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Lib Dem let-downs: too cheap to meter

Feb 19

Posted by James in Energy, Environment, Westminster | 7 Comments

atomictreeYou can set your watch by the Lib Dems. Every promise they make is worthless, and each one will be broken precisely at the moment at which it is tested (apart from on increased tax allowances, which are more regressive than might be thought). The latest is on nukes, predictably enough. In opposition they were against nuclear power altogether, but coalition changed that: the new line was yes to nukes, but without subsidies.

Even Cameron had been firmly set against subsidies: “We’ve taken the very clear view that there shouldn’t be subsidies, so if nuclear power stations can make their case in the market and be built, then they should be able to go ahead. That’s been our view for a long time. Our view has always been no subsidies, but if they can come forward as part of the energy mix then that’s fine.”

As the industry gradually retreated from the idea of new plants, with one eye on the chaos in Finland, the coalition clearly started to panic (can you hear Sir Humphrey warning about the lights going out?), and today we find out that, as predicted, the taxpayer will indeed be forced to pay for these white elephants.

The apparent aim is to keep the cost of nuclear power stable just below £100 per megawatt hour by concealing the fact that the cost is above that. It must seem quite cunning to divide the cost between energy consumers and taxpayers, who are, after all, largely the same people. Worse, that same piece confirms we’ll be locked into this absurd subsidy for up to 40 years. If the actual price of nuclear generation falls, as the enthusiasts think and the industry claims, this move would mean we’d just be handing over even more money to EDF. This isn’t a market. A true free market would never build nuclear plants: the entire economic justification of these new stations to shareholders will be based on our money.

To be fair, a true free market wouldn’t be building offshore wind just now either: it currently costs around £140 per megawatt hour. But then generating from renewables has another purpose: decarbonising our power system, and the costs of offshore wind are falling. The Crown Estate looked at the numbers, and by 2020, which ain’t far away, the costs of offshore will come below £100 per megawatt hour, and it doesn’t come with the massive decommissioning and waste disposal costs that a new nuclear fleet would bring (costs that would be borne by the taxpayer, natch).

The scale’s comparable too: offshore wind isn’t niche. That same paper notes that licences for 10GW-worth have already been granted, just in Scottish waters. That’s a ninth of the UK’s energy requirements (and about 100% of Scotland’s needs).

This decision, therefore, is pure ideology, not anything approaching rational either on economic or environmental grounds. Yet again, anyone who expects principled consistency or even pragmatic flexibility from the Lib Dems has just been disappointed. The only two things they’re consistent on are a love of Ministerial office at all costs and an ability to abandon principle the moment it comes under pressure.

The Ambivalence Referendum

Feb 18

Posted by Jeff in Democracy | 4 Comments

‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’ was a political slogan that promised much and delivered little back in the 70s. Like a dry seabed, constant drilling of this message into the Scottish population yielded scant returns for yesteryear’s SNP.

There could be any number of reasons for this but my own view is that Scots don’t like to be seen to be too greedy, irrespective of how rightful a claim either legally or morally they may have over the UK’s particular spoils or how desperate their situation may be.

Today, we are still in the grip of an economic crisis but the regularly heralded ‘mansion tax’ continues to hold sway with the Scottish population for much the same reasons as to why ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’ failed to hit home. Similarly, ‘Tax the rich’ has been a Socialist slogan for decades but it has yielded precious few political returns as a result. Even the poorest of Scots don’t want to be a burden, even to the wealthiest of our fellow citizens. That’s noble, but it’s not going to right our country’s many wrongs any time soon.

It seems clear that Robin Hood or even generally redistributive taxes don’t have the power over the working classes that they could, and do in other countries. This may explain why Scotland on Sunday’s Kenny Farquharson was having a rare time teasing SNP activists into coming up with any genuinely redistributive policies that the SNP Government had put forward since 2007. (Tesco Tax and the minimum wage were the only two that I could think of). Indeed, the one party that had a pointedly redistributive manifesto at the 2011 Holyrood election was the Greens and they were unable to withstand the Nationalist landslide, save for a lowly two MSPs.

This is problematic for Yes Scotland for two reasons, and particularly for those arguing passionately that an independent Scotland would be a fairer, more socially democratic, more Scandinavian type of place to live.

