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Arguments over how much oil there is are missing the point

Mar 11

Posted by Dom in Democracy, Economy, Energy, Environment, Ideology | 15 Comments

An independent Scotland will ban nuclear weapons, we are told. Top stuff. I’m all for it.

Nuclear weapons are amoral and have the potential to kill millions of people if they were ever used, as well as belonging to an age now past.

But there is a bigger threat to  global peace and wellbeing lurking in Scottish waters, one which the more head-in-sand types in the SNP leadership and UK government are all too eager to embrace.

Scotland is about to undergo a second oil boom apparently. At least according to the First Minister.

And in the week that a leaked document accepting the idea of change and adaption as a central component of any society made the headlines, we are told that things shall always be as they have been, for ever more. The boom becomes a beat and the beat goes on.

What is pretty clear is that we can’t just turn off the oil industry. The Scottish economy would collapse, and thousands of people would lose their jobs. Like those peace-loving Swedes exporting Bofors armaments far and wide with a shrug of their shoulders and and a nod to the employment statistics, it is easy enough to take away the pain of responsibility with a few spoons of relativism.

And it is incredibly tempting, because all those guns and all that oil pays for the welfare and investment in the public good which so many right thinking people want in a society.

But the kind of politicians who would take the oil and look away are the same type of person who would use the cheats on Championship manager, only to wonder why winning the European Cup carries no sense of achievement. It’s the Dorian Gray of natural resources, and for every single drop pumped out the official portrait at Bute House will turn a touch more grotesque. Or maybe Faust if you want. They’re all the same basic metaphor.

It’s our oil till we’ve sold it, and then it’s another man’s grievance.

There is no denying that the low-carbon world which we must inevitably transition to – either by design or by sheer necessity – will and must come. I’ve stood in the gallery at Holyrood and watched the whole parliament pat itself on the back over climate change legislation. You can call yourself world leading or pioneering as much as you like, but if you then choose to adopt a position which runs counter to received scientific wisdom and moral defensibility you will find yourself leading a world of one.

Because the emissions from an ever expanding Scottish oil industry will kill more people than Trident, be it in the form of air pollution or crop failure, flooding and conflict.

And because we must transition to a sustainable economy, does it not make sense to do it immediately?  I’ll be voting Yes to change Scotland into the country it can be, not into an unthinking and morally indefensible oil state.

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Poll suggests Scottish Lib Dems to be cut from 11 to 2 at next election

Mar 9

Posted by Jeff in Elections, Parties | 10 Comments

Despite there being many possibilities for Scotland’s future between now and the next UK General Election, one intriguing consideration since Clegg and Cameron took to the rose garden to announce their parties’ coalition is – to what extent can the Lib Dems survive as a political force north of the border.

The party is enjoying the power and trappings of Government, and being relevant to national political discussion. It is easy to forget that Labour MPs used to walk out of the Chamber when it was the Lib Dems’ turn to ask Prime Minister Questions. Not any more, now they must face them from the opposition benches and even watch on occasionally as Nick Clegg takes to the lectern in the Prime Minister’s absence.

It has been, of course, considerably more bruising for Scottish Lib Dem MPs, wrestling with their consciences over votes on tuition fees, bedroom taxes and spending cuts, knowing that they have to compromise their principles and shred their constituency mandates in order to vote Yes. A commendable number have voted against their party and against their Government, but will this be enough if they have to face the voters again in 2015?

A recent poll by Lord Ashcroft has helped shine a light on the Scottish Lib Dems fortunes, and, well, it doesn’t look pretty.

The party currently holds a mighty eleven seats north of the border, a figure that far outweighs the number of seats they deserve based on national voteshare. These seats were the population for a poll of voting intentions, with a sample size of 1,151, and resulted in the following:

Voting intentions
SNP – 31%
Labour- 26%
Lib Dem – 20%
Conservative – 16%
Others – 7%

The analysis concluded that the Lib Dem seats would change hands as follows:

Aberdeenshire W & Kincardine – SNP GAIN

Argyll & Bute – SNP GAIN

Berwickshire, Roxburgh & Selkirk – TORY GAIN

Caithness, Sutherland & Easter Ross – SNP GAIN

East Dunbartonshire – LABOUR GAIN

Edinburgh West – LABOUR GAIN

North East Fife – SNP GAIN

Gordon – SNP GAIN

Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey – SNP GAIN

Orkney & Shetland – LIB DEM HOLD

Ross, Skye & Lochaber – LIB DEM HOLD

A lot can happen between now and 2015 of course, not least a referendum that would mean zero Scottish MPs of any party. However, any suggestion that the success of Eastleigh could be replicated north of the border in 2015 appears to be a very faint one indeed. There is, seemingly, no escape from a very public evisceration, except through independence.

An independent Scotland would start with a clean slate, with an increased number of MSPs at the Scottish Parliament with relatively few experienced politicians ready to hit the ground running. There may be no space for Jo Swinson, Mike Crockart or Danny Alexander. Even Michael Moore, Charlie Kennedy and Menzies Campbell won’t be returning to the UK Parliament on the basis of this poll, but all eleven Scottish Lib Dems would quite reasonably expect to be voted back into power at an enlarged, empowered Holyrood in an independent Scotland.

