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Better Nation

The Scottish Greens’ Nordic Future

Oct 10

Posted by Dom in Constitution, Culture, Democracy, Economy, Education, Environment, Equality, Europe, Health, Holyrood, Ideology, International, Local government, Society | 1 Comment

Patrick Harvie's Swedish opposite number Gustav Fridolin. Notice the dissimilarities from Alex Salmond and Johann Lamont

Patrick Harvie’s Swedish opposite number Gustav Fridolin. Notice the dissimilarities to Alex Salmond and Johann Lamont

The Scottish Greens’ conference in Inverness last weekend was dominated by one theme, and one question. Why is Scotland not like its neighbouring Northern European countries in terms of living standards, life expectancy, wellbeing and sustainability?

Three of the plenary speakers chose variations on the theme and all of them spoke glowingly about the potential for moving away from the Anglo-Saxon obsession with big economics and moving toward a government and financial system more similar to Scotland’s Northern European peers.

The effervescent Lesley Riddoch has made it her mission in recent years to persuade Scotland of the advantages of decentralisation, localism, empowerment and Nordic levels of public service provision. In the Greens she has obviously found a receptive audience. She was joined by Mike Danson  from Heriot Watt University whose time seems to have finally come after years of proposing alternative economic models of Scotland, and Robin McAlpine of the Reid Foundation fronting the work done by a team of academics and researchers to develop a blueprint for an autonomous Scottish parliament.

The Reid Foundation’s Common Weal project is gaining momentum, and Robin McAlpine paid the Greens a compliment in saying that they already have the policies to make it work. The challenge lies in convincing the SNP and Labour of the validity of such an approach or making sure that the Greens gain enough seats at the next Holyrood election to at least begin to implement it in government with another party.

Talk of the Arc of Prosperity may have vanished from the lips of the First Minister, but over in the Green and Independent corner of the chamber the vision is very much alive, and it is hard to argue against Scotland pursuing such a course when all the evidence suggests it would lead to a decidedly better country for everybody.

The list of potential polices is almost endless, but the Greens are committed to increasing investment in strategic public transport infrastructure, re-regulation of bus services to give local authorities more say, increased basic wages to both help people and increase tax yields for investment in services, municipal energy companies and education reforms based on Finland’s proven globally leading example.

The Common Weal project is a welcome addition to the Scottish political scene with its stress on common consensus rather than socialist revolution, and its use of existing similar states to Scotland which clearly illustrate that it is possible to tackle some of Scotland’s endemic problems in an inclusive and democratic way.

The Greens now find themselves in the strange position of having a more cohesive and coherent vision for Scotland’s future than almost any other party in Holyrood, the SNP included. Next time you’re stuck in a traffic jam on the way to pick up your kids from an overpriced nursery and worrying about the 8.2 per cent price rise your energy company have just foisted upon you, take a moment to consider that Scotland has an alternative modern future ready and waiting.

The benefits of a unified government

Oct 1

Posted by James in Constitution | 11 Comments

pulledDuring the 1980s, pressure for a Scottish Parliament stemmed largely from the view that devolution might be able to protect Scotland from the worst excesses of Thatcherism. The last fourteen years have certainly confirmed that logic, even if some of that Thatcherism was being pushed at Westminster by New Labour. The decisions taken at Holyrood by this administration and its predecessors have almost all been either better than Westminster’s equivalent decisions for England or at least no worse. That’s why the idea of abolishing the Scottish Parliament, as floated by the occasional fringe voice from the Tories or Labour, is now utterly inconceivable.

The current Coalition is engaged in a direct assault on the poor across the UK, particularly through tax and benefits, and on immigrants – all areas that are primarily reserved, even if Holyrood can make some difference on all of them. Although independence is for keeps, not just to block this particular Tory/Lib Dem administration, this kind of policy agenda certainly helps make the case for independence.

But it’s not just “if Holyrood had powers over these areas it’d be making better decisions”, even though that seems likely to be true no matter who’s in power at Holyrood. It’s also a broader issue of coordination and direction. Is it really in Scotland’s interests to have the key policy issues that affect us all divided between two legislatures and two lots of Ministers, Ministers who will so often have radically different objectives? Does it help Scotland to have social policy pulled in two directions at once? Even on economic issues, where the SNP are closer to the Westminster consensus than I’d like, the two administrations aren’t exactly in lock-step.

As the US shutdown illustrates, a single national government doesn’t always lead to coordination and efficiency, or even common sense. But I’d rather we didn’t have to have a Scottish Government which spent a chunk of its time either complaining about Westminster’s poor decisions or considering how to work around them. I’d also rather that when people have a problem they need help with they don’t have to check Schedule 5 of the 1998 Act to work out if they need to speak to their MP or their MSPs.

