the head of Keith Brown!

Mar 3

Posted by Dom in Holyrood | 3 Comments

For all their faults, you can’t deny that the Labour governments of the early Scottish Parliament were better at rail policy than the SNP have been. The rebuilding of the vital link between Bathgate and Glasgow, Larkhall to Motherwell and the Borders railway were all projects that achieved critical mass in those first sessions. Even the Edinburgh trams, conceived with the best of intentions but executed with the worst incompetency and lack of enthusiasm, will turn out to be a wise investment in the long term.

The SNP on the other hand seem intent on standing in the way of rail and sustainable mass transit at every turn. The Edinburgh-Glasgow line via Falkirk was all set to be a benchmark for the rest of the Scottish rail network until Keith Brown’s department realised just how much money they would need to carry out economically dubious projects such as the doubling of the entire A9.

Today the self-interested people-hating rail lobby in Scotland, concerned only with giving people better and cheaper public transport and blind to the real issues facing hardworking people such as the lack of a slip road and city-centre parking charges, Transform Scotland have nailed their colours to the mast in a broadside on the SNP government.

Transform Scotland have essentially produced a wish list or projects that need funded, with an emphasis on schemes that would lead to carbon reductions, better connectivity for peripheral areas and nullify the arguments for hugely expensive road projects. Rather than repeat what they have said I’ve compiled my own list to send to Keith Brown.

1) Electrify the Highland Main Line from Inverness to Perth and build a new section from Perth to Inverkeithing:

At the moment a lot of the safety issues on the A9 are caused by lorries that could easily transfer to rail. Electric trains climb hills quicker and rebuilding sections of double track that previously existed with a few additions would be much cheaper than the scheme to double in size the trunk road. This is a model employed in Sweden where existing transport corridors have been used to minimise impact on land and where the train is visibly faster than the cars alongside. As for the ‘new’ section, that would just be a new variation of an old railway closed in the 1960s.

2) Stop building car parks and extend the Glasgow Subway above ground.

To say Glasgow’s public transport is dysfunctional is an understatement. Useless private owner buses and three different ticket systems for the buses, subway and the big trains. The East End of Glasgow is undeveloped enough that it would be easy to extend the Subway above ground. There are a couple of different scenarios for this, but the most sensible would probably be a line running from between Buchanan Street and St Enoch that surfaced between High Street and the river, then ran out to the public transport voids of Easterhouse, Baillieston and the sports village. The Docklands Light Railway in London is an example of how this can be done relatively cheaply. It would provide a direct connection between the East End and West End, enlarging the city centre and reducing reliance in poor bus services.

 

3) Mutualise the buses.

Edinburgh has the best buses in Scotland, and with the exception perhaps of the heavily subsidised London network, the best in Britain. The simple reason for this is that it is owned, though not run, by the council and reinvests any profit into the service. People from Glasgow and Aberdeen wonder at the relative quality of an Edinburgh bus. In the long term Edinburgh should look to integrate trams, buses and Edinburgh Crossrail into one unit with the same tickets.

 4) Intercity trains

If you’ve taken an intercity train in Scotland you’ll probably have clocked that they are much the same as short distance trains. Whether you travel from Aberdeen to Glasgow or Glasgow to Gartcosh it will be on the same sort of train. They were originally developed for commuters in the South-East and English midlands, being an off-the-shelf model when Firstgroup opted for them. This means that for things like catering and luggage space they are unsuited to trans-Scotland work. Given the varying numbers between summer and winter in Scotland, it would make sense to invest in German-style push-pull trains where coaches can be added without having to keep whole trains on standby at great expense. This could also mean more room for bikes, buggies and even parcels, as well as allowing the same coaches to be used on electric and non-electric parts of the network. Aberdeen to Dumfries direct anyone?

5) Fares you can afford

A few years ago the SSP, in a fit of utopian hubris and with a lack of understanding of how the economics of public transport works, came up with the idea of all public transport in Scotland being free. Fundamentally, railways and buses cost money to run and it would be obtuse for someone with little need to travel to be paying for someone who regularly had to commute from Aberdeen to Ayr in the name of solidarity. The levels of subsidy it would require would also remove capital from investment budgets just to keep the wheels rolling. Although fractionally greener, it makes as much sense as giving out free petrol but not mending any of the roads.

A better system, which could make full use of the half-baked Scotland smartcard the SNP have come up with, would be to offer people incremental gains on their journeys by giving them both affordable startup fares and air-miles style points. This might mean that the last quarter of the year on your Glasgow public transport would end up being free or the application of a 25 per cent discount on all fares, increasing to 50 or 75 after certain amounts of usage.  Instead of looking at journeys as finite events it rewards behaviour over time and means that there is always an incentive to take the train or bus.

