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What is The Question?

May 31

Posted by Aidan in Constitution, Holyrood | 4 Comments

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As I prepare for the final exam of my degree I can hear the voices of  my high school English and Modern Studies teachers echoing through my head from the distant past: “remember to answer the question”. Physics and Computing were a bit more straightforward to approach and my chances at Higher Maths had been slightly scuppered by my teacher deciding to go off and manage Berwick Rangers. Alongside not really getting to grips with it, having scraped a 2 in Standard Grade. Mostly the latter if I’m entirely honest. Anyway.

Which isn’t to say they were demanding a simple “yes” or “no”, one of the skills of those kind of exams is to figure out what the question is really asking. In those cases it’s normally prompting at a quick explanation of the issues and then some argument about them. Seems pretty straightforward from a relaxed perspective but, hyped up on a mix of Irn Bru, Roxette and the prospect of getting out of small town Midlothian for the bright lights dark clubs of Glasgow and University figuring out what the question meant in the few minutes available wasn’t always the easier task.

For the referendum, of course, we know the question ahead of time: ”Should Scotland be an independent country?”

The answers are more Standard Grade multi-guess, we can pick Yes or No and that’s it. No hour to write a justification, just one of two boxes.

That doesn’t mean that it’s not worth considering what the question is actually asking though. You can choose to interpret it a number of ways.

You could, for instance, choose to to interpret it as asking if it means you prefer David Cameron or Alex Salmond to lead the country. I’m not sure that stands up but it’s how the SNP part of Yes sometimes presents itself.

You could also choose to interpret it as asking if you’d prefer Patrick Harvie and Alison Johnstone to either Alex Salmond or David Cameron as the Green part of Yes sometimes presents itself. That stands up even less.

Then there’s interpreting the question as asking if you’d rather the sky fell in and we were given nothing but sackcloth to wear. Not that likely really.

Me? I think the question should be interpreted as asking “Will independence maximise the political freedom of Scottish people in determining their own future?”

Even then that’s a more complicated question than it appears. On an initial glance it’s tempting to answer Yes because smaller political units mean more freedom. Don’t they? Well.. no. Not always. Otherwise what’s the point of government at all? Some times pooling sovereignty with others increases the number of things you can do, provided you get collective agreement to do them. This is something which arguments for withdrawing from the Union but not the European Union implicitly accept, as does the proposal for a currency union post-independence.

There’s obviously some freedoms to be gained from independence, but there would be trade offs as well. The question is really about the balance between those two.

To rephrase the question as a more open ended “please discuss”, it could be framed as “what policy decisions would be opened up and which closed off  by independence?”

That’s a question I’d like to see answers to from both sides. I’ve given it some thought and I think I know what the answers are but you never know, I could be wrong.

Scottish politics’ Old Firm

May 30

Posted by Dom in Activism, Democracy, Environment, Equality, Governance, Local government, Parties, Society | Comments off

A few things have happened to me in the last few weeks which have reminded me of the importance of community to every aspect of our lives, and how this can be a wonderful thing.

Last Sunday I joined tens of thousands of other Hibs fans at the Scottish Cup Final in Glasgow. To see half the stadium singing Sunshine on Leith – a crowd made up of people who you recognised from bars and shops and the local swimming pool – underlined what a powerful thing community can be. Hibs went down 3-0 to a Celtic side with a global fanbase and several times more money composed of players from across the globe.  A defeat, but one which cemented the feeling that Leith is a very special place with a very specific identity and community.

A few days later came another defeat dished out by the big boys, but this time it was Edinburgh and not Glasgow putting an end to a long and hard fought campaign. The City of Edinburgh council’s Labour/SNP administration made the decision to sell the local fun pool to a private developer instead of the preferred community option that it should be taken over by a community organisation and run on a non-profit basis with a public subsidy. The council have opted to sell it to a property developer with plans for a generic indoor play zone, despite the area already having indoor play facilities.

Now, to return to the question of Hibernian FC, it has a fine tradition of producing footballers who are then purchased for apparently irresistible  money by Glasgow teams, the rationale being that the payoff is too good to refuse and that it will help the team build and move on in the long term.

As long as I have been a supporter of Hibernian FC this has demonstrably failed to happen, and I am worried that the same will be true of the Leith Waterworld saga. Were that one million pounds ploughed directly back into the local area it would be welcome, but it won’t be. That one million pounds could cover the whole of Leith in safe cycle and walking projects to keep kids fit, or it could be used for community startups or form the basis of a cooperative energy company which would more or less print money for the community to reinvest. Hell, it could even pay for a few metres of the tram line down Leith Walk, which we are in far greater need of than the poverty-stricken residents of Edinburgh Airport are (on this note it is also worth pointing out the council masterplan to develop the greenbelt land around the tram line by the airport when we have a huge number of brownfield sites which are either underdeveloped, underused or contain housing so bad it should probably be torn down anyway).

Leith is not a suburb of Edinburgh – it is a cosmopolitan place in its own right full of wonderful people. We have been let down by decision makers who do not know what the needs and desires of the local community are, in a failure of both democracy and common sense. The decision has cemented people’s dissatisfaction with structures of governance which view our assets as belonging to the city chambers and not to the people of our communities. We may not to be able to afford Leigh Griffiths, but we can definitely afford to invest in our collective resources.

