Scotland has always overachieved in its higher education institutions. However, this tradition of excellence is at threat, as a culture of intolerance and stifling of free expression has taken over in universities, and across Scotland.
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On the 15th of September, Humza Yousef told the public that they should “think twice” before calling an ambulance. Only if it was “absolutely critical” were Scots to dare dialing 999. The Health Secretary’s comments came in response to the tragic news that a Glaswegian man of 65 had died after a 40 hour wait for an ambulance.
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Suzi Murning | Twitter
Suzi Murning is campaigns officer for a leading anti-poverty charity in Scotland. For Challenge Poverty Week, where organisations from across Scotland come together to demand action on solving poverty, she’s outlined 5 ways the Scottish Government can help end poverty. For more information read here: Challenge Poverty Week.
When you close your eyes and imagine the kind of Scotland you want to live in, what do you see? No doubt you are imagining a more equal Scotland, one where everyone, no matter their background, has the chance to live with dignity and to thrive, and one where our children’s lives are happy, healthy, and long.
When it comes to social justice, Scotland’s shared hopes and vision for our society is built on a convergence of moral values that we all bring to bear upon this vision: justice, equality, and compassion. Fundamentally, we all want a better Scotland.
This is the Scotland we see when we open our eyes: a society beset by poverty that disadvantages far too many of our fellow citizens, and inequality that intrenches this disadvantage.
One million people live in the grip of poverty, including a quarter of a million children. This moral failing is an affront to our shared values.
For those who find themselves trapped in poverty, the harm of this moral failure affects every aspect of their lives; their mental and physical health, educational attainment, employment prospects, relationships, and it robs them of the ability to enjoy a full and flourishing life.
There is no denying the impact of Conservative welfare policies in driving up poverty rates across the UK, including in Scotland, over the last decade, and that the planned cut to Universal Credit payments set to come into effect this week will sweep even more families into poverty. But the purview of justice, as it pertains to tackling poverty, falls over all Governments and institutions who have the power to do something about it.
The Scottish Government have full or significant powers over all areas of competency where the most impactful solutions to tackling poverty lie – housing, transport, childcare, economic development, education and skills, and enough scope on social security to input sufficient investment.
This creates a moral imperative to act, with urgency, to stem this rising tide of poverty. A majority of Scots agree: the Scottish Government can, and must, do more.
Here are five things the Scottish Government can do now that would help solve poverty in Scotland:
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Poverty in Scotland 2021 report this week confirms what we already know, that Scotland is not on course to meet its statutory interim targets to reduce child poverty rates in Scotland by 2024. In fact, we are wide off the mark, meaning that if we are to have a chance of meeting these targets we must act with increased ambition and at an increased pace.
The most effective and immediate way to make an impact on child poverty rates is though boosting family incomes. The Scottish Government’s commitment to double the Scottish Child Payment should be introduced immediately, and they then must immediately look into plans to the double it again to £40.
At the beginning of the pandemic, incomes fell furthest and fastest for those on the lowest wages, with young people being hit disproportionately hard. Unemployment in 16-24 year olds accounts for 57 percent of total fall in employment over the last year. The Scottish Government should examine the feasibility of a Scottish Public Sector Guarantee for every under 25-year-old without a job. Families where no one is in paid employment are most at risk of experiencing poverty, and this is especially true for lone-parent families, the majority of whom are women. The Scottish Government should increase funding for schemes like the Parental Employment Support Fund and Fair Start.
Scotland needs to do more make sure all parents who want to work are able to find decent employment, but we also must ensure that we remove barriers to employment. Providing 50 hours of free childcare to all low-income families with children under the age of 16 is an essential part of widening access to employment and tackling poverty in priority groups.
Housing is a huge driver of poverty in Scotland, with many families only falling below the poverty line because of high rents. One of the most impactful levers the Scottish Government can pull to help families meet the rising cost of living is by building more houses for social rent that provide safe, warm and affordable homes.
No one should be cut off from accessing vital services like health care, employment, education, or advice because they cannot afford the price of their bus fare. At a time when the cost of living is rising, making buses free for those on low incomes can open up opportunities, reduce inequalities, and help Scotland become a country where everyone has a pathway to realising their human rights.
All of these potentially life-changing policies can be enacted now by the Scottish Government. Sustained and implemented they would show that Scotland is truly committed to a better course for people and children in poverty. We don’t just have to close our eyes and dream of a better Scotland; with effort and resolve, we can also see it and live in it too. As we mark Challenge Poverty week, I hope Ministers and MSPs commit to doing so.