(1) there is little evidence that they can point to in the recent past of concrete steps that have been taken to close the inequality gap here in Scotland. Holyrood’s powers may be limited, but it’s easy to get the impression that Scotland would be ‘business as usual’ either side of a referendum victory in the absence of radical change to point to

(2) the lofty promises of a future better nation post-referendum (which I fully buy into) are not being heeded by those who would arguably benefit the most, seemingly due to a resistance to take the power, the resources and the money that could transfom inequality and truly tackle poverty. The stirring, desperate call for a mansion tax are not emanating from deepest, darkest Glasgow and the Cs and Ds certainly continue to turn their noses up at the option of independence.

Thankfully, there is another way to go, and it involves ignoring the Scottish carrot and reacting to the UK stick. Using Westminster decisions that are incongruent with an independent Scotland against them could turn opinion more quickly and more significantly than hazy and seemingly unseemly plans to soak the upper classes. After all, the three biggest protests north of the border have revolved around the poll tax, the Iraq War and Trident, all Westminster policies, all deeply unpopular in Scotland.

This is where the bedroom tax comes in, the badly thought through punishment of those who are struggling the most across the UK in order to save a mere £500m. The Scottish Government is against it, the Scottish people are against it and 82% of Scottish MPs are against it. It is precisely the type of misstep that a Tory-led Government can make that might light the Saltire blue touch paper this side of the referendum.

Scotland’s many have-nots weren’t moved by the promise of riches from North Sea oil, and they won’t be again. They were however moved by a poll tax that directed unfairness at the very heart of Scotland’s weakest.

My main concern is whether enough Scots will be bothered. A UK poll at the weekend contained a hidden warning for Yes Scotland in the regional breakdown. Despite 6% of Scots believing that David Cameron was doing “very well” as PM and only 2% believing Ed Miliband was doing very well as Opposition leader, the region that had the most Don’t Knows in question after question from the EU through horsemeat scandal to the welfare state was Scotland, often by quite a margin.

If Don’t Knows can be read across as Don’t Cares, I don’t see how Scotland will be roused into taking or objecting to anything over the next couple of years, at precisely the time when there is the most to gain if they do so.

Jumping into bed with the Swedes

Feb 15

Posted by Dom in Culture, Economy, Education, Energy, Environment, Europe, Gender, Holyrood, Ideology, International | 8 Comments

Shetland's hybrid Scots-Scandinavian flag

Shetland: Already halfway there

There have, in the past week, been a few noteworthy articles regarding the Scandinavian shadow which looms large over the issue of Scottish independence, as well as the future and makeup of Scotland’s economy, welfare system and society more generally.

Now I write this as somebody who knows a fair deal more about Scandinavia than most, for both personal and professional reasons.  A colleague of mine in the Greens remarked that the next Scottish Green manifesto should just be called ‘Scandinavian Nirvana’, such is the appetite in the party for increased welfare, greater social freedoms, gender equality and local democracy. I wholeheartedly agree.

Which brings me to something said by Blair McDougall in a BBC interview on the independence referendum. He accuses his opposite number in the Yes campaign, the significantly more articulate and less hackish Blair Jenkins, of wanting ‘57 per cent tax like in Norway’. There are indeed people in Norway paying that much tax, but these kind of people are not the salt of the earth working men and women which McDougall thinks will be crushed by the weight of Kaiser Salmond’s iron taxation, if he did indeed have such plans.

Then there was a report in The Economist which made the odd logical step of collating the radical reforms by centre-right governments in Sweden and formerly in Denmark with the high living standards and safe economies of the Nordic countries. As the Swedish journalist Katrin Kielos noted, there is an awful schizophrenia about the new craze for the Nordic centre-right, in that it assumes that being Scandinavian is a virtue in itself and argues that the path forward for these secure and durable systems is to follow a more British or American model . It is a trend which wishes to dine on the fruits of the Scandinavian countries’ labour whilst seeking to undermine it at its foundations.

The whole thing is illustrative of the fact that there is a huge amount of ignorance about the way in which Scandinavian society functions, and that this ignorance can be used to significant political advantage. It is also debatable to what extent it is even appropriate to address the Nordic countries as a single unit. There are however certain things which underpin  ‘the Scandinavian model’ which Scotland would have to adopt were it to develop in such a direction.

The first is a strict ethos of universalism. Not all services are free in Sweden or its neighbours, but notable by its absence is the incredibly British notion of selective assistance. Britain seems to implicitly accept that there should be huge gaps in income between different levels of society, and that one of the roles of public welfare is to alleviate this. It is a mode of thinking which the New Labour project perfected with its targeted alleviation, support for bright pupils from state schools and university access bursaries, without ever tackling the structural causes of poverty and discrimination.

