BACK in 2014, had I lived in Scotland, I would have voted No to independence. But as Keynes said, when the facts change, I change my mind.
I’m someone who is interested in how economies grow. I even have a new book about it. It’s this interest that brought me to read the Sustainable Growth Commission Report.
After the dubious economic hand-waving that abounded on both sides in 2014, I thought it was an important and serious attempt to set out what the Scottish growth model is, and what it could be in the future. My journey to the "other side" began there.
My change of mind is not based upon romanticism. It’s based upon the realisation that the facts have changed.
The growth model
The UK’s growth model, as is apparent even to the Economist magazine, is broken.
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As Brett Christophers has painstakingly detailed, the UK’s growth model is an economy of rents, where ownership of assets that generates income (rents) and the squeezing of labor combine to produce one of the most unequal and unproductive economies in the OECD.
Brexit was not an attempt to change that growth model so much as double down on it, as the "forever in power" Conservative Party are utterly bereft of ideas about how to change it.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party these days seems more interested in how many Union Jacks they can fit on party letterhead than actually challenging the Conservatives. Scotland was at least trying to imagine a better economy. Is it really a surprise that changed sides?
My terrible error
But I was naive about the politics of doing so. After I switched, I did a podcast for the US foreign press association on the topic of Scottish independence and I made a terrible error. I played the "two-handed economist".
On the podcast I argued that you can make a compelling case for, and against, independence, and I proceeded to do so, clarifying why I think the "for" case is more compelling.
That was an idiotic thing to do. Of course The Telegraph would take the "against" case I made, trumpet it as if it was the only thing I said, and claim that I destroy the case for independence. This was my introduction to the politics of selective quotation.
Despite my own goal, the Scottish Government contacted me in 2021 and asked if I would be a member of the committee designing a 10-year National Strategy for Economic Transformation. I was happy to agree. As part of doing so I emailed the Scottish Government, a lot.
Earlier this year my emails to the chief economist of the Scottish Government were the subject of a freedom of information request and were trawled over by the Scottish press.
The latest claims - and the truth
Three papers contacted me. All were interested in the same quote, which was the one that Alf Young led with in his piece in The Times last Wednesday, which suggests, yet again, that I can’t make a positive case for independence. Here’s the quote:
“Since David McWilliams made me into the reluctant poster child for Scottish independence, I’ve been a bit stumped. I’ve been trying to write something on the subject but keep struggling to find the positive case that I hoped for.”
It’s an unfortunate turn of phrase. But if you read the rest of the email, you can clearly see that it’s a compliant about not being able to find specific national accounts data on the Scottish Government website. My email was a request for data. It was not an admission of defeat.
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That same Times piece used another quote from a September 2021 email, where I complain about getting up at 4am my time for Advisory Council meetings, which is completely true.
Who wants to get up at 4am for a committee meeting on zoom, for anything? But the point of using this quote seems to be to get us to the next one, which infers from another email, six months later, that because I felt I was "persona non-grata" with some folks in Scotland I’ve been left off the new board spun out of the National Strategy Council.
Yet isn’t it simpler to infer that I’ve been left out because I don’t actually live in Scotland, and I clearly hate 4am meetings?
This morning, Friday, August 19, The Times graciously published a letter, by way of response, that outlines my amusement and bemusement with this exercise in selective quotation. And right then a mate of mine from Glasgow emailed me a link to the Spectator. Yes, it’s happened again, the same day.
The Spectator piece took the "one-handed economist" quotes, in the style of the Telegraph from the podcast, and linked those to the "nothing burger" that was The Times story to tell the same story all over again. It’s like I woke up in selective quotation Groundhog Day.
It's a distraction
What this episode shows me is that the Scottish independence question, at least in the hands of its politicians, civil society leaders, and media, has become a local version of the Brexit debates. It’s an all-consuming distraction where partisan lines are drawn, points are scored, and emails are selectively quoted, all in a way that avoids the need for any actual engagement on the real issues facing Scotland.
Scotland suffers from being attached to a broken debt and consumption-driven national growth model called the UK that teeters on the brink of collapse. Some 35% of UK GDP is generated in London.
Much of the rest of the country effectively lives off transfers. Sterling has been overvalued for a generation, which has masked these problems, sucking in other people’s money to cover over the cracks. That model is coming to an end, soon. If you think the UK has inflation now, just wait.
While the UK has no functioning growth model Scotland is at least trying to lay the foundations for a new and better one. The National Strategy for Economic Transformation was an attempt, within the existing constitutional framework, to do better. It spells out how and why Scotland should grow and diversify its exports while putting the all too necessary green transition at the center of its ambitions. While Westminster peddles tax cuts Scotland tackles decarbonization and the growth of a hydrogen economy.
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But we can’t have that discussion. We seem to be unable to move beyond the politics of point scoring. We’d rather cast aspersions on a project, and each other, via selective email trawling and podcast transcript editing.
My emails are a distraction. Scotland has real problems. It would be nice if its media and politicians actually focused on them.
Mark Blyth
Providence RI, USA
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