THE key to victory in a second independence referendum is winning over working-class No voters unconvinced by the 2014 Yes case and whose votes are essential to win.
However, I feel duty-bound as a member of the wider independence movement to say Andrew Wilson’s voluminous Sustainable Growth Report offers nothing to working-class Scots under austerity’s cosh these 10 years past.
Rather, it offers them 10 more years of the same!
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The Scottish Socialist Party will not participate in a Yes campaign that puts this report at its centre. It risks driving hundreds of thousands of former Yes voters into the hands of Jeremy Corbyn.
The SSP and others on the Left cannot campaign for independence on this right-wing economic case.
Rather, we will present a far more persuasive and ambitious vision for independence based on lifting our fellow citizens out of the poverty, inequality and lack of opportunity they currently endure.
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Circumstances Andrew Wilson and his learned academics and business people wish to maintain.
“Tone and message matter every bit as much as policy specifics in driving sentiment”, says Wilson.
I agree. And that’s why his promise of low taxes for employers and low wages for employees is not my vision of independence.
The report undermines the case for a progressive Scotland that rejects the status quo and breaks with free market economics and neoliberal capitalist conventions.
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Iain Macwhirter – who suggested this report be read, filed and forgotten –was right. It’s a report straight out of Tony Blair’s playbook.
Blair also advocated “flexible working practices” as cover for undermining the employment rights of working people in the 1990s. Wilson’s advocacy of them now as part of “a competitive location for international investment” is classic Blairite code for cutting corporate taxes and for turbocharged austerity for the masses.
This while keeping the punitive council tax – which the SNP promised to scrap – where the burden falls heaviest on those least able to pay, and other regressive levies like VAT and fuel duty.
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Public ownership was anathema to Blair, too, and nowhere does Andrew Wilson’s report talks about returning Scotland’s abundant natural resources to public hands.
His Fund for Future Generations pales in comparison to Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund because our oil and gas fields are privately owned.
We get the tax levied on oil company profits – Norway gets all the profits.
At the outset of this report, Wilson makes clear independence for him is not about challenging existing power relations in Scotland but maintaining them.
He talks like Blair did, about “creating a stronger economy” and “sustainable public finances” in order to build “a fairer society” before all mention of the latter promise disappears altogether.
His Productivity, Population and Participation section is undermined by zero-hour contracts, poverty wages and widespread underemployment.
On population growth/immigration he fails to point out the overwhelming majority of the 479,000 migrant workers who have come to Scotland since 2010 are here as a source of cheap labour for unscrupulous employers unable to find people prepared to sweat all day in their fields and factories for such poor wages and conditions.
A million Scots are living in poverty – the majority of whom are in work.
Freeing them from slave wages and insecure employment would show ambition and offer a glimpse at the kind of country we might, with independence, be.
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