6) Connect the cities to their surrounding areas.

Pioneered in Germany, tram trains use a combination of street running and old railway lines to construct low-cost ways of getting from rural areas into medium sized cities. A city like Aberdeen could potentially benefit from tram trains to places like Banchory and Ellon. They are quicker and more reliable than buses and can potentially connect forgotten towns directly to the national rail network without having to get on a bus.

7) Direct trains from the Far North to Edinburgh.

At the moment getting from the Far North to the capital is a hassle. Given that it is potentially only a six hour journey by rail, there is a case to be made for night trains to Edinburgh that mean people from Orkney, Caithness and Sutherland can be in Edinburgh for breakfast. Long term aspirations to decentralise and repopulate Highland Scotland means that innovative approaches to moving people around are needed.

8) Edinburgh/Glasgow-Paris/Brussels

When the channel tunnel was built Scotland was promised a passport to the continent, but the plans were quickly shelved. If climate targets are to be met and capacity problems addressed at Scotland’s airports, it is time the Scottish and European capitals were connected. This could even mean European subsidy for the project as part of the commitment to improving and maintaining European transport networks. Sadly, Scotland is considered as part of the UK at present and is expected to magically utilise the concentration of European connections in London.

9) Insist on standards of cycle infrastructure for all new roads.

We’ll always need roads, just perhaps not motorways. At the moment new roads are built without any requirement to make them suitable for cyclists. Simple legislation on separate cycle lanes would mean that any road ‘improvements’ would have to improve it for cyclists and walkers as well as motorists. The most ambitious policy in the world on this is Hamburg’s which has vowed to incrementally improve its infrastructure until the city centre is car free and cycleways are the primary arteries for short distance transport.

10) Replace Keith Brown with Alison Johnstone

This is as simple as it sounds. Out goes a transport minister who likes spending a lot of public money on roads most of the public will not use, in comes a woman with a vision for how transport can be made cheaper and more accessible for everyone.

We’re off to Tillicoultry

Feb 14

Posted by Aidan in Holyrood | Comments off

Thursday didn’t start well for me: after waking up late and rushing out the flat I had huge problems making myself understood to anybody from the woman at that AMT stand in Queen St through folk on twitter and was incomprehensible when I got to the office. I never have gotten the hang of Thursdays.

The point I was trying to make on Twitter was that the biggest problem I’d encountered while canvassing for the Labour party was the lack of a referendum code for “they haven’t thought it through”. By which I didn’t mean that the people hadn’t considered it (most people have, though quite a lot haven’t) but that the poor unfortunate we’d gotten out of bed at 11am on a Saturday morning would, with varying degrees of certainity, vote No in September because they didn’t think the Yes campaign had properly worked out how independence woudl actually function. The biggest problem for Yes, I attempted to wittily observe, was that we badly needed a code for that because it comes up all the time. In the end I mangled it all and subsquent attempts at clarification only made it worse.

The Yes campaign’s response to the bucket of cold water thrown over the idea of a sterling zone seems likely to make that problem worse for them and is something which, as James argued yesterday, could easily have been predicted.

The basic problem with the idea of the sterling zone is that the two main arguments that pro-Sterlingzone advocates use also apply to the “Sterlingisation” policy plan B of unilaterally using the pound without a formal union, support from the Bank of England and so on.

Firstly the argument about lower transaction costs in what will still be a closely entwined pair of economies is obviously true but also obviously applicable to Sterlingisation since it’s all about the physical and electronic representations of money avoiding conversion, exchange rates and so on.

The second argument that Yes put forward for a sterlingzone is that of the balance of payments, which is a rather drier and more technical argument. This suggests that because Scottish oil is included in Sterling trade it helps stabilise exchange rates through increasing global demand for Sterling which helps offset our tendency towards importing foreign goods such as food. This is true but, again, is largely applicable to a Sterlingised Scotland as well as a Sterlingzone Scotland.

Meanwhile the benefits that an independent Scotland would get from a Sterlingzone are largely inapplicable to a Sterlingised Scotland: no input into the MPCs membership or, more importantly, its terms of reference, no shared regulation or lender of last resort and so on.

While ultimately a political decision for the rUK it’s not really clear to me why they would take on the risks and costs associated with the Sterlingzone when not doing so and Scotland continuing to use the pound unilaterally would retain the major benefits for rUK.

Probably the most damaging aspect of this, however, is the lack of foresight that this displays by the SNP (and it is principally the SNP part of Yes that favoured this route, although not all in the SNP do). Being left with “the Fiscal Commission have some Nobel medals” and “if they don’t agree we’ll default on the debt” looks petulant and amateurish.

Alex Salmond will have to do a lot better at communicating a plan B in the next few days than I did yesterday to pull this back. I suspect Sterlingisation will be the backstop, punting to a new Pound Tillicoultry would open up even more questions.