Politics, they say, is the art of the possible and all too often is simply driven by the need for survival. There are nine Scottish Lib Dem MPs with coats on very shoogly pegs, all supposedly signed up to a party policy for home rule and federalism, and this high watermark of representation realistically won’t be reached again for decades.

In order to save their political careers, who would blame them if they became independence converts in the next year or so?

Why the SNP should consider pushing the referendum back to 2015

Mar 7

Posted by Jeff in Constitution | 23 Comments

One school of thought surrounding the SNP’s scheduling of an Autumn 2014 independence referendum is that the haunting spectre of another five years of Tory Government after the 2015 General Election will veer Scots towards a Yes vote. The current problem with this strategy of course is that Labour are currently 13% up in the polls.

This inconvenience should not have come as a surprise to anyone within Yes Scotland. Incumbent political parties that go on to win handsome election victories often lag far behind in the midterm polls.
The SNP trailed Labour by double digits nine months shy of the 2011 Holyrood elections, Michael Howard’s Tories kept pace with Labour for over a year before being thumped by the irrepressible Tony Blair in 2005 while John Major famously snatched victory from Kinnock’s jowls of defeat in 1997, contrary to what the polls had been saying. Even political rock’n’roll star Barack Obama trailed the Republicans for most of his first term, ultimately winning a second with relative ease late last year.

The clue as to who will win the next election often lies with leaders’ personal approval ratings. Gray never struck the necessary chord with the Scottish public, Brits agreed that Howard had something of the night about him and Kinnock never went beyond being ‘alright’ in the public’s minds. All were electorally eviscerated accordingly, despite the commanding poll leads their parties had enjoyed.

Ed Miliband appears to be very much a similar pretender to that longed for throne. Labour’s 13% poll lead is not mirrored in the party leader’s ratings given Miliband is less popular than Cameron right across the country, except for a very slender lead in Scotland (29% approval to Cameron’s 26%). For a Labour leader to be jostling for popularity with a Conservative leader north of the border is practically unheard of.

In a referendum context, these somewhat contradictory statistics are bad news for Yes Scotland and good news for Labour. It is fair to say that the public broadly do not understand the nuances of political polls and would largely expect a Labour majority in 2015, and vote in Autumn 2014 accordingly.

And if the threat of a Tory Government was a reason to vote Yes, then the promise of a Labour Government must surely be a reason to vote No.

Many Nats, in their best Charge of the Light Brigade fashion, will argue that nothing can be done, that the die has been cast and that the Autumn 2014 date is immovable. Not so.

The Holyrood term runs from 2011 to 2016 with the Westminster terms from 2010 to 2015 and 2015 to 2020. The Scottish Government could therefore decide to hold the referendum in the Autumn of 2015, still within its current term but quite possibly several months into a Tory Government’s new term.

It’s a gamble; and there are downsides, of course:

The SNP has set its stall out for an 18 month handover between the referendum date and Scotland’s first post-independence elections in Spring 2016. A new timetable would push this back a year into 2017 with the thorny question being whether devolved Holyrood elections would be required when the current term runs out. An SNP victory would be likely in such an event but a devolved Labour Government being tasked with thrashing out a deal with the UK Government would be unpalatable. Issues surrounding a mandate for the treatment of Trident is one obvious can of worms.

A further concern would be the quite reasonable headlines suggesting that Yes Scotland is running scared, that it is already beginning the ‘neverendum’ process of delay and dither to suit its purposes. These headlines would be short lived but potentially damaging nonetheless.

However, the overriding objective for Yes Scotland is getting to 50% and a post-2015 Tory Government with few (if any) Scottish MPs may well be deemed a better environment in which to reach this threshold than the false sense of security of Labour surging misleadingly in the polls.

The SNP gambling on the general election outcome and holding the independence referendum in Autumn 2015 is therefore surely worthy of consideration. Scotland won’t be hosting the Commonwealth Games or the Ryder Cup that year, but it will host the Orienteering Championships, and appositely so for a Yes camp who may require to know their bearings more accurately come then.

A tale of two markets

Mar 6

Posted by Aidan in Holyrood | Comments off

Image by SalFalko

Image by SalFalko

Today, like most days, it’s the economy that’s front and centre. The publication of  the latest GERS report has lead to a predictably dull round of cherry-picked comparisons, although this BBC article which confuses debt and deficit in the headline and first paragraph takes the headdesk biscuit.

Equally depressing was the paroxysm of joy over the proposed cap on bank bonuses. Never in the field of financial regulation has so little been done by so few to so many. There’s certainly an argument that the structure of incentives within investment banks were badly wrong and encouraged an unquestioning herd mentality. There’s also an argument that investment banking remuneration levels reflected the capture of those institutions by their employers who ran them in their own interests, not those of their shareholders. However altering the pay structure so that salaries are higher and bonuses are lower, which is all that a cap will lead to, won’t affect either of those in the slightest. A cap on bonuses doesn’t address the wider structural problems in combining financial infrastructure and retail banking with investment banks – something which the business models of Barclays, JP Morgan, RBS and others explicitly rely on. Nor does it even attempt to touch the deep problems with high-order structured products, dark markets and other forms of financial innovation in weakly regulated global markets with highly mobile capital.

