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Independence? Show me the money

Dec 6

Posted by Jeff in Constitution, Economy | 37 Comments

It was never meant to be this way.

What if Mel McGibson had marshalled the troops at Stirling Bridge and tried a different type of inspiring rhetoric:

‘Imagine yourselves lying in your deathbeds, many years from now. Would you trade in all the days from this one to that, to stand here and fight, to say to your enemy that you may take our lives, but you will never take our £500!’. I don’t know if Scots had short arms and long sporrans back then, but it doesn’t exactly get my patriotic juices flowing.

Amidst this whimsy I am referring of course to the poll news yesterday (commissioned by the Scottish Government, curiously) that 32% of Scots are in favour of independence but 65% would vote Yes if Scotland proved to be £500 a year better off. I know times are tough but that’s a rather tawdry way to go about choosing your constitutional destiny, is it not? That said, I do wonder what the result would have been if the dangling trinket was 500 Euros rather than pounds. Isn’t it SNP policy to take us into the Euro before too long? I’m just saying…

Anyway, it will be a bit sad if this is what the next few years are going to come down to, a contest over who can convince Scots who they’d have more money with as their Government. It’s like some sort of unseemly Tesco vs Co-op price war. I can just see Salmond and Cameron jostling for position at Fort Kinnaird giving out clubcards. I understand that people are struggling to make ends meet and the prospect of more money in the wallet each month is appealing but noone really knows with any degree of certainty how much better/worse off Scotland would be after independence so what we end up with is all sides just yanking each other around, and the public seems to not only be caught in the middle, but falling for it gooing ga-ga over the shiniest entreatment before them.

I’m often disappointed at the idea that the richest in the UK have to be placated with financial incentives to stay here so if Scots were also seen to be selling their future to the highest bidder, that would be doubly depressing, triply depressing infact as this poll result will inevitably open to the door to more scare stories about how Scotland will be a basketcase of ah place if it goes it alone.

I suppose I should guard against being too cynical. After all, my personal belief is that Scotland will be better off as an independent country, albeit partially off the back of a foolhardy strategy surrounding its oil revenues and despite seemingly shunning the sensible option of a separate Scottish currency. Either way, would I be voting No if I thought Scotland would be worse off if independent? I like to hope not, I like to think that this choice runs deeper than the pound signs (or Euro signs) that are seemingly flashing in front of our eyes.

The prospect of building a new country in the mould of what Scots envisage a country should be, distinct from (but not separate to) the rest of the UK and Europe at large, is a tantalising prospect, an adventure that we can all tell the next generation(s) about and trust them to continue. I genuinely love the idea of a Scottish call to arms, a clarion call to Scots across the world to come ‘home’ and help build something special. It is a message built on emotion, on romance, on ambition. It is not a message that is built on creaming a few extra hundred quid for yourself.

Not that the SNP should be castigated if they do opt to tap into the strategy of promising more money for all after independence, it has to give the people what they want to get by, that’s how democratic politics works after all. Let’s be honest, a win is a win and, come the referendum, there isn’t really such a thing as winning ugly. The game is ensuring that your objective is appealing to the majority of the public, irrespective of how base their instincts may be. There is also a realism that has to be faced here; how many countries have chosen independence from a larger country and faced a poorer future? I am thinking of South Sudan, of UAE, of Norway. Plenty of oil, plenty of profit and plenty of people voting in favour of secession. Is that really so bad?

Either way, I remain hopeful that Scots can in time dig a little deeper and harden their opinion on the matter one way or the other. Voting Yes doesn’t come with a money-back guarantee, it is a decision taken for richer or poorer, so maybe we should take the £ signs out of the debate a bit more.

Build it, (keep it free), and they will come

Dec 5

Posted by Kirsty in Culture | 2 Comments

With the gorgeously revamped Scottish National Portrait Gallery just reopening its doors to the public, the end of 2011 sees Scotland with four flagship cultural projects successfully completed. The Scottish Government’s support for culture, given its spending on three of these four projects, should be celebrated, but government must not lose sight of how the arts can truly make a difference amongst all the new bricks and mortar.

Although open to the public from 1 December 2010, the launch of the four great cultural capital projects started officially on 21 January 2011 with Makar Liz Lochhead opening the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway. This was followed by the Riverside Museum in June, the National Museum of Scotland in July and rounded off with the Scottish National Portrait Gallery last week.