Gordon Hector | Twitter
Gordon Hector worked as Director of Policy and Strategy for the Scottish Conservatives. Before this, he worked for a hospital management company which ran elective and acute services across England. This included working as Head of Communications for an acute hospital trust. He now works on public services policy at Urban Foresight, a consultancy in Dundee.
The ambulance service crisis is dominating the news. But one thing is missing: ideas on how the Scottish Government should do better in response. Opposition parties, academics and the media are not as well-equipped as government to define policies to tackle crises, for the simple reason they know far less about what is going on. Others like unions or royal colleges are naturally involved in the front-line at moments of stress, rather than policy debates.
This means that in a crisis, we have often have little sense of what government should be doing. The tell-tale sign is usually one too many tweets from MSPs using the phrase ‘get a grip’. What is to be gripped? And by whom?
I’ve been in the room for a few minor public services crises and have written more than my fair share of ‘get a grip’ tweets, too. So to be a bit more constructive, here are 5 things that we should expect to see from Ministers in this kind of healthcare crisis.
Good managers in the NHS understand the financial implications of their choices; bad ones are penny-wise and pound-foolish. The last thing you want in a crisis is someone, good or bad, blocking an essential clinical move because they are unsure if they have the resources to do it – things like bringing in staff on overtime, speeding up procedures which are paid for by the item, or bringing in outside help. Central government needs to give confidence that the response will be supported, without permanently losing all financial control. This is what the £20m the Scottish Government announced for the ambulance response is trying to do, and it feels about the right level of short-term response.
Many NHS organisations use a crisis management structure called Gold-Silver-Bronze, which sets up a series of strategic, tactical and operational teams. They have clearly-understood rules on who does what.
This works. But the problem is that any NHS crisis is also a political crisis. So the NHS might have a structure, but Ministers will often not know how to interact with it. They can either lose all control by not assuming enough responsibility – or clog up decision-making with too much central control. Either extreme leads to failure.
People laughed at Dominic Cummings’ mission control-style bunker, but something like it is actually the right approach. The point is to create a forum for absolute, full-time political leadership with situational awareness and clarity of decision-making. If there isn’t a room at St Andrews House with a team of crack civil servants and the Cabinet Secretary, a big chart with the status of sites across Scotland, and clear communication channels and devolved responsibility to board-level leaders, something is wrong. If they’re doing it on Teams, we are doomed. Equally, if isn’t clear whether this is a crisis being led by the Health Secretary or the First Minister, then wires will inevitably become crossed.
The parallel, oddly, is the small decision-making teams that run elections. A good election campaign is an attempt to impose order on events by a small team who have complementary skills and a clearly-recognised decision-making structure. A politician should treat an NHS crisis with the intensity of a central campaigning team. Anything less will fail.
The critical concept in many healthcare services is flow: you want people to proceed smoothly and safely through their care, with the number of people turning up at the front roughly the same as the number of people leaving at the back.
This is a fragile balance of supply and demand. When it breaks, the ambulances start queuing.
The really big risk is a chain reaction: if things get really blocked up, then staff get exhausted. Sickness absence creeps up, and conditions which could be treated early become more serious. So delays get worse. So you lose more staff. And the whole thing starts to spiral. This sounds melodramatic, but the spectre that hangs behind every ‘NHS in crisis’ story is that one day, it could lead to a devastating domino effect across the system.
The priority is to stop that happening. So you relentlessly prioritise flow: getting people in, treated, and out. That can mean different things depending on where the block is: just now the critical shortage appears to be ambulance crews, so that means finding more paramedics and vehicles. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine suggests the issue is beds, too – so the board-level response is often to cancel elective care and use those beds for emergency care. For some hospitals, the priority could be to secure social care places for medically fit patients, so that no-one sits in A&E waiting for a ward bed to free up. The role of national politicians in all this is to take quick, dramatic action when a clear system-wide intervention is needed, such as bringing in the army, or creating significant new capacity.
There is no escaping that this is a game of grim trade-offs. Cancelling non-urgent care ruins someone else’s care and creates a longer-term backlog. And in the pandemic, the rush to discharge patients into care homes was a mistake.
But this is the awful reality of crisis management. You have to focus. It’s brutal: fix the flow, or risk a spiral. So that’s the priority, and we should judge ministers on their ability to make and explain these sorts of lose-lose decisions.
Why is this particular crisis so acute? It’s surely because staff are already exhausted. They’ve spent 18 months fighting the pandemic, and now the pressure is ramped up again. They have winter ahead of them.
