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Sustainable shipbuilding needs Caledonian Mac-Brains

Nov 11

Posted by Dom in Holyrood | Comments off

 

MV Loch Seaforth. The future is, for the moment, German

The West Coast can be a vicious place to set out by ferry. One of the defining memories of my childhood was being thrown across the deck of the boat that used to run the Small Isles route in about 1990. Its superior replacement the Loch Nevis was built in Troon, but CalMac ships built in Scotland are increasingly rare.

The strange kind of command economy demanded by defence spending means that Scotland has several shipyards devoted to the building of large military vessels, but remarkably little in the way of medium-sized capacity. For a country with a functioning fishing industry and a fair few ferry routes, the idea that Scotland should have a crisis in shipbuilding is absurd, to say the least, but that is exactly what has happened.

In the Dunfermline by-election Rosyth reared its head. As everyone raced to ‘get around the table’ over Grangemouth there were also empty promises to Rosyth, but nobody had any kind of vision for Scotland’s marine industries beyond competing for military orders. Neither is it a question of globalization through markets. The next addition to the CalMac fleet, MV Loch Seaforth, is currently being built in that well known developing country Germany. Whatever some might say, it does not show a lack of solidarity with neighbouring countries if you try and support your own country’s industry.

Because Scotland’s major shipyards are controlled by one central player – BAE Systems – they will always be BAE’s assets. They cannot diversify because BAE manufacture military vessels, but when there are no military vessels to make, what happens then? BAE are not a state company and have no obligation to create employment anywhere. They have no interest in manufacturing non-military vessels, and Scotland might have the shipyards but you’ll be hard pushed to find a CalMac or Northern Isles ferry built on the Forth or the Clyde even if they probably should be.

In the event of independence Scotland will most likely inherit some assets from the Royal Navy, but it will also need to build its own. If Scotland is serious about its new international role it will involve activities such as peacekeeping, anti-piracy and aid work that require frigates, though perhaps not destroyers.  There will be obligations in terms of Arctic security and the North Atlantic and the equipment needed to meet them. This might mean an end to aircraft carriers, but diversification of Scotland’s marine industry would be more sustainable for all. With the right planning we could see the Marine Patrol Vessel MPV Robin Harper and the North Sea ferry MV Suðrland being built across the water from one another on the Clyde.

The all or nothing approach to industry by both sides in the referendum campaign is testament to a lack of imagination and an obsession with the very big over the diverse. It pays not to have all your eggs in one boat.

Dunfermline athletics long game to kick off for Green goals

Nov 4

Posted by Dom in Activism, Crime, Democracy, Economy, Elections, Energy | Comments off

elephantbridgeCara Hilton is now firmly ensconced in Holyrood after what turned out to be a reasonable majority in the Dunfermline by-election. Her victory was assured using a scattergun approach to campaigning that entailed being selective about what Scottish Labour’s current policy platform says and relying heavily on ‘I’m no SNP, so I must be Labour’ identity politics.

I know this because I was responsible in part for organising Zara Kitson’s campaign for the Greens and saw it all unfold before me first hand. How do you fight half-truths with truth when nobody recognises the legitimacy of what you are saying? On that same note it would take a Scottish Labour spin doctor to dress the Greens’ result up as a victory, but neither was it the disaster some naysayers made out.

Looking at the question of legitimacy, I was rather disappointed with Brian Taylor for lending his voice to a piece beginning ‘Meanwhile, the Greens had an environmental message’. The clip took one quote from Zara Kitson and pretended it was a manifesto. Had the BBC checked their own footage they would have found hours of interviews with the Green candidate in which she talked about local democracy, the bedroom tax, community football, properly funded schools and well-paid jobs. I know because I was there when it was filmed.
Perhaps it serves the Greens right for running an honest campaign in which they attempted to talk about what needed to be talked about. Zara Kitson made no promises about bridge tolls she would never have individual control over or the policies of a council she would not sit on. Should the Greens have followed the UKIP route and ploughed money (but precious few activists) into the kind of bitter, dishonest and intellectually bankrupt reactionary politics designed to garner as many votes as possible on as little policy as can be inserted into a leaflet made on the 1997 version of Microsoft Publisher? Probably not.

UKIP’s voters will have gone and voted and then retired to their armchairs or slipped their driving gloves back on and taken a ride out in their Saab 95 to check there were still no wind turbines. The Green voters, however, were part of a planned-out process of capacity building and a strategy that went beyond securing votes and getting back on the motorway to Edinburgh or London. This was misconstrued by the BBC on election night when they quoted Zara Kitson saying ‘it had been all about the campaigning’. She did not just mean that it was the taking part that counted; this was a longer battle than the media were prepared to accept in their finite narrative.

The interesting thing about the Green vote in Dunfermline is that nobody had ever been given the chance to elect a constituency MSP before, and the group of people who did choose to vote Green were galvanised by the election into knowing that there were hundreds of people across the area like them. Were Holyrood by-elections contested using the AV system the results could have been radically different. First past the post traps people into tactical voting and creates the same two-party politics that dominates Westminster.  It is almost inevitable that the end result will be hastily printed flyers with big pictures of bridges on and wild promises that can never be kept and will never need to be kept.