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Higher education can’t be fixed at 19

May 30

Posted by James in Education, Holyrood, Westminster | 5 Comments

St AndrewsThe Scotsman’s front page declares “Tuition fee axe ‘still favouring the rich’“, a classic instance of the headline not being stood up by the story. To be fair, the headline online is the much more accurate “Scottish universities remain elitist“.

The supporting piece, by Sheila Riddell from Edinburgh University, argues that the proportion of working-class students at Scotland’s ancient universities has declined from 21% in 2003 to 19% now.

Attributing this change to the abolition of tuition fees, as the frothing front-page headline at least seeks to do, is evidentially problematic to say the least, given that rebranded tuition fees were scrapped in 2008, precisely halfway through that decade.

Simultaneously, and more compellingly, the Guardian reports on survey data from England which looked at precisely the most important group: 11-16 year-olds in state schools.

Amongst those who say they’re unlikely to go to university, 41% say they’re not bright enough (something which, it should be noted, never seems to deter the privately-educated and will certainly not be true for many in that group) but 57% cite the cost as the deterrent. The headline on this? The diametrically opposed “University fees biggest barrier to wider access, research finds“.

It is difficult to draw hard and fast conclusions from this data because there’s no control, no parallel Scotland which didn’t abolish tuition fees in 2008, no parallel England where the Lib Dems kept their promises (that one’s even harder to imagine).

Only 19% of students at the ancient universities are from working class backgrounds this year, sure, which is very poor: but what proportion would have been if every student had to pay £9000 per year?

Leaving aside my ideological preference for education to be based on academic merit rather than ability to pay, though, it still seems likely that tuition fees will be less off-putting to those for whom money is no object. It also remains the case that tuition is of course only one cost associated with higher education, which is why previous generations of students (notably including those Labour, Tory and Lib Dem politicians who introduced or hiked tuition fees) had the benefit of a system of grants, now largely gone. As Riddell notes, the SNP administration to its credit is also introducing (reintroducing?) funding in bursaries and loans of up to £7250 for students from poorer backgrounds from the autumn of this year. That will surely help.

However, the problems with unequal intake don’t start when school leavers are considering applying to university. The inequalities in our education system start right at the beginning, and are anchored in a secondary system divided between the private and the state-run. Means-tested grants, ending fees: these are good measures, but they are merely tinkering. Unless we start phasing out private schools (or otherwise bringing the state sector up to their standards), we will continue to see grossly unequal intakes to universities.

It’s not just idealism at work here: the current arrangement is also bad capitalism. The interests of business as well as society would be better served by the brightest making it to university, irrespective of their parents’ background. It’s not time for fees to come back and entrench the divide. It’s time for radical change to an educational system that continues to confirm entrenched privilege, generation after generation, through school, into university, and on throughout life.

Disclaimer: I went to a private school and to St Andrews (above) and am therefore part of the problem.

Scotland 2.0, or why the nation needs a new operating system.

May 28

Posted by Dom in Culture, Democracy, Economy, Energy, Environment, Science, Society | 2 Comments

Today a guest post from Lee Bunce, a Green with a keen interest and academic expertise in the relationships between information, democracy and technology. 

Whitelee wind farm creative commons

Scotland is uniquely placed to take advantage of the new technologies that together will shape the future of our planet. It is both geographically and technically well-positioned to place itself at the forefront of  renewable energy and information technology. But to make the most of these new technologies it most avoid repeating old mistakes. Rather than handing the benefits, and profits, over to a handful of corporations Scotland should direct its efforts towards its communities.

Scotland’s renewable potential is well understood. It has some best resources in wind, wave and other renewable energy sources of any country in the world. Perhaps less appreciated is Scotland’s potential to be a leader in technology. Scotland’s ICT industry already directly employs around 40,000 people (according to ScotlandIS ), compared to 11,200 in its whisky industry for example, and its games industry in particular is thriving. Government support combined with access to a highly skilled workforce, as well as geographical advantages such as proximity to both the rest of Europe and America, and indeed its renewable energy sources, could help make Scotland a world leader in the field in much the same way that Iceland is to the north.

Development of these industries has so far been carried out along traditional corporate lines.  Scotland has hugely ambitious targets for renewable energy, aiming for 100% of Scotland’s electricity to be produced by renewables by 2020 . The majority of this energy will be produced by large scale top-down onshore wind projects, which largely means a continuation of the trend whereby the ‘Big Six’ energy companies provide around 99% of UK energy. The Scottish government meanwhile envisages  that around 500MW of this renewable capacity will be community owned, or just around 3% . It’s a start, but nowhere near ambitious enough. In Germany around 65% of its turbines and solar panels are community owned, and Scotland could aim even higher.

Community owned renewable energy comes with a number of benefits. It creates local jobs, keeps money circulating within local economies and builds community cohesion. Projects that are community owned are also more likely to be supported by the communities they serve, which is important at a time when resistance to wind-farms is prevalent. By taking a more ambitious approach to community energy, Scotland reap these benefits on an enormous scale.

