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Better Nation

Putting human rights at the heart of Scottish foreign policy

Jan 31

Posted by Guest Blog in Defence, Holyrood | 2 Comments

Thanks to Andrew Smith for today’s guest post: Andrew is a spokesperson for Campaign Against Arms Trade and tweets here. 

Rosyth subOne of the most positive contributions to the independence debate has been the Scottish Government’s recent commitment to a ‘do no harm’ exports policy in the event of a Yes vote.

Earlier this month the Scottish Government’s Minister for External Affairs and International Development, Humza Yousaf, wrote a well received blog for The Herald that presented the Scottish Government’s vision in contrast with the current UK one, saying “our good work globally will not be undermined by the selling of arms to some of the world’s most brutal dictators as has been done by previous UK governments.”

I was very impressed, but I wanted to know more about which governments Yousaf and his colleagues see as ‘brutal dictators’ and which they see as potential partners. The UK’s links with regimes that abuse human rights are well known, so I contacted Yousaf on Twitter to ask him to clarify what criteria the Scottish Government would hope to apply in an independent Scotland.

He responded very quickly, telling me “We look towards the Swedish model of Policy Coherence where civil society provides the barometer in conjunction with government.”

The problem is that the Swedish policy has almost as many inconsistencies and contradictions as the UK one. Swedish exports from 2012 included €57 million worth of military exports to Algeria and €6.5 million to Bahrain. If we look to 2011, Sweden’s largest customers included Saudi Arabia, to whom they sold almost €500,000,000 of military equipment, and UAE, who bought over €70 million. Although it could be argued that the Swedish policy is an improvement on the UK’s one, it’s also clear that it’s a policy to be challenged rather than replicated.

A disappointing aspect of the recent debates about the impact of Scottish independence on jobs in the Govan shipyard and Rosyth naval base is that they have focused almost entirely on how the status quo can be maintained. Very few voices have focused on the ways in which the Scottish Government can encourage a more positive and constructive manufacturing sector, with less focus on military industry and the arms trade.

Yousaf’s goal is admirable, but it needs to be underpinned by a greater clarity. According to the Scottish Council for Development & Industry, there are 185 arms companies with offices in Scotland, which employ 12,600 skilled workers and account for annual sales of £1.8 billion, so what happens to them is obviously a matter of concern.

One of the most thoughtful responses to the launch of the White Paper came from the Unite union’s Scottish Secretary, Pat Rafferty, who said “We also believe there is a case for the creation of a Scottish defence diversification agency to help offset the employment impact on the proposed removal of Trident.” With a wider brief, such an agency could also examine alternative work for the other people currently employed in the military industry in Scotland.

Not only would a ‘do no harm’ foreign policy present fresh and ambitious new thinking on an area that is traditionally done in the dark, but in the short term it would set a challenge to pro-union campaigners to look at the impact UK arms exports have on global peace, security and human rights and reflect on how this can be improved.

This isn’t the first time that a high ranking politician has spoken about the need to make human rights central to foreign policy. In 1997 the late UK foreign secretary, Robin Cook, spoke about the need for a foreign policy with human rights at its heart. He also argued for the conversion of military industry to socially useful production. Unfortunately neither of these goals were realised, but Scottish people should remember his arguments and take warning from his failures, whether in an independent Scotland or as part of the UK.

ironic pic credit

In for a penny, in for a groat

Jan 29

Posted by James in Constitution, Economy, Elections | 1 Comment

GroatThe Governor of the Bank of England has just sunk plans for Scottish independence today, we’re told. The flaws with the SNP’s currency union mean it’s over all bar the voting, apparently.

Except that’s a lot of nonsense for one key reason. Scotland’s medium and long-term currency future won’t be up to the SNP. Their schedule, which I was previously more sceptical about, gives us a bit over two years from a Yes vote to independence day, which coincides with dissolution of Holyrood, which means that post-independence decisions will be made by the people in the most interesting election Scotland will have ever seen.

I’m also very relaxed about an initial period where we use the pound prior to any change, either to our own currency, my preferred option, or hypothetically to the Euro, which I doubt any of Scotland’s five Parliamentary parties will offer in May 2016. But imagine Labour win at Westminster in 2015, which still has to be the most likely option. And then perhaps a separate Scottish Labour would get their act together and lead Scotland’s first independence administration. It’s not impossible: just think how the British electorate chose them to “win the peace” in 1945. Would those two administrations not work together while respecting the Scottish people’s desire for independence?

In fact, the hostility to currency union from Westminster and Threadneedle Street would then no longer have much of a real purpose, if one accepts that it’s primarily to scare Scots into voting No. Maybe the SNP would also accept over time that currency union would be too restrictive, and offer a transition to our own currency (see the Republic of Ireland’s experience for how slowly that might happen). Who knows? But the decision will, if we win, be made by the Scottish people on the basis of the manifestos offered then: each option has pros and cons, but a democratic choice is the right way for it to be made.

Thinking the unthinkable.

Jan 26

Posted by Dom in Constitution, Democracy | 10 Comments

When The Scotsman is agitatedly reporting a poll showing moves towards a Yes vote then you know it’s time to start believing it might happen. Not in the way that belief works as a manifestation of the dreams of the independence movement, but giving plausibility to the idea that by next October Scotland may well have taken its first steps to once again becoming a sovereign state.