Scottish Government funding and support, together with fundraising and Heritage Lottery Fund grants, was crucial for three out of the four projects. The National Trust for Scotland received £8.6 million from Scottish Government towards the £21m Robert Burns Museum. The National Museum of Scotland and Scottish National Portrait Gallery, each holding National Collections, received £16m and £7.1m respectively from Scottish Government.

The Riverside was the exception for central government funding, given the collection is held by Culture and Sport Glasgow. The £74m funding for the glorious Zaha Hadid venue was raised from Glasgow City Council, the Heritage Lottery Fund and a fundraising appeal.

Such commitment to culture in a time of austerity indicates the Scottish Government recognises the importance the arts can contribute to both Scotland’s economic and wider wellbeing. And while the economy is still likely to dip further, this has to be a commitment with cannot be cut, either in creating or revamping new venues and also in making sure people can access them after opening.

Arts and culture are central to Scotland’s success as a tourist destination. Unlike festivals and events, museums and galleries can cater for visitors all year round, driving international tourism to us. The return on investment for culture spending is huge: an independent report estimated the reopening of National Museums Scotland’s museum on Chambers Street would contribute £3 to the Scottish economy for every £1 invested by Scottish Government.

And while each of the four capital projects has an essential ‘Scottishness’ as its theme, exhibitions like the stories of wandering adventurers in the National Museum’s World Cultures galleries and the Pakistani tales and faces in ‘Migration Stories’ in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery will inspire learning and broaden horizons.

This week also marks a decade since free admission to English national museums was implemented by then Labour Culture Secretary Chris Smith. Over those ten years, even institutions which did not charge previously, like the Tate and the British Museum, have seen a significant rise in visitor numbers since 2001.

The National Museum of Scotland, the Riverside Museum and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery are free for anyone to enjoy, and they must remain that way.  Maurice Davies, Head of Policy at the Museums Association, warned Scottish museums and galleries in 2010 that reintroducing entry charges would be a false economy, because charging admission would slash visitor numbers, thus increasing the level of public expenditure per visitor.

The Scottish Government has already committed more funds to further major Scottish cultural capital projects – the Battle of Bannockburn Visitor Centre, the V&A at Dundee, and revamps of Glasgow’s Theatre Royal and the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. Each of these future projects are vital, whether for the Royal Scottish National Orchestra to have a proper home, or for Dundee to gain some much needed Guggenheim-esque revitalisation on the banks of the Tay. But the Scottish Government must continue to heed the warnings of Maurice Davies and not permit institutions under its auspices, especially those displaying National Collections, to introduce entry charges.

To my secular brain, museums and galleries are what cathedrals were to the medieval mind: glorious living monuments that celebrate the best of humankind in science, or art, or history, or culture. Scotland has some of the world’s greatest collections here, owned by its people. Our government should spend to make sure those collections are housed in the very best of spaces, and it can never forget that its people have every right to see these treasures for free.

Follow the money

Dec 4

Posted by Aidan in Holyrood | 26 Comments

Picture by Pete Prodoehl

The Electoral Commission has published the full breakdown of election spending for the Holyrood elections.

The first thing that reading the returns showed me was the terrible handwriting endemic throughout the people responsible, and I write as a dysgraphic well used to trying to decipher my own scrawl.

The second thing was how, despite clear instructions to the contrary, some parties (cough) filled in the pence rather than rounding up to the nearest pound. The 5 main parties are summarised in the table below:

Party Lib Dems % Tories % Greens % Labour % SNP %
Broadcasts 4558 2.59 5088 1.86 7630 5.76 46235 5.66 71961 6.30
Advertising and publicity material 8441 4.79 664 0.24 10698 8.08 115985 14.20 294601 25.80
Unsolicited material 104274 59.15 200150 73.19 73872 55.77 545745 66.81 405728 35.54
Manifesto 1972 1.12 4062 1.49 2665 2.01 9147 1.12 14067 1.23
Market Research / Canvassing 20680 11.73 1434 0.52 1860 1.40 32623 3.99 201613 17.66
Media 73 0.04 1922 0.70 14123 10.66 6153 0.75 32269 2.83
Transport 10530 5.97 10475 3.83 980 0.74 16798 2.06 34957 3.06
Rallies and other events 1936 1.10 1783 0.65 193 0.15 19695 2.41 20689 1.81
Overheads and general administration 23836 13.52 47884 17.51 20770 15.68 24503 3.00 65777 5.76
Total 176300 100.00 273462 100.00 132463 100.25 816888 100.00 1141662 100.00

What was really interesting was the different patterns in each party. The Tories and the Lib Dems didn’t really bother with print advertising or broadcasts, focussing  on unsolicited material. The Greens spent a fair chunk on media, much more proportionally than any other party and more in absolute terms than anybody other than the SNP.