It is about the illusion of localism and the belief that constituency MSPs are local leaders, rather than parliamentary legislators. Even more so, the first past the post element of the Scottish electoral system perpetuates the kind of thinking that Holyrood was supposed to leave behind. Why it cannot be replaced with sixteen smaller regions electing lists is a question we should probably all be asking ourselves. Local government should perhaps be left to local government and we should not pretend that Cara Hilton or any other MSP has the ability to change things by themselves.

Any such reform would also present a challenge for the Greens, it has to be recognised. There is very little data showing whether people first vote Green and then opt for a constituency candidate of their choice or whether the reverse is true.  The BBC did not help, but what Zara Kitson tried to do in Dunfermline and will no doubt do again in the future was show that Green votes are not second preferences but first steps toward something altogether different. We need an election system that liberates people to vote freely and demands that smaller parties ready themselves for government.

My Journey from Red to Green

Oct 30

Posted by Guest Blog in Parties | 19 Comments

Thanks so much to Pauline for today’s epic guest post, which we will let speak for itself. 

PaulineMy name is Pauline Ward. I used to be a fervent Labour Party activist, and for just over two years I was a Labour Party employee, as a full-time researcher in the Scottish Parliament (2007-2010). This is the story of the political journey I made to Green politics and to the cause of Scottish independence.

A couple of years ago, while I was working for a charity, I started studying economics and sociology and history with the Open University (I was a scientist originally). It opened my eyes in many ways, at a time when I was enjoying the intellectual freedom of no longer being a Labour employee. It made me think about what a nation is. I learned about the way the nation states we find in Europe today were mostly born in the nineteenth century, as the manifestation of the shifting allegiances of ordinary people who had rejected the old royal rulers and ties of religion. The borders of the new nation states crystallised around the nations which people felt willing to defend with their lives. And this made me realise how I felt about the idea of Scotland having full fiscal autonomy: basically, that would not be enough for me, because I wanted the people of Scotland and the leaders they alone elected to have the final say on when and whether Scottish service men and women would be sent to fight in any war.

I had been opposed to the Iraq war. In fact, I’d actually exiled myself from the Labour Party for two years in protest over it, something which was very hard for me, given the party was like a second family to me. And at the time I did not see Iraq as a UK war imposed on Scotland – indeed, the polls told a different story. Rather, it was a war predicated on paper-thin excuses, driven through in spite of vehement opposition right across the UK, and at great political cost to Tony Blair and Labour as it turned out. But looking back now, I see that the parties elected in Scotland were more opposed to the war than those in the rest of the UK. And if Scotland had already been independent, whichever party was in power, I believe we would have sat that one out, because I don’t think our parties had an appetite for it.

And then in January 2012 Johann Lamont, my former colleague, a very intelligent woman, a nice person, newly-elected as leader of the Labour Party in Scotland, started calling publicly  for the referendum to be held early. Get it over and done with. I was disappointed. I had voted for Johann to be leader because I knew she would put the emphasis that I wanted on economic equality for people living in poverty and for women. But I had also felt reassured by the noises she’d made in the media about the independence debate during the leadership campaign: she had promised to be accepting and respectful of the decision if the Scottish people wanted independence. Johann had sounded like she understood that the SNP had a point. So I wasn’t expecting what seemed like a point-scoring exercise: it just seemed to me that she was calling for an early vote because of the polls showing a likely No vote, and because she wanted to rub the SNP’s noses in it; this didn’t feel like a more respectful, accepting debate. And I started to feel very uncomfortable about the idea of continuing to pay membership dues into this Labour Party that was going to spend the next two years primarily arguing bloody-mindedly against something I believed in. Johann had been in that Parliament at lot longer than me, listening to the nationalists quite often winning the argument: if Scotland was independent, we could make our own decisions about all sorts of things; we had more than enough resources to maintain levels of public services and so on. The sky would not fall in.

In my two years working in the Parliament, I didn’t think too much about the independence question. My job was to support the Labour MSPs, on behalf of the taxpayer, to help them put forward the priorities they’d been elected to put forward. Which primarily meant social justice, and by that I mean combatting poverty and its pernicious effects. They were decent people, just human beings, these politicians – the 46 MSPs I worked for were genuinely there to try and make things better. But they were blinkered. I didn’t think too much about independence, and neither did they. When Labour For Indy appeared recently, I knew full well they would get no comfort from the MSPs because they are on automatic pilot as far as the constitution is concerned. They’ve painted themselves into an anti-SNP corner. I was instructed and trained in saying white whenever the SNP said black. And I think the Labour MSPs are a bit unrepresentative of the Party membership in that sense. If you were thinking about standing for Holyrood on a Labour rosette over the past couple of elections, you probably wouldn’t do it if you had strong doubts about the Union. So it’s a Unionist rump that remains in Holyrood. Maybe among Labour Councillors and other members we will hear more pro-independence voices as the referendum gets nearer. I hope so.