This is of course great news for supporters of the Yes campaign and will not cheer Better Together and the other unionist campaign groups at all. More importantly, it requires those currently opposed to independence to seriously ready themselves for the democratic changeover and for all of Holyrood’s opposition parties (including the pro-indy Greens) to come up with a plan to beat the SNP in the first post-independence elections. If the white paper was an ‘SNP manifesto’ as many people have claimed, shouldn’t the Tories, Liberals, Labour and the Greens be making up their own manifestos for the day after?

Marked out as the bright young hope of Scottish Labour, what is Anas Sarwar’s Plan B? There’ll be no more Progress think tank meetings in London and probably no Sarwar family seat either. As someone who lambasts the SNP for not focusing on the issues that matter to people, can we assume that  Anas has a long list of issues to talk about the day after? Can Scottish Labour just plot UK policy onto Scotland or will they have to come up with an entirely new political project in the space of 9 months before that final UK general election of 2015? Similarly, can the Liberal Democrats recover their traditional territory without any real policy input. What are their plans on an independent Scottish energy policy? What are the Lib Dem views on currency, immigration and the broadcast media? Come a Yes vote it could be the No parties drawing up ideas on the back of a fag packet, and in a new democracy with one party making all the running that is a dangerous place to be.

The No campaign portrayal of Alex Salmond as a tinpot dictator risks becoming a reality should they not get their act together. An SNP dominated Scotland could be a self-fulfilling prophecy in the absence of any alternative vision from opposition parties, so by refusing to embrace the notion of independence at all they are playing a very dangerous game with democracy. For everybody’s sake, we should probably hope there are a stack of brown envelopes in the locked drawers of Ruth, Johann and Willie’s desks underneath all those UKOK badges.

Academics prove nothing in the hands of spin doctors

Jan 21

Posted by Dom in Constitution, Democracy, Education | 1 Comment

During the autumn I was asked to join up to a campaigning group that would have assembled people working in universities with a predisposition for voting Yes in the referendum as a counterweight to the rather limp Academics Together arm of the Better Together campaign.

                             I declined for a number of reasons, including that it was evident a great many other people of more academic standing than myself had probably said no before me, but mostly because there is something deeply wrong with academics getting involved in political campaigning.  This is especially the case when you’re writing about the referendum, as I currently am, and when the respective campaigns wish to appropriate the legitimacy that comes with having academics on board without paying due attention to what those people might actually be saying.

                             Every time anything vaguely academic comes about that supports the needs of either side it is jumped upon as empirical, rational and falsifiable proof of the madness of the other team.  The truth of the matter is, you can always do more research and you have to ask the right questions. The Economics and Social Science Research Council report on inequality in an independent Scotland that was seized up by Better Together when it came out recently is a case in point. It is, by the looks of things, a well put together piece of research, but its research parameters are based on SNP policy outcomes and not on the actual policies available to an independent government. As a stick with which to beat the SNP that is all well and good, but in terms of independence as concept it does not tell us all that much. I also feel sorry for Dr David Comerford, who no sooner than he had signed off his name at the bottom of the study found his words selectively used by both The Scotsman and the Better Together press team. The report even mentioned that changes to Scottish employment law, not currently on the table in the UK, would make a difference to tax takes and general equality. From reading the newspapers and the press releases associated with the story you’d have struggled to pick out the truth. What the paper actually says is that tackling inequality in Scotland would require more radical change that what either the No Campaign or the SNP policy advocate.

                             We should, of course, be making an informed decision about the country’s constitutional future, but when ‘academic’ knowledge is propagated and appropriated by the press teams of the Yes and No campaigns it becomes contaminated by their own desire to give a rational justification to a choice the people behind the desks have already made. Moreover, these people will be particularly loyal and convinced by particular old and concrete sets of beliefs, identities and standpoints that give them a high threshold for resistant readings of the other side’s outputs. Ironically, they are also some of the worst placed in the entire country to convince the middle ground of their case because they are almost incapable of seeing the justification for their opponent’s course of action. This is why academia is such a boon for them, because it allows them to seize on what the public might see as objective truth (there’s a discussion to be had there, but that is for another day), and claim that they were indeed right all along.

                             The other side is that there are a number of academics who are ‘out’ for either camp, but because academics are people they can have all kinds of reasons for being so. A physicist worried about childcare might be tempted to vote Yes, not because it would have any bearing on the world of physics but because they cared about their child’s future.  A Perthshire-born political scientist who has written extensively about the advantages of smaller democracies might vote no because they like the idea of watching the Football League Show and have a dislike of Alex Salmond. It isn’t cut and dried, and none of us are as rational as we think, but academia is there to serve Scotland’s people and not the press-desk loyalists of the referendum HQs.

*I had originally intended to include a tweet from Better Together’s Gordon Aikman on the ESRC story, but it appears to have been deleted from his account. I’ve asked Gordon why this is.

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

Jan 8

Posted by Dom in Activism, Constitution, Culture, Democracy, Elections | 1 Comment

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.