It’s just unsustainable to keep people operating at this kind of a fever pitch. So a good leader doesn’t just increase pressure and then increase it again. They give their team a sense of progress, and find ways to reduce the sense of endless attrition.
The best clinical leader I’ve seen was positively Churchillian: not just issuing decisions but giving a story of what those decisions meant, and judging when to suggest the end of the beginning was dawning. They gave the crisis a narrative. That helped staff make sense of their experience and bound them to the collective response. They felt they were walking through the fire together, in the knowledge normal life would one day resume.
Again there is a tension between political and operational goals: a politician would be nuts to ever put a timeline on a crisis ending, or to go into full wartime oratory.
But between them, NHS leaders and Ministers need to communicate that this is not a one-way ratchet of ever-increasing pressure, but a struggle in which we will prevail. They have to give a sense that the end – or at least, some kind of end – is possible.
So when the end comes, what then? For staff, this is the moment to have some slack. For politicians it’s the moment to absolutely not have any slack, because their job is to work out how to prevent the next crisis. That’s best done with the momentum of recent events. A good Minister won’t just breath a sigh of relief when the headlines move on – they will get their civil servants to deconstruct what they’ve just lived through, and define whatever systemic problems need fixing. Most likely that’s a combination of staffing, funding, structures and long-term culture, and the test of a Minister is that there are signs of this kind of deep reflection even when there is no pressure from the media or opposition to do so.
None of this is easy but all of it is essential. Crises like this one are underpinned by long-term issues. They will keep happening until there is a clear articulation of a vision for the whole NHS which addresses those issues.
We do not have that vision just now. We are running on reactive mode.
And this frames the real choice: do the hard thinking and policy spade-work to define what the NHS is going to be in 10 or 20 years.
Or don’t, and relive the cycle of crises. They will get worse, and one day, it will be a tragedy at scale.
For Ministers this need to keep moving might sound relentless: no sooner have you got through a rough patch, but you need to be thinking big strategic thoughts.
But then relentless work is what we have asked of clinicians these past few years. Relentless stress is what patients are going through right now: everyone who needs an ambulance, or who’s just had their surgery cancelled.
So it’s probably the least we can ask of politicians: do the work. And stop this happening again.
Earlier this week, the Auditor General for Scotland Stephen Boyle wrote powerfully about the continuing gap between ambitious policy announcements and actual delivery on the ground in Scotland. On cue, we learned 24 hours later that the ambitious policy announcement by Nicola Sturgeon to create a new nationally run not-for-profit energy company had been scrapped.
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Ewan Gurr | Twitter
Ewan Gurr is a columnist for the Evening Telegraph. He established Dundee Foodbank and is the former head of The Trussell Trust in Scotland. Separately, Ewan is a non-executive director for Social Security Scotland and the Treasurer of Restore Scotland. This article is written in a personal capacity. You can read more from Ewan here.
In 2018, I was appointed to serve for three years as a non-executive director on the board of a Scottish Government agency and, alongside other public appointees, was sent to Victoria Quay for induction. On that autumnal afternoon, we were addressed by Kate Forbes, the then Deputy Finance Secretary. Miss Forbes presented what was, at that point, the current Programme for Government boldly titled: “A Nation with Ambition.” It was an optimistic prospectus for an entrepreneurial Scotland.
It is a somewhat subdued symptom of our times that our current programme is entitled: “Protecting Scotland, Renewing Scotland” The pandemic has both inflated the paternalism of our political leaders and diluted the potency of their vision. As a result, the current prospectus feels less optimistic and internationalist and more dispirited and protectionist. If ever we needed a fresh outward-looking and open-handed programme it is now but, instead, our government appears fatigued.
Last week, Holyrood politicians returned after summer recess and the 2021-2022 Programme for Government was postponed allowing Scottish Green and Scottish National Party members to vote on the cooperation agreement between their parties, which they both did with overwhelming support last weekend This week, we will see the publication of the Programme for Government. However, the document upon which this partnership hangs is an indication of the forthcoming trajectory of policy.
No matter how many may imply otherwise, this is a coalition which seals with vice-like durability the hegemony of power at the apex of Scottish politics. It also affords considerable strength when proposing policies set out in the legislative programme because the Scottish Government, in effect, commands a majority. However, using the spine of the 2017-2018 Programme for Government and employing its positive tone, I will set out an alternative vision from the one I suspect we will see this week.
The 2017-2018 programme opened with the headline: ‘Scotland, Europe and the Constitution’. Published only one year after the EU referendum, it portrayed a Scottish Government ill at ease with the outcome. It said: “The result of the EU referendum clearly demonstrates that the people of Scotland see their future as part of the EU.” The cooperation agreement also pledged to support “Scotland’s journey towards democratic renewal and independence in Europe.”