The biggest difference, to my eye, is the huge importance the SNP put on market research / canvassing. From the invoices the much vaunted (and equally envied) iPhone app cost them £8k, which in the scheme of things is buttons and must surely represent one of the best value investments in the history of campaigning?

They seem to have employed a number of people through recruitment agencies on low wages (you don’t get much as a temp from the agency when the client’s paying £10/hour) for thousands of hours for “telemarketing” and “customer service” throughout the campaign working at an SNP National Call Centre in their Edinburgh HQ. Combined with the invoices for  for polling work and research running from February the impression given is that there was a huge phone operation running for months both getting their message out and measuring how it was working. There’s also 1000 hours from First Opinion and BSS invoice for 47 thousand contacts on polling day itself which point to a massive get out the vote drive run from Edinburgh.

Labour, on the other hand, ran 16 focus groups, 4 of which were in Edinburgh and Glasgow through Red Circle Communications. That’s it. There’s an invoice from Leftfield Communication for 6 focus groups held in Wales but I think we can assume that’s been misclassified and one from the Labour Party in England from January.

The party spent a huge amount on on bumpf and had no idea if it was working. None at all. Now, that was pretty clear from my vantage point of shoving it through folks letter boxes but I’d assumed there’d at least been some polling done before it went out. Nope. There was volunteer phone canvassing going on but that was for voting intention and there’s no way that that constitutes useful data about what is or isn’t working.

Labour seems to have been flying blind, intent on being heard as much as possible and with no idea about whether what it was saying was in any way effective, why it was effective or how a different message would play. The line that Labour was “micro-targeting key groups” doesn’t really stand up, but nice try.

I  still maintain that the difference in available cash played a part in the SNPs victory, but there’s no denying that the scale of Labours defeat in May was somewhat self inflicted. You just can’t shout into a void.

Freeing Scotland’s Slaves

Nov 30

Posted by Kirsty in Crime, Sport | 16 Comments

A key feature of the Scottish Enlightenment was the critique and opposition to the practice of slavery.  While in the eighteenth century many Scottish emigrants to the Caribbean and West Indies found themselves exposed to the realities of slave labour on plantations, back home an intellectual movement grew and developed and campaigned until slavery was abolished.

Or so they thought. Modern day slavery in the form of human trafficking is still there on Scottish doorsteps. But just as in the eighteenth century, it should be Scotland’s mission again to rid our country and then the world of this heinous violation of human rights.

An Inquiry into Human Trafficking in Scotland, headed by leading QC Baroness Helena Kennedy and carried out by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, was published in Edinburgh this week. Kennedy makes 10 recommendations for Scotland to pioneer a new approach to the problem, and to introduce these measures prior to the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

Kennedy’s calls comes on the back of Scotland’s first successful prosecution under the UK’s new anti-trafficking laws, with two sex traffickers jailed for a total of almost five years in November for arranging travel, accommodation and advertising for 14 women who worked as prostitutes.  However, this compares with almost 150 similar prosecutions in England and Wales. Phil Taylor, head of the UK Border Agency in Scotland, conceded in June that the length of time taken to investigate cases means too few are brought to court.

The main call in Kennedy’s inquiry is for a victim centred approach, with better systematic sharing of information and intelligence about cases, as well as a new Scottish act specifically to target the crime.

While any human who is trafficked and forced to labour undergoes a horrendous experience, Kennedy notes especially that women trafficked into the sex trade undergo “the most prevalent and pernicious manifestation of human enslavement”.

The estimate, widely reported in the UK press, that 40,000 women were sex trafficked into Germany for the 2006 World Cup seems to have no reliable source; nonetheless such sporting events are paramount to raising awareness and ensuring prevention of the prostitution of vulnerable women.

