A DEVOTEE of this column, Allan Sutherland of Stonehaven, writes in to support its general line in favour of a future independent Scotland geared to growth and exports. This would, of course, make it richer and happier than our non-independent Scotland geared to subsidy and consumption, or indeed than an independent Scotland of the same kind. I’m glad to see the arguments I have been putting over since I started writing for the National are getting through to its more perceptive readers.
A difference still persists between me and Allan, in that I think the sort of future independent Scotland we favour might come about in quite short order, especially if it is part of the EU, or at least of the single market. Those were my reasons for voting Yes in the referendum of 2014 and Remain in the referendum of 2016. Allan takes a different view: “My problem with all this, and the reason I am against independence, is I don’t think the SNP’s core voter base will relish the level of cuts, restrictions or general reality that the transition to … independent Scotland and the ongoing fiscal and behavioural rectitude require.”
I can quibble about the “core voter base”. Of course the main reason we have an SNP government today is that it has beaten, routed and put to the sword the Labour Party that once ruled the roost in the west of Scotland especially – a perfect illustration of the proverb about power corrupting, and absolute power corrupting absolutely.
But, on the most generous definition, this vital socialist base accounted for only half the nation. While I find that Allan’s own county of Kincardineshire did not even get a Labour candidate till the general election of 1950, at least afterwards its voters enjoyed six decades of opportunity to elect a Labour MP if they had wanted. They never did.
In fact the conventional politics of left versus right in the rest of Britain did not take root in Scotland outside the central belt. It is one reason why the national movement sweeps the board in these regions too.
Still, I am happy to concede that the majority of the activists who stand up and make speeches at SNP conferences, and so start to tot up the Brownie points to carry them to Holyrood or Westminster, are people who would probably vote Labour if it were not a Unionist party. There is a minority of right-wingers in the SNP: I meet and talk to them all the time. But they keep their heads down. They are more interested in the advance towards and eventual achievement of independence than they are in pushing any particular policy agenda. If this has to be done from the left, then so be it.
I agree their strategy is the correct one, though as a columnist I do not feel myself bound by one possible implication of it, that I too should keep quiet and not rock the boat. Somebody still has to warn where things may be going wrong.
Going wrong they are in terms of the policy agenda actually being pursued by the Scottish Government. It can hardly be called socialist, not least because since about 1990 nobody has been able to say what socialism means. The sole examples left in the world of countries defining themselves as socialist are Cuba and Venezuela, which we lack the sunshine to imitate, and then North Korea: not an alluring prospect. Denmark and Sweden? But they are avowedly capitalist countries, which happen to have generous systems of social security. We might have one too, if we could do as well economically as they do. Otherwise we would be piling on ourselves burdens we cannot bear. We already have enough trouble running what welfare powers have come to us under devolution. The way to change this is to transform Scotland, too, into a country that creates wealth. This cannot be done from within the UK.
It is true the economies of the British Isles are closely integrated.
It is rather the political structures that impose different outcomes on the different nations, outcomes usually unfavourable to Scotland. To shape an economic environment auspicious for the creation of wealth, we need stronger political structures of our own.
The system of economic management in the UK is highly centralised, and run from London.
It comes as no surprise that the system normally reflects the interests and prejudices of politicians and civil servants who live and work in the south-east of England, a tendency that intensifies when there is, as now, a Conservative government.
For half-a-century or so, the productive capacity of the UK has been decaying. It can no longer earn its bread from competition in emerging markets as the Danes and the Swedes do, let along the unbeatable Germans. Instead British governments have been forced back on the manipulation of house prices as a means of making the people feel richer, in the hope they will go out and spend and in this way stimulate the UK’s torpid industries. Hence the buy-to-let schemes and other fabulous nonsenses. They have kept housing asset bubbles swelling through all the stagnation of the last decade and created an unacknowledged inflation which in fact makes us on average poorer.
The failure of the policy in itself is ignored because the political and economic establishment can think of nothing else. I find it hard to imagine a course of action less relevant to Scotland. Our level of home ownership is now about the same as England’s, but we have had little by way of housing bubbles and I hope we never will. Yet without economic government and policy of our own we are powerless to seek a different course.
Let me suggest one alternative scenario. In order to make an economy grow, you need three things. You need the technology to exploit – and, for all its problems, Scotland remains good at technological innovation, in part coming from world-class universities but also from the people at large in a nation where socialism has never quite suppressed the basic entrepreneurial instincts. You also need capital, and Scotland has a lot of capital knocking round in its financial institutions, though for now usually invested outside the country.
Thirdly, you need labour. If an economy grows, a new workforce has to be there to make the new products in the new factories. But Scots are no longer reproducing themselves. Our own native population is declining and ageing, so that the recent increase in the total national population has come from immigrants, younger and more vigorous. For a growing economy, we must have more of them.
Yet it is precisely in the face of that necessity that we get a UK government, in reaction to English prejudices, setting out to cut immigration. If the effort succeeds, the Scottish economy will slow even further. In this case, British official policy works directly counter to our interest.
So to Allan Sutherland of Stonehaven I say that only a government of our own can transform our culture of provincial dependency and make us think about realising our latent potential. It is true this government would also need to turn from away some fabulous nonsenses of its own, with its prattle of sustainability and inclusiveness. But you have to start somewhere – and independence would be the best place.
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