Secondly, the way in which Scandinavian trade unions work is different to the British model. The nostalgia for the 1970s which pervades much of Britain’s left ignores the fact that old British models of trade-unionism were what allowed public support for the radical reforms of the 1980s. The systems of collective bargaining employed in Sweden and relatively high levels of unionisation amongst what might be termed normal people means that it is both destigmatised and can claim to represent large portions of the population.  This system has come under attack from centre-right governments in recent years but has survived relatively intact. The Scandinavian countries do not have a legal minimum wage, but they do have an effective minimum wage proportionally higher than Scotland, leading to a reduction in income inequality before the tax system has even played its redistributive  role.

And once tax is collected, where does it go? Not into benefits as they might be normally understood, but rather into the provision of universal services.  Childcare, incredibly well funded education systems, transport and infrastructure and healthcare.  The biggest challenge to Scotland is whether it is possible to transfer to this type of system given the appalling disparity evident in the country and present. It is in the interests of every Scottish woman to vote for a scenario which will provide the funding and structures for them to work and live on the same terms as men (and from a male feminist perspective, in men’s interest too).

Now to return to Blair McDougall and his mythical 57 per cent tax rate, I would say that it would only become an issue when you earn as much money as a senior press adviser or an MP.  Having large tax reserves means that in times of crisis governments are able to effectively deal with them, unlike the British model of medium taxation on an out of control financial system without any thought as to the after effects.

So to be realistic, adopting a Scandinavian social model would involve higher rates of tax, but it would also involve higher wages and better public services. In real terms incomes might well be higher, or at least remain static whilst providing for higher levels of public investment.

The whole thing is also dependent on a grand narrative. People vote for things because they believe in their viability, and the Scandinavian system is underpinned by a notion of functional redistribution different from the dominant discourse in Britain, and even in Scotland. It isn’t about smashing the rich or shooting bankers at dawn, but rather about building a cohesive society which works in the interest of all. As Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg says, “to create we must share, and to share we must create.”

David Leask’s excellent ‘As Others See Us’ column in the Herald, in which a group of Norwegians were asked for their opinion on independence, was revealing. The lack of interest in Scotland’s constitutional future was unsurprising – I frequently find myself explaining to Swedes the ins and outs of the independence movement – as Scotland is not politically visible. The Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter  recently published a feature on Europe’s contemporary independence movements which mentioned Scotland in the same breath as the Northern League in Italy and Flemish separatism in Belgium, entirely ignoring the broadly leftist motivations found in the majority of pro-independence groups and parties in Scotland. The challenge will be to explicitly build the construction of a sustainable and humane welfare state into the Scottish cultural narrative at home and abroad.

Neither would we or should we transform Scotland into Scandinavia overnight. When talking with a good friend of mine about how I hoped to live in a Scotland where I felt the state and society treated me and any potential wife/partner equally she smiled wryly and wished me good luck, with some justification. But that isn’t to say that we shouldn’t try. I answered that to combine the best aspects of Scotland and Sweden would create something beautiful, but that it would require the type of radical social change not seen since the 1960s. It would be a national project which larger countries would be entirely incapable of, but which might just work in Scotland. Scandinavia might be a fluid concept with many faces, but the values which it ostensibly represents are what we should really be aiming for. Both financially and morally, we cannot afford not to.

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“… and Trumped it there with an ace.”

Feb 14

Posted by James in Democracy, Environment, Local government | Comments off

Trump hair“…The Saint took up the pace,
And drove it clean to the putting green and trumped it there with an ace.”
– from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Famous Ballad Of The Jubilee Cup

As reported here some months ago, there’s been a petition in the offing to Holyrood’s Public Petitions Committee, one covering the Trump affair and calling for a public inquiry into the way relations with the Trump Organisation were handled by local and national government.

The petition has finally been posted today on the 38 Degrees site, and you can sign it here. The Parliament’s rules say all valid petitions will be considered, even ones with just one name on them, but a few hundred signatures here would certainly help.