Likewise, the way in which information technology works sometimes holds back innovation and progress due to commercial monopolisation. Technology is primarily about knowledge, in particular using knowledge for the benefit of society. Again, development in technology has so far followed the traditional route followed by the rest of the UK, whereby this knowledge economy is built on classic conceptions of private enterprise which commodify knowledge using stringent intellectual property legislation that restricts the use of knowledge and information to those who can afford to pay for it. Again, Scotland could benefit by adopting a more community based approach.

Community here means something different of course. It might mean online communities developing free and open source software that is available to all, or building useful applications based on free and open data. It might even mean communities of artists and musicians using information technologies to make their work freely available under ‘copyleft’  licences, or scientists sharing data and collaborating online. The benefits of adopting this ‘open’ philosophy could be substantial. Relaxing intellectually property laws could stimulate a boom in innovation in technology and beyond as ideas are able to freely spread and developers are able to build on the ideas that came before them.

Supporting free software and open data does not mean being anti-business, as is often claimed. It just means being rejecting business models that do not benefit society in favour of other models that do. Taking free software specifically, this might mean that instead of making a profit by selling expensive licenses to use software while keeping the source code hidden programmers can make money by offering their expertise as a service, providing support or bespoke modifications. The result is that the technological benefits can be spread far and wide (the classic example of this is the GNU/Linux operating system, though there are countless others).

Both these approaches towards new technologies, energy and IT, mean doing something quite different to the economic default.  They mean discarding policies and practices that benefit the few in favour of quite radical new ideas that can benefit the many. Given that the future of these technologies and industries will likely shape the future of Scotland, and indeed the planet, any method of distributing benefits as widely as possible deserve to be taken very seriously.

 

Lee is one of the two founding editors of the Edinburgh green journalism project POSTmag. The text published here is available for reproduction under a creative commons licence with attribution to the author.

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Two bald men fighting over a comb

May 16

Posted by James in Constitution, Energy | 5 Comments

Scotland has endured forty years of debate about North Sea oil – who owns it, how much is there, what is it worth, can we afford to burn it, can we afford not to, and so on. It’s been a totemic issue for the SNP, with their early successes in the 1970s built in no small part on the slogan “It’s Scotland’s Oil“. Some on the fringes even believe the marine border between Scotland and the rUK was changed prior to devolution to diminish the proportion that would indeed be Scottish in the event of independence (pro-tip: negotiations over independence won’t be trumped by a Westminster statutory instrument).

More recently, though, there’s been a flurry of excitement from the nationalist side about the reserves that remain and the value of them to a future independent Scotland. There are three problems with this.

First, the argument on increased value is based primarily on a massive (and entirely plausible) projected increase in the cost of oil. The stuff is, after all, finite and globally the more readily accessible portion of it has indeed been used. However, not only do all those revenues not just accrue to Scotland, given we don’t have a nationalised oil industry, as a nation we also use a substantial amount of it. As Chris Skrebowski of the Energy Institute put it in 2008:

Alex Salmond’s predictions are simply wrong. Even with optimistic assumptions about future North Sea oil production, and even if Scotland was allocated all of that production, an independent Scotland would be likely to be a net importer of oil by 2015 or 2016. By that stage, given the global decline in output which has already begun, we will have to buy oil on the open market for two or three times the current price. It’s completely fraudulent to suggest that Scotland can just live off its oil wealth now.

The extent to which high prices benefit us while we remain a net exporter can be debated (i.e. how much of the benefit accrues to the Treasury or a future Scottish exchequer), but as soon as we’re a net importer high prices only hurt us.

oil chartSecond, although Chris’s dates there may be a bit pessimistic, the trends on output are clear. I asked a friend in the oil industry for the 1980-2020 output figures, and the graph to the left shows them for both oil and gas in kboe/day (red is oil, green is gas). The projected rise and fall again between 2012 and 2020 is down to a few factors, notably a couple of new developments plus the closure of Schiehallion during 2014 and 2015 while they replace their FPSO, effectively postponing production there for two years.

The baseline for that graph is zero, too. You’ll hear a lot over the next few years about a boom as oil output goes up from 888kb/d last year to a projected 1,429kb/d in 2016. But it’s just a blip.

The bottom line is this – the glory days of North Sea oil are over, and there is no prospect of anything like the 1999 peak in output being repeated. Last year’s figure is less than a third of that peak, and the long-term trend is down.

The third problem is this. We can’t afford to burn it all, because of a little thing called climate change which the unGreen parties are broadly ignoring, and any valuation of the reserves that assumes we can afford to burn it risks another bubble and crash.

Scotland can afford to be independent, and we are energy-rich, but our true lasting assets are the wind, the wave and the tides, not the dinosaur wine. Arguments with Westminster about who should own the latter are an embarrassing distraction. Even the climate change sceptics should realise that the raw economics make it time to plan for a post-oil economy, to invest in public transport not endless new motorways, to turn planning around so local communities come before commuting, and to switch to supporting low-carbon industries.