We need a single Parliament, fairly elected, responsive and transparent (and yes, one which devolves more power down to communities too), one which deals with every national issue, and which holds to account a single government which drives policy in a clear direction: whatever direction it was elected to take us in. Given we’re not going back to unitary rule at Westminster any time soon, that can only come with a Yes vote next year.

Are we getting it right?

Sep 27

Posted by Guest Blog in Holyrood | 1 Comment

The Scottish Parliament debated the new Children and Young People Bill this week, but Labour MSP Ken Macintosh asks, are we Getting It Right For Every Child?

Ken Parliament Office - CopyDoes your child need a “named person” in order to promote, support or safeguard their wellbeing? The Scottish Government is proposing just such a move, appointing a named person for every person under 18 in Scotland.

We debated the subject in Parliament this week and the Minister argued that such a person, typically a health visitor or a teacher, would help all families access services, information and support. Most of the children’s organisations such as Barnardo’s back such a move saying that taking a universal approach to providing children with a point of contact is in keeping with the GIRFEC principles, child protection based on Getting It Right For Every Child.

Now, I do not have a knee jerk opposition to state intervention, but I find myself questioning the need and the practicality of this measure. I am certainly not going to lay claim to being a perfect parent, but is this really the best use of tax payers’ money and teachers’ time? My main worry is that despite the best of intentions the whole exercise could end up diverting scarce resources away from the children most in need.

There are few people across Scotland who fail to recognise the need to protect and help our most vulnerable children. The national news is filled too often by stories of neglect and abuse and the all too horrific consequences with children dying at the hands of their own parents. At the same time, it is difficult to see how appointing a named person to look after for example each of my six children, will do anything to improve child protection or to prevent such deaths occurring again. I simply fail to follow the argument that by giving a health visitor or a teacher responsibility for let’s say 30 well brought up children, or even dare I say, not particularly well brought up children, that will help them recognise the one that needs support and intervention. The danger is that time spent filling in forms for 30 children who will never need any intervention is time that could be better spent on those children in desperate need of help. Resources diverted to children who are thriving, loved and nurtured are resources not spent on the neglected and vulnerable.

As far as I am aware, teachers already have a professional duty and an ethical and legal obligation to pick up on kids who are turning up late for school, badly fed, poorly dressed or otherwise showing signs of lack of care. The same duty applies even more clearly to health visitors. How does seeking assurance from those same teachers that the vast majority of children in their care do not need help in any way assist them in identifying those in danger of slipping through the net? Is there not an obvious risk of creating an administratively cumbersome and bureaucratically complex system but with no additional practical benefit? Will there be a file for every child? Who will keep that file? What happens when staff move on as they often do? At the very least we need to clarify what this additional duty as a named person will mean.

Now I would put my concerns to one side if I thought the named person approach would save one life or pick up on one example of child cruelty or neglect that would otherwise go undetected or unrecognised. But if we look at all the recent cases of child abuse, as far as I can recall every subsequent inquiry concluded that where the state failed to intervene early enough it was not because no-one knew about the risk, it was because of the failure to share information. One of the main recommendations as a result has been to identify a lead professional in those cases where risk has been identified and public agencies have to work together. If every child is to have a named person, is there not a distinct possibility that we will create masses of information telling us nothing more than most children are fine, whilst potentially confusing lines of responsibility between the named person and the lead professional?

The children’s charities have argued that the measures are in line with the GIRFEC principles, but as I recall, GIRFEC was originally based on a report called “It’s everyone’s job to make sure I’m alright”, not ‘It’s one named person’s job to make sure I’m alright’.

If we are to go down the named person route, the solution surely must lie in the role, function and the resources we give to health visitors as child health and welfare is already their raison d’etre. What worries me here is that in recent years, Scottish Government practice has run counter to this very policy. Health visitors used to visit every mother and child regularly, but making contact with lots of healthy mums and toddlers was regarded as a waste of scarce resources and so a more targeted approach was taken. This has left us with genuine problems; that of mothers with post natal depression going undetected and of some children seeing no one virtually from leaving hospital until compulsory school age. I believe health visitors will be expected to make contact with families at 27-30 months as part of a new toddler development visit which is a good thing, but again apparently without any additional funding. I was at least reassured to hear that strong concerns were raised at the Parliament’s Finance Committee about placing new duties on various health and educational professionals with insufficient additional funding to help them carry out those duties.

I appreciate that the intention may be simply to formalise the role of health visitors or teachers who already have contact with our children and who provide a welcome service, but the fact is that this Bill proposes giving these named persons legal duties. Yes there are some desperately inadequate parents in our world but that should not blind us to the fact that the vast majority love and care for their children. I hope discussion and debate around the Bill will provide clarity on this matter but I fully understand why many families will be downright offended by the notion of someone assuming any kind of alternative parenting role, of setting themselves up in loco parentis or potentially judging parents in some way. The evidence does not suggest that the state makes a better parent than most families whatever our faults.