What’s the weather like in Montenegro?

Feb 12

Posted by James in Constitution, Economy, Holyrood, Westminster | 2 Comments

MONTENEGROThe latest round of “positive campaigning” from the Westminster parties centres again on the currency. It’s clear they’ve decided it’s the SNP’s weak spot, and they want to hammer on it. So now all three of Westminster’s parties of government have declared (or will declare, so the BBC have been briefed) that an independent Scotland would be barred from the SNP’s preferred approach, a formal currency union with the rUK.

On one level this is a trap the SNP have laid for themselves. Their policy has essentially evolved like this: “Yey Euro! No, wait, the Euro’s collapsing. Shit. What shall we do? Well, we could have our own currency. But that sounds scary. What’s the only other option? Keep the pound. Phew. Sounds safe.”

A better approach would clearly have been to say “well, on day one Scotland still continue to use the pound, as is normal when countries achieve independence, and it will be for the Scottish people to decide whether they prefer to move towards an independent currency, either as an end point or as a step towards the Euro, or to seek an ongoing currency union with rUK”. Not least because then the post-2016 Scottish Government would have a specific democratic mandate for a sterling zone if that was indeed the outcome of the election. Fear of uncertainty is why this is off the table. But if you want to know what happens after a future election, you’d better get used to uncertainty for obvious reasons.

Given that formal currency union would require Westminster’s assent, though, today’s stramash was entirely predictable (Jeff saw something similar coming in November 2011, although I disagree with some of his conclusions). Perhaps the SNP genuinely like the sight of Tory/Labour/Lib Dem bullying on this issue. It certainly looks ugly, but I can see Osborne’s logic: like it or not, this announcement does take the SNP’s preferred option off the table. They can’t keep saying “once we’ve had a Yes vote Westminster will have to take Scotland seriously”. Well, they can keep saying it if they wish, but it sounds increasingly ridiculous and practically as petulant as the Westminster parties’ position. Strategically, the Tories are correct to assume that this mess must reduce the chance of a Yes vote, and of course it’s not just them. With all three of the biggest parties at Westminster now publicly opposed to currency union, the SNP are effectively relying on persuading one or more of them changing their mind. Not a solid basis for the last seven months of a referendum campaign.

The reality is that on 24 March 2016, the SNP’s proposed independence day, we absolutely will be using sterling in Scotland’s shops. Our bank accounts will still be denominated in sterling. The pre-dissolution SNP Government has no mandate to change that: it’d be utterly undemocratic to do so prior to the election which kicks off on that day. And then on 7 May 2016, when Scotland wakes up with its first independent government, we’ll still be using sterling no matter what. That government will have had a policy (or policies, if it’s a coalition) on the currency, but the starting point will be the pound in your pocket.

And the basis for the pound in your pocket won’t be a currency union. It can’t be. Even if Westminster were entirely relaxed about it, the SNP don’t have a mandate to establish a currency union in the September 2014-March 2016 interregnum and to tie future Scottish Governments’ hands. We’ll be using the pound like Montenegro uses the Euro, or (as Jeff pointed out) like Cambodia uses the dollar. We won’t have a seat on the Bank of England’s (!) Monetary Policy Committee. Scottish budgets won’t have to go to Westminster for oversight, or vice versa, as formal currency union would require. Nothing will have changed.

At that point, if that new independent Scottish Government has been elected on a platform of pursuing currency union, they can get on and pursue it and hope that the post-2015 rUK Government would support it. The only easy route to co-operation on this would be if Labour somehow managed to win both elections while losing the referendum. But if currency union is sought and rUK Ministers stick to today’s line, there would only be two options for those future Scottish Ministers: the Montenegro way, or the Montenegro way moving towards our own currency like a normal independent state. That way we could manage our affairs without our economy still being skewed towards London and without our fiscal policy still being skewed towards austerity. An independent currency seems almost inevitable, especially in the longer term. Or it would do if the Yes campaign wasn’t bogged down by the SNP’s short-sightedness on this issue. They need to think again or they risk jeopardising the recent progress that’s been made towards a Yes vote.