Despite the Green-SNP fascination with the constitution and belief that their partnership will accelerate progress towards IndyRef2, the unassailable political pundit and Herald columnist Brian Taylor recently wrote: “Does this deal bring a referendum measurably closer? The short answer is no.” An alternative Programme for Government would place constitutional questions down the list of priorities below a resolute focus upon areas in desperate need of competent governance.
Chapter one of the 2017-2018 programme projected “a futureproofed, hightech, low carbon economy.” The Green-SNP cooperation agreement went further by pledging £500 million toward the transition from oil and gas, £1.8 billion in energy efficiency and committed to marine environmental protection. These proposals, however, are neither consistent with historic promises to preserve oil and gas jobs nor the pursuit of EU entry, which would afford unfettered access to international fishing trawlers.
On this issue, even former SNP deputy leader Jim Sillars was scathing. He, in the Sunday Times, wrote: “If Scots don’t wake up – and that includes rejecting the ludicrous ‘climate emergency’ policy of the Scottish government – then we shall have the unique distinction in the developing world of being the only nation to discover oil and get poorer.” An alternative Programme for Government would place irrevocable value on the livelihoods of those working in our oil, gas and fishing industries.
Chapter two of the 2017-2018 programme declared that “improving the education and life chances of children and young people is the defining mission of this Government.” These words sound hauntingly akin to Nicola Sturgeon’s keynote speech to educators in 2015. She said: “Let me be clear – I want to be judged on this. If you are not, as First Minister, prepared to put your neck on the line on the education of our young people then what are you prepared to. It really matters.”
However, the report card is very clear – we are failing on education. The Scottish Government shelved its Education Bill after hurtling down the PISA rankings presided over an exams fiasco before announcing SQA’s dissolution and, without parental consultation, introduced contentious materials on sexual health and guidance on transgender pupils. An alternative Programme for Government would deliver root-and-branch education reform with teachers at the heart of that process.
Chapter three of the 2017-2018 programme sought to deliver “dignity, equality and human rights for all” and unique strides were made in Scotland in 2018. On social security, Social Security Scotland was established to preside over devolved welfare powers. On tackling poverty, the Child Poverty Bill was introduced, which set us on course towards the Scottish Child Payment. On land reform, the Land Commission was formed to progress goals set out in the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016.
However, under our very noses the dignity, equality and human rights of those in the grip of addiction were overlooked. In 2018, Scotland recorded another increase in alcohol deaths at a tally of 1,136 and a record number of drug deaths at 1,187 according to the National Records of Scotland. An alternative Programme for Government would bring those who have entered, experienced and exited addiction – the real experts – to the centre of policy-making on alcohol and drugs.
Chapter four of the 2017-2018 programme was entitled: “A Confident, Outward Looking Nation”. That confidence was conveyed in bills announced in the legislative framework, which the Scottish Government knew carried majority support on several issues such as climate change and organ and tissue donation. This same confidence does not exist now on issues like reform to the Gender Recognition Act nor assisted suicide, which is why a deal with the Scottish Greens is essential.
Both gender recognition reform and assisted suicide are divisive issues. Women’s rights campaigners believe reforms to the Gender Recognition Act have the potential to minimise the value of womanhood just as those concerned about assisted suicide believes it sets a disturbing precedent on the future value of life. An alternative Programme for Government would unashamedly uphold both the value of women as well as the value of life, in all its diverse and varied beauty.
This site has focussed over the last two weeks on radical ideas for next week’s Programme for Government. I’d like to focus less on specific policy proposals than on a wider issue – the absence of what might be deemed a guiding strategy for reform in Scotland
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Malcolm Offord
Malcolm Offord is Chairman of Badenoch and Co in Edinburgh, investing in Scottish manufacturing SMEs which pursue an export strategy called MISSA – made in Scotland sold abroad. He was born and educated in Greenock and read Law at Edinburgh University before departing to London for a 25 year career in the City. He returned to live in Edinburgh in 2014 and he stood as a list candidate for the Scottish Conservatives for the Lothian region in the Holyrood election of 2021.
We are living in extraordinary times. The fourth industrial revolution is hurtling towards us at break-neck speed with a fusion of advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, etc blurring the boundaries between the physical, digital and biological worlds. All happening at a time when the world has been turned upside down by a global pandemic, by Brexit, by escalating geopolitical tensions between US, China and Russia, and with climate change still posing the greatest threat to our planet.