I think that in their hearts the vast majority of the supporters of social justice in Scotland want to vote for freedom from Tory rule. That is a crucially important argument for me. Scotland consistently votes for more left-wing parties and politicians than the rest of the UK. But we keep on getting Tory governments that we never voted for. It’s happened in 8 out of the 18 Westminster elections that have taken place since 1945.

The Union means that Scotland is ruled by Tories and LibDems right now. It means austerity. It means humiliating, badly-designed, badly-administered, downright cruel Work Capability Assessments for so many people with disabilities and diseases. It means the cruel Bedroom Tax forcing families out of their homes when there are no homes of the ‘correct’ size for them. It means our supermarkets and other businesses using Workfare to grind work out of our jobseekers unpaid-for, a brazen slap in the face of the minimum wage, a shameful contribution to cheaper grocery bills for the well-off. Every little helps. It means a real-terms cut to child benefit and families being fed out of food banks, and widespread in-work poverty.

Why can’t we have an economy that works for everybody? Why can’t we have a country where work pays? Where all companies are not just expected but required to pay their taxes. And this is where studying economics comes in. Because I learned that there’s no reason we can’t have these things. We can choose governments that will re-wire the economy to do these things. But UK Labour seem to have lost the belief in themselves to make radical change to benefit the people at the bottom. Why is that? I think it’s because they need votes in the wealthy South East of England to get into power in Westminster. They can’t afford to have a politics that’s fully focussed on the kind of widespread poverty we have in Scotland.

I’m from Clydebank (and on my mum’s side from a wee farm outside a petit village in France, and I grew up in Milngavie and Bearsden, and went to school in Maryhill). My grandfather and my great grandfather worked in the shipyards as engineers, back in the day when not all engineers had a degree. And when the German bombers came, in the Clydebank Blitz, our family was huddling together in the close, not knowing if they would make it through to see the next day, and not knowing whether their dad, my (great) grampa would be coming home from the yard ever again. I think successive Westminster governments abandoned people living in poverty in communities like Clydebank, and parts of Leith where I live now. The Union has not served them well.

So I joined the Green Party. Here is a party that’s willing to make those radical changes to the economy to bring a better quality of life for everybody. Here are people who’ve read The Spirit Level and like me were delighted to find in its pages the evidence for what we’d been working for all along. It turns out societies where there’s greater equality of economic opportunity (e.g. Japan and the Scandinavian countries, compared to the UK and USA) are better off economically as well as healthier and happier. Here are people who not only accept that climate change is real but accept some responsibility and are trying to do something effective to stop it. The Greens are willing to stand up to businesses when they need to, to force them to take responsibility for their impact on the environment, among other things, they accept that there are both advantages and disadvantages to Scottish independence, and they understand and respect that all members will make their own judgment about that. And I’ve never looked back. I’ve been a Scottish Green Party member for a year and a half now, and I’m very proud to be Green. I don’t think I’ll be tempted to go back, although I’ll always reserve the right to switch my vote on principle; I want politicians to earn it.

So, to round this off, I would say that learning a bit more about how our country works (both from my studies and from being inside the Parliament, seeing change happen) made me realise how plastic our world is. Our politics, our economy, our ideas of what fairness is, these are all subject to fundamental change. They’ve always been changing, and in our digital-age-democracy they can and do change quicker than ever, because each of us has so much more freedom and power to communicate and therefore to influence. And I’ve lost my fear of Scottish independence. My history taught me that one of the things that kept us in the UK for so long was the vast range of economic opportunities the Empire offered, both in trade and in work in the colonies. That no longer applies, thank goodness. And my history taught me that powerful elites always ran the UK and made the rules to suit themselves. And they haven’t given up power willingly, it’s had to be wrestled from them.

If you look around the world, you’ll see a great number of countries which used to be joined to the UK, as colonies or dominions. Not a single one of them is clamouring to get back in. Each of them is different, sure. But ask yourself when was the last time you heard anyone from Australia, or New Zealand, or the Republic of Ireland, or Jamaica, or Trinidad & Tobago or the USA or India, Pakistan or North or South Sudan, or Kenya wishing they could be part of the UK, wishing they could join us in a currency union, or asking David Cameron to command their armed forces.

What all this boils down to is that I think independence will give our children the best possible future. A future where there’s more dignity and respect for people in different circumstances and from different backgrounds, and where everybody feels they have a say, and a stake, and a chance to make the best life for themselves. That’s why I’m voting Yes.

A trampled bagpipe

Oct 23

Posted by James in Elections, Parties | 4 Comments

Behold the greatest contrast offered by the Dunfermline by-election campaign: the aftermath of the moment when Zara Kitson’s Green campaign was interrupted by the 3rd Viscount Monckton, notorious climate change denier and UKIP’s top candidate for Mid Scotland and Fife in 2011. Personally I think it’s brave of him to campaign in Scotland having said “the Scots are subsidy junkies whingeing like a trampled bagpipe as they wait for their next fix of English taxpayers’ money.” I also like the fact that Zara fobbed him off with a leaflet on the Greens’ vision for an independent Scotland. No wonder the furrowed brow, as he contemplates ideas he presumably can’t distinguish from full communism.

ZaraKitsonLordMonckton

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.