Industry baron in “against independence” shock

Feb 4

Posted by James in Constitution, Economy | 2 Comments

The No campaign are most excited that an American corporate boss has come out against independence: Mr Bob Dudley, of BP. So here are his arguments:

  • “Great Britain is great and should stay together“. This is at best the most spurious form of British nationalism, at worst a kind of empty nominative determinism. Let’s file this with “the dictionary definition of marriage is one man and one woman” and move on.
  • There’s a “question mark” over which currency Scotland will adopt. Yes, absolutely, there is. If Yes wins in September, it will be up to the parties to propose their preferred options for Scotland’s currency future, and then for the people to decide. Deciding now would be undemocratic. Sorry if that’s inconvenient for your accountants, but oil will continue to be denominated in dollars, so in practice this would affect BP less than most other businesses.
  • There are “big uncertainties” for the firm (non-specific). Sure. All those whose current position is feather-bedded and backed by government are likely to have concerns about greater democracy. This counts as classic FUD, and therefore very appealing to Project FUD.
  • “All businesses have a concern..” Well, opinion is divided. Some business people are more concerned about independence, while others are more concerned about the status quo. As a business person, even one with a direct commercial interest in Scotland’s over-governance, my main concerns are about the status quo.
  • “It would create extra costs for our business..” This is the closest thing to reasonable on his list. In fact, that’s probably true, but the wider financial pros and cons are in part also subject to democracy. If the SNP win the first election after a Yes vote, they’ll presumably try to cut taxes on big business. If they need Green votes, they’ll find that harder. Personally I hope independence would reduce BP’s revenue, too, as an independent Scotland seems just a touch more likely to take climate change seriously and to restrict drilling in sensitive areas. Just a touch, given the way the other four parties at Holyrood voted on a deepwater moratorium. But this is the firm that delivered the largest marine oil spill in history, and even the most pro-oil of the other parties presumably don’t want to see Scotland’s coastline go the way of the Gulf of Mexico. Let’s pause for a minute on that thought.

deepwater

In any case, what is he suggesting BP would do if we win? Hand their lucrative North Sea fields back to the Scottish Government? Just sit on them and hope for reunification? It’s the oil equivalent of Jim Davidson and the like, odious right-wingers who threaten to leave Britain if Labour wins an election, and just as likely to happen. Regrettably.

As it happens, Mr Dudley also came out against a 50p tax rate for the richest section of society today. It’s no coincidence, either. His interests, both personal and commercial, are not aligned with society’s best interests, especially those who Westminster cares little about: and both the positions he set out today illustrate that perfectly.

pic credit

The London model is more like us than we’d maybe wish to think.

Feb 2

Posted by Dom in Constitution, Defence, Democracy | Comments off

Sitting in the foyer of the Citibank building in Canary Wharf, where the trains have no drivers and the supermarkets no checkout staff, Scotland seems a long way away. For many in the independence movement the heart of Britain’s financial industry is the antithesis of everything they want to see in a country.

                             A few miles north, in trendy Hackney (the hipster who attempted a citizen’s arrest on Tony Blair and wrote about it in the Guardian walked past me with his girlfriend) the Olympic park and its adjoining shopping centre lie on one side, on the other former warehouses converted into breweries and arts centres. A woman from the Green Party of England and Wales offers me an anti fracking leaflet and the bar is selling bottles of Schiehallion.

                             Down the road in Shoreditch there’s a festival going on of ‘Nordicana’. I don’t go – it’s 25 quid a ticket – but if I had I’d have been able to eat Scandinavian food and ask fawning questions of the stars of Borgen, The Killing and The Bridge.  We would probably have talked about how edgy the shows were and how lovely the cakes in the café are, like watching the Wire with a grab bag of American popcorn and a Budweiser.  

                             If you really want genuine though go a few miles further east still, to Upton Park at the flashpoint between what remains of East London’s white working class mixed with monied and hair-gelled Essex fringe dwellers and the vibrant South-Asian communities that have made Green Street and the area around West Ham’s stadium their own. Inside it might still be 1980 – there isn’t an Asian face to be seen and men wear long coats and caps over impressively engineered haircuts.  In front of me David James does a TV spot. Bobby Moore looks on, England is intact and unchanging. West Ham are one of the best clubs in the country. Men stand smoking in the toilets under the banks of seating, convinced of the superiority of their team like Celtic fans living in 1967. The only Bridge they worry about is the Chelsea one.

                             Then out again, the Olympic park on the horizon. It could almost be the East End of Glasgow, but instead of getting ready for the Commonwealth Games the workmen are trying to erase the Olympics and replace it with ‘regeneration’, expensive flats and transport for commuting south to Canary Wharf and west into the City. In modern Britain this is what prosperity is. Scotland wants London’s immigrants and it wants its wealth. It wants its global profile. In many ways it wants to exist as the British Isles’ other city state. It wants the finance and the business growth, the arts scene and the airport hub. It wants Nordic lifestyle but without too much hard thought given to how or why.  Are these the right things to want? For some, perhaps. If Scotland wants London without the geographical inconvenience of a flight or a train ride, but we should be careful. My company is forthright about the shortcomings. As we stand at the automated checkouts of a Sainsbury’s in Holborn packed with high-heeled young professionals shoving gourmet ready meals into expensive bags, all she wants is to move back to Glasgow, “the most beautiful city in the world.”