One of the virtues everyone should be able to expect from government at all levels is fairness and equal treatment. You should be entitled to expect that everyone is playing by the same rules, and that those rules should be consistently enforced. Since the Trump saga began in 2005, as covered in Ant Baxter’s film You’ve Been Trumped, local residents in Menie do not appear to have received this kind of fairness from Scottish Ministers or Aberdeenshire Council. And as Quiller-Couch’s Jubilee Cup illustrates, things quickly get out of hand if the rules for a single game are not followed.

The residents, Councillor Ford’s committee, the environmental objectors: they were playing “Planning” according to the official rules as published. Mr Trump and Scottish officialdom, on the other hand, appear to have been playing some other game behind the scenes: perhaps “Beggar Thy Neighbour”, or “Rich Man, Poor Man“. Either way, it’s just not cricket. Please do sign here. Disclaimer: I helped David Milne with the petition text.

Stop Insulting The World

Feb 14

Posted by Guest Blog in Holyrood | 25 Comments

We are delighted to host a second guest post from North East SNP MSP and Holyrood Health and Sport Committee member Mark McDonald.
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Back in the 1970s, while suppressing the McCrone report, the parties who now make up the No campaign told Scotland that it would be as poor as Bangladesh if it voted to become independent.

Withholding the true extent of Scotland’s potential oil wealth to construct a narrative of a nation incapable of running its own affairs was insulting to Scotland then, and it persists now.

But the comparison was also an insult to Bangladesh, and her people. By using another nation to construct a negative narrative, you are by definition looking down on that nation, sneering at it if you will. There is no doubt Bangladesh faces serious problems of poverty, but I would be willing to bet that her people are still fiercely proud of their independence, and would view an attack on their nation’s integrity in a very dim light.

And yet this contemptuous attitude to other members of the community of nations continues unabated from those opposed to Scotland taking her own path. The desire to undermine the cause of Scottish independence appears to be so overpowering that diplomatic niceties go out the window.

This weekend, the No campaign, with little concern for the UK’s relationships with other nations, made Denmark the target in a bizarre quote from a UK coalition source, when trying to explain why Scotland’s interests were best served as part of the UK in Europe:

“At these European summits, you see all the key players moving around, the French, the Germans and the British. But where are the Danish? They’re nowhere. It’s not that Denmark is not significant, but it’s not as important as these other nations, simply because of its size.”

I suppose the UK Government won’t be banking on any support from the Danes in European negotiations any time soon.

Over the last few years Ireland and Iceland have taken the brunt of the anti-independence campaign’s international insult offensive. The gleeful use of the ‘Arc of Insolvency’, coined by smug anti-independence politicians in 2008 – despite the fact that the UK was somewhat goosed at the time as well, and that those self same anti-independence politicians were in part responsible for the UK’s plight – hardly helped international relations. Now while Ireland and Iceland may well have faced significant difficulties, we know that they went through those difficult times as independent nations, and are recovering well as independent nations. How galling for them it must have been to look to their near neighbour, the UK, with whom they might have expected to find some solidarity in the face of financial adversity, to instead be faced with politicians laughing at them and calling them names in order to achieve some form of political one-upmanship in their own constitutional debate.

This behaviour appears regularly at First Minister’s Questions where we have seen Iain Gray and Johann Lamont stand up and openly do down other nations for the sake of trying to undermine the arguments for independence. From Namibia to Montenegro, Ireland to Togo nations are brought up to draw an unflattering comparison. In the unlikely situation that Johann Lamont becomes First Minister, imagine her first meeting with the Namibian ambassador: “Hello ambassador, your country’s a bit rubbish isn’t it?”

You see, this is the crux of it all. I don’t want Scotland to be independent because I think we are better than any other nation, or because we are bigger or richer than any other nation – which is essentially the narrative being cultivated by the No campaign in all of the examples above – I want Scotland to be independent because we are just as good as any other nation.

I want us to take our seat at the EU top table, alongside the Danes and the Irish, and any other nation the No campaign wishes to insult. We may not have size on our side, but it isn’t about how loud you shout, it’s about what you say.

I want to sit at the UN and make common cause in pursuit of international peace and tackling poverty and inequality with nations like Bangladesh, Namibia and Togo, because I believe an independent Scotland can be a force for good in the world. Togo, in fact, was one of the rotational members of the Security Council in 2012-13.

And above all else, I want to see a Scotland where we make our own decisions, on the issues that matter to our people. Just like every single one of those nations the No campaign look down their noses at.

To paraphrase Winnie Ewing – Stop insulting the world, Scotland wants to get on.