There are already many dedicated health and education staff who sensitively inquire after the children in their care and who expend most energy on those in greatest need. Our focus should be on how to make it easier for them to carry out those duties. There will be others unfortunately, whose response will not be to show increased concern for the children in their care, but to cover their own backs by making sure every child allocated to them has a form filled in proving that they fulfilled their legal duties. In other words, at one extreme this Bill could be a charter for interfering busybodies and at the other, for risk averse jobsworths.

I have no doubt that this is not the intention of the Bill and I sincerely hope that my fears are entirely misplaced. It is my understanding that the GIRFEC pilots have been viewed as successful and that the Education Committee is taking evidence on these very matters over the next few weeks and months. I want the Children’s Bill to improve the lives of all young people in Scotland and like most parents, I want to feel confident we have a system that identifies potential problems early and intervenes effectively. I do not think we should reject this approach until we hear the evidence but we should also be seriously questioning whether a named person would indeed be getting it right for every child.

Love Voltaire us apart, again

Sep 19

Posted by Dom in Culture, Economy, Education, Holyrood | Comments off

One of the questions regularly raised in discussions of independence is what would happen to Scotland’s globally prestigous universities.

Senior figures at my own place of work, the University of Edinburgh, have voiced concerns about the impact of being cut off from UK government research funding. More publicly Louise Richardson, the American-inspired principal of St Andrews has attacked elements of Scottish higher education policy as unsustainable and believes that universalism and universities do not go together.

What many people do not know is that, although higher education is devolved to Holyrood, the research funding which keeps many universities topped up and allows them to employ some world class academics is still allocated from Westminster. In the early days of the Cameron government there were attempts to politicise university research through directed funding of some of the main research councils, Arts and Humanities, Economics and Social Science, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences,  Medicine, Natural Environment and Science and Technology. Thankfully, a great many academics resisted such efforts and despite the crisis of tuition fees the structures of research funding are still relatively intact.

Now given that Scotland’s universities are already regulated and funded at an undergraduate level by Holyrood, the research funding pool is the one remaining structural link to Westminster. People such as Louise Richardson buy into the idea that severing this link would be a disaster for Scotland’s universities, and the forensic and nuanced Labour MSP Malcolm Chisholm pointed out the benefit of large research pools in this week’s independence preview debate in the chamber.

This is not something the Yes campaign can just ignore, and being a Scottish university is not a virtue in itself without the funds to back up the country’s claims to be at the top table of world education. You would hope that the future of higher education in Scotland, which is crucial to the country in terms of both its economy and its ability to meet its aspirations as a highly developed state, receives a significant amount of attention in the Scottish Government’s forthcoming white paper. In Scotland being the education minister also involves safeguarding and developing crucial national institutions for the benefit of all.

Nothing, however, is impossible, and there are various options for Scotland’s universities to take after independence.

The first would be to propose a joint research pool with Englash, Welsh, Irish and Northern Irish universities that would better allow specialisms to flourish and facilitate cross border academia. There is already a limited cooperation agreement between the UK and Ireland on pooling of research resources, whilst a great deal of higher-end science research now happens within the context of European funding organisations and research networks anyway.

The other option is that Scotland, in line with the aspirations of some SNP and Green thinkers to seek membership of the Nordic Council, should attach itself to the Nordforsk research pool which coordinates funding and specialisation across Northern Europe from Iceland to the Baltic states and Western Russia. This would move Scotland away from what Scandinavians term the Anglo Saxon educational tradition and integrate the country more closely with its Nordic neighbours. This might seem a horrific idea to the Ivy League obsessives in the country’s top universities but would apparently be more in line with the collective mood in Scotland generally.

The third option is that Scotland goes all out in developing itself as the go-to country for education by mixing high levels of access and participation for its own citizens with state backed research. It could aggressively pursue international funding and utilise the advantage of having several top class universities within a few hours of one another to create a world-leading research cluster across a range of disciplines. When Voltaire fell over himself to praise the Scottish intellectual climate he did so in a world without research councils and American exchange students. Ideas, and not oil or Scotland the brand, could be what comes to define the first century of a reconstituted state.

The last of these three scenarios is probably the most fanciful, but it is also the most enticing. Given the increasing dysfunctionality of universities in England independence might give Scotland the chance to develop a distinctive educational paradigm which could become a national cause celebre to dwarf flogging golf hats and whisky to wealthy tourists.

Separatism Voltaire us apart

The Westminster Party – what’s their record?