In London, anti-trafficking charities, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Met and the GLA  are working together to combat trafficking prior to the 2012 Olympics. If Scotland is going to be the leader in ridding the world of human trafficking, it is critical that the 10 recommendations in Kennedy’s inquiry are implemented prior to 2014.  Not just because of a fear, like in the 2006 World Cup case, that trafficking only becomes a problem because of sporting events, but because this a heinous crime which is all around us, at all times.

We should use the celebration of nationhood and sport and togetherness that the Commonwealth Games brings to recognise our essential humanity, and to find ways to treat human beings as that, not as chattels to be traded and used.

November Rain

Nov 29

Posted by Aidan in Holyrood | 14 Comments

Photo by Alex E. Proimos

And when your fears subside
And shadows still remain
I know that you can love me
When there’s no one left to blame

George Osborne’s Autumn Statement started with a familiar refrain – all our growth problems are due to sovereign debt problems in Europe. If there’s a recession it’s due to the Euro crisis. Never mind that growth’s been flat since this government’s economic policies started to take effect.

Then there was a couple of minutes of blaming the profligacy of the last Labour government – profligacy he of course supported as Shadow Chancellor.

Lead in done, we get to the meat of the matter. OBR projects growth down to 0.7% in 2012, for the whole year, borrowing up. But it’s ok, because our bond yields are low and that means low mortgage rates. Which somewhat ignores the fact there’s very little linkage now between government bond prices and mortgage rates.

There’s an extension of the public sector pay freeze limiting rises to 1% per year for 2 years after the freeze ending which I’m sure is in no way intended to pour oil on the troubled waters of tomorrow’s strikes, ahead of hiding behind John Hutton and blaming the Unions for damaging the economy.

Overseas aid target of 0.7% of GDP has gone from a target to a limit which, given lower GDP, means DFiD will be getting a budget cut. Large parts of the working tax credits program have been frozen, which is effectively a 5% cut, although he did baulk at freezing benefits.

There’s £40bn worth of “credit easing” using money from the largely unused business asset purchase facility at the Bank of England to offer loan guarantees to small businesses – those with turnover of less than £50m, funnelled through existing banks based on how they increase net and gross lending. Depending on the details this could basically be a bung to the banks to take further risks.

The heavily trailed return of right-to-buy is in there, with a 50% discount on prices. While the leaks floated a rule that councils would be able to use the money to build new houses this doesn’t seem to have been mentioned in the speech – whether this is a good thing or a bad thing rather depends on the detail. Might just prop up the inflated housing bubble a bit more though.

The Lib Dems’ £5bn in capital spending has gotten in, with £1bn going on Network Rail, expect them to seize on that as a “coalition benefit” while ignoring the rest of this.

There’s a big £20bn sized lump of pension fund capital being used to build various infrastructure projects and, somewhat bizarrely, a £50/year cut in bills for customers of South West water – aimed at the Lib Dem constituencies round there? That of course isn’t new money, it’s existing investment that’s being used for a more interventionist government policy. Quite an odd thing for a Conservative chancellor to do. There’s also a big increase in capital allowances for the North of England, which is good – and it would be good if Holyrood could do the same.

Bit of chipping away at employment rights, ‘elf and safety – profits, not people, and planning laws – nothing says “Conservative” like ripping down historic buildings.

Corporation tax  and income tax for start up investors will be cut, though again no detail. The red book (the detailed document describing what all this actually means) will be very interesting. There’s normally quite a few hidden things in there that alter the headline meaning. Nick Robinson:” From April 2012, anyone investing up to £100,000 in a new start-up business will be eligible for income tax relief of 50%. In 2012, any tax on capital gains invested in such businesses will also be waived.”

OBR predicts unemployment hitting 8.7% next year and by 2015 it’ll only fall to 6.2% which is kind of horrific. There’s going to be a raft of supply side measures to prepare people for jobs that aren’t there, and if they can’t take a job that isn’t there then they’ll be forced into subsidised jobs for companies. Fuel duty’s cut, school investment up.

And, like all the best songs, he closes with a callback to the start – Euro crisis and the mess we inherited. DIMBLEKLAXON.

The big news, of course, is that the UK government won’t eliminate the deficit by 2015. Unsurprising given the damage they’re doing to the economy, a key part of that was always to get GDP up.

And it’s hard to hold a candle
In the cold November rain