So much joy was expressed at what is, however you look at it, tinkering at the edges that it made me wonder if people understood anything about the financial crisis at all. Then I saw the GERS article on the BBC and I realised that no, no they hadn’t.

On a more positive note, however, the OFT report on pay day lending is great. Clear steps for a deeply problematic, exploitive and under-regulated industry to take with a defined, appropriate timescale to take them in and clear penalties for not doing so. There are a number of really good campaigns working on this at both a Scottish and UK level and it’s really good to see the regulators taking a firm line on the systematic issues within what’s essentially a cartel. I just wish we were seeing  similar action at the macro-economic level as well as what’s, basically, the micro-economic level.

I have concerns about immigration

Mar 1

Posted by James in Ideology, International, Parties | 8 Comments

ukbaWithout dwelling too long on Eastleigh, it’s clear that UKIP’s doing well by broadening its appeal out from anti-Europeanism and into broader anti-foreignerism.

No longer just against the European institutions, UKIP are now against Europeans personally. They have made a breakthrough with this repellent rhetoric already – actually winning would just have been the nasty icing on the cake.

It’s not just the crack-down coalition that hears this inchoate yelp from what they call Middle England, either. Labour are also listening. They’re going to address voters’ concerns on immigration, they say.

Fine. Address mine: here they are.

I am very concerned at the way immigration is described as a problem. Immigration isn’t a problem, let alone the problem.

Let’s start with the closest thing there is to “an immigration problem”, though, which is a problem caused by slow and incompetent administrative responses to changes in population levels. When particular areas see large numbers of people move into them, whether from within the UK or from the rest of the EU or from beyond, then services and funding for services need to follow them. If not, shortages of school places and longer queues in GPs’ surgeries can lead to resentment and community division. Extra support for translation, interpretation and the provision of English tuition will often be required. Central government needs to be more responsive here.

Next, there are concerns about pay. Does increasing the labour supply cut pay? Well, simplistically applying classical economics may suggest so, but economies and societies are more complicated than that. For one thing, immigrants aren’t just potential employees, they are also potential employers. These are people who have already shown enough determination to uproot themselves and come here, so I’d be astonished to discover they weren’t, pound for pound, more likely to be innovators and hard workers. Why else would the right-wing propaganda machine be so determined to tell us they’re scroungers? And there are solutions here, measures we should be taking irrespective of immigration: don’t strangle the economy with austerity, support tax-paying SMEs and co-ops rather than tax-avoiding multinationals, and above all, in this context, make the minimum wage a living wage and protect employee rights.

We live in a world where there’s virtually unrestricted movement of capital, but still restricted movement of labour. It’s a divergence designed to exploit: workers in country A get organised and demand better pay and conditions? It’s easy enough to shift business to country B, or at least as easy as it can be made for companies to do so. I’d expect any party that’s actually of the left, unlike the modern Labour party, to understand that. A real party of the left would wish to rebalance it.

More broadly, I’m concerned that politicians from Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems seem not to realise the broader cultural contribution immigration makes. Imagine a Britain that had somehow barred the various waves of post-war migration, or a Scotland without the Italians, the Irish, the Bangladeshis, the Poles, the Sudanese. Depressing, isn’t it? Many of our institutions are still “too male, stale and pale”: if the whole country still looked like that I’d be looking to get out of it myself. When was the last time you heard any politician from any of those parties be just plain positive about immigration or immigrants? Sure, sometimes they make a token nod in the direction of positivity, but you know a “, but…” is going to follow.

I’m also concerned that when British residents move abroad for work they’re called “ex-pats”, and it’s seen as their absolute moral right to do so, which is fine, except that the same people are told that someone making the exact same move in the opposite direction for the exact same reasons is an immigrant, come simultaneously to take the jobs they’ve left behind and to scrounge off benefits. Let’s use the same term for everyone doing the same thing, in whichever direction. “Ex-pat” is a more positive term, so let’s go with that.

Finally, without wishing to blur the two issues like the right do, there are asylum seekers and refugees. In those cases, we see all the same benefits, plus the fact that we’re offering a safe haven to someone whose own country has become unsafe for them. It’s a basic moral principle. I have a couple of friends who came to Scotland as refugees from Sarajevo. I remember the day they got their status through: I cried. And they are now EU citizens, but they call Scotland their home. That makes me proud, prouder than any nationalist’s praise for his or her own country. “You just happened to be born here”, I think, “whereas these two made a positive choice”. Imagine a civil war here, or the rise of a truly fascist state: wouldn’t you want the French or the Chileans or the South Africans to offer vulnerable British people a safe haven?

Overall, though, my main concern that we’re missing out on the economic and social benefits that more immigration, with the protections set out above, would bring for this country. Are you listening, John Denham?