Sep 19

Posted by James in Constitution, History, Holyrood, Parties, Westminster | 7 Comments

4159787227_1513c4f155Scotland’s vote in a year’s time is too important to be decided by who looks likely to win the UK General Election the year after. This isn’t about party politics, it’s about the broad sweep of history, and it’s about the institutions we vote for and which then rule over us.

Anarchists are fond of the phrase “it doesn’t matter who you vote for, the Government always get in”, which is what makes the referendum such a rare and fascinating thing. For the first and probably last time in my life I’ll have a vote on whether I want the Westminster government as a whole in my life or not. So let’s put party to one side, or rather, let’s take a look at Westminster’s record as if it were a single political party, the good and bad.

The Westminster Party, for want of a better name, has been in power all my life. In fact they have (for the purposes of this argument) ruled without a break since the mid-19th century. So let’s go back a bit, rather than just looking at the last five or ten years: perhaps the last 40-50 years? What have they delivered over that period? I’ll do my best to be fair and pick a few areas to consider.

Democratic reform: Progress here has been limited at best, with the highlights being the Scottish Parliament itself and the other devolved assemblies. On the minus side the Westminster Party has defended its own interests over the decades by retaining an electoral system that’s non-proportional, outdated, and frankly favours the party’s own self-interest. The only time they’ve offered us a choice on replacing it, the alternative on offer was the smallest tweak possible, still non-proportional, and not something any of the party’s factions has ever even supported. Despite the cautious removal of some of the hereditaries from the House of Lords, we are still ruled in broadly the same way we were back in the 1860s. Oh, and the Westminster Party looks unlikely ever to offer us the option of an elected head of state. Compare to the Holyrood Party – the only level of democracy they could reform under the Scotland Act was local government, so they acted, and we now have a properly fair electoral system for our Councillors. The flaws in the Westminster Party’s record this area shouldn’t be regarded as something just of interest to wonks, either – it’s the foundation for all the policy issues below.

The economy: There’s no nice way to say this. Boom and bust, plus inequality: those are the Westminster Party’s trademarks. The booms have been unsustainable and delivered most of the benefits to the already better-off, to the city, and to London and the south-east, while the busts have been at the expense of the poorest, of manufacturing, and of the North of England in particular. It’s almost as if the Westminster Party’s policies over the last forty years have been designed to deliver instability and ever-widening inequality. Key public services have been handed over to the City, too, and so public money goes to support the lifestyles those who own the companies, rather than the services we use.

Health: If you go back a bit further than 50 years, you’d see perhaps the Westminster Party’s most shining achievement in this or any other area: the NHS. However, over the last 20 years, despite the massive popularity of a publicly-owned and publicly-run health service, the Westminster Party has chipped away at it, brought in private competition, charged for built new hospitals through dire PFI contracts, and weakened it perhaps permanently. They still charge for prescriptions and eye tests, for goodness sake. Fortunately, Scotland has missed the worst of this: the Holyrood Party, in power here since the start of devolution, has protected the NHS in Scotland from the worst excesses of this marketisation.

Education: You could almost say the primary policy of the Westminster Party here has been change for its own sake (another feature of their NHS policy): endless reorganisations, often without a clear purpose in mind. Having said that, the 1990s saw a period of significant investment at the primary and secondary level, which is to be commended. Unfortunately, at the same time the principle that higher education should be based on ability rather than bank balances was first threatened. Now the English university sector is effectively unaffordable for those who aren’t from wealthy backgrounds or prepared to get deep in debt, a principle which the Holyrood Party also ended in 2007.

Defence: This should really be billed as Interference. Or perhaps Profligacy. Defence is the only part of public spending that never gets challenged by the Westminster Party, who have also been committed to nuclear weapons for as long as nuclear weapons have existed. They never saw a military boondoggle they didn’t want to waste money on, and there’s hardly an American-led war (notable exception: Vietnam) they didn’t support or even actively take part in. Some of those interventions (e.g. Sierra Leone) have gone better than others (two recent disasters hardly need to be named), but the record here is pretty brutal, to say the least.

The environment: Despite an unexpectedly early expression of interest in the late 1980s, it’s been all coal and new motorways and business as usual. The Westminster Party leadership knows it needs to talk as if it cares about the environment, and set some meaningless targets to miss (a flaw it shares with the Holyrood Party, to be fair), but they have achieved literally nothing substantial that might protect the environment either here in the UK or internationally.

Overall, the Westminster Party’s failures of policy and governance could hardly be more clear. This what we’ve had to put up with over the last 150 years, but if Scotland votes No, it’s also what we’ll face for the next 150 years. I regret the fact that the rest of the UK isn’t being offered an opportunity to vote the whole lot of them out out, especially my friends in England who (outside London) don’t have the benefit of devolution.

But that can’t be helped. We have a chance in Scotland to push a domino over next year. Perhaps others will fall after it.

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