I am a Trustee of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and, on our DofE expeditions, we were taught that the only way to quickly pitch a tent for shelter in a howling gale in Glen Etive was to focus on getting the first corner pegged down and then one by one the other three. We need shelter in Scotland, first to re-set, then to re-build after 14 years of maladministration by the SNP. The only way to level up is to focus on our four corners.
Let’s start by embracing digital, cognitive learning but in such a way as to embed knowledge into our students; from a very young age their brains are bombarded with information, we need to distil that information overload into knowledge. Therefore, each student must have access to a lap-top plus tutor and should be tested regularly and then streamed into academic or vocational pathways with both being valued equally highly. Those from homes where there is less parental support need extra supervision and, when schools do return, we need longer days, longer terms, comprehensive hot breakfast and lunch provision and lots of extra-curricular activities ranging from coding to volunteering.
This requires a revolution in the teaching profession not just in numbers but also in skill-set and philosophy to tailor a bespoke programme for each child in a wide diet of school activities ranging from the academic to the vocational to the pastoral to the extra-curricular. We must be more flexible and equitable in how we teach at the same time as refusing to compromise on high standards via thorough testing and respected qualifications in each activity alike. Our challenge is to prepare our children for a world of work where two thirds of the jobs are not yet invented.
Two Scottish entrepreneurs have expressed their frustration with our lack of imagination in education. In the TV program ‘Teaching Tom’ in 2016, Sir Tom Hunter concluded that we suffer from a ‘one size fits all’ approach and highlighted a need for better leadership and more open minds in Scotland to close the attainment gap. Lessons learned south of the border, where more than two thirds of state schools are now either a free school or academy, demonstrate that it is possible to achieve outstanding performance in poorer neighbourhoods. The best success is achieved where control is removed from the dead hand of the local authority and instead is undertaken by ambitious local governors who want the best for their local school and, therefore, are prepared to do things differently. The academy model has been fiercely resisted by teaching unions in Scotland but Sir Tom asks ‘if it works, why wouldn’t we try it?’
Meanwhile, Jim McColl created a monster (success) when he established Newlands Junior College in Glasgow in in 2014, a vocational school targeting the 20% cohort of our statutory school leavers who go NEET or worse still, get involved with crime, having struggled in mainstream education. 25 pupils per year aged between 14 and 16 were given active mentoring and vocational skill building and, in a five-year period, Newlands benefitted 125 vulnerable young people by improving their chances of achieving a positive destination from 25% to 75%. The cost of £15,000 is undoubtedly high against the average pupil state budget of £7,000 but surely this additional cost is more than offset by the benefit to society of converting probable welfare recipients into viable tax-payers and by the very substantial associated savings to the NHS and the criminal justice system? All too predictably, the SNP government refused to fund it any further so after five years so it closed in 2019; apparently, the concept of an ‘independent’ school receiving public money was too much for teaching unions and education officers to accept with local authorities fearing it could be a trail-blazer for ‘English style academies’. Really?
We need a revolution of innovation, leadership and imagination in education. This is OUR specialist subject. We should be ashamed that Scottish state school education has fallen behind England and Wales for the first time in history. One fifth of our statutory school leavers do not have positive destinations and the lifetime cost to them of this permanent wage scar is enormous as is the cost to the economy in terms of future welfare. Meanwhile, we have a quarter of a million children living in poverty in Scotland and a good education is their only route out. The attainment gap has only widened with the impact of COVID and this is a crisis which needs urgent governmental attention. We are letting down a whole generation of young Scots. No more socialist dogma. It’s time now to level up in Scotland with a world-class Universal Education Guarantee.
It’s time now to end unemployment once and for all. Countless studies show that young people who go NEET at 16 never recover their earning power and often become lifetime recipients of welfare, therefore, it is a rational economic decision for the state to get them into employment from the start. It’s always easier to get a new better job from an existing job and getting into the working habit needs to start young. Equally, unemployment does enormous damage to older workers who find themselves de-skilled as the digital revolution leaves them behind. Every UK citizen should have a life-time learning voucher which allows them back to college to up-skill or re-skill to allow them to switch jobs and sectors multiple times in a lifetime of work. We Scots have seen the damage done to working class communities and families caused by the deprivation which resulted from the de-industrialisation of Scotland in the Eighties, an unfortunate by-product of a free market economy. Margaret Thatcher was right that the state could not support unprofitable industries, but she was wrong in the state providing no parachute or Plan B for the workers.
SO, where are all these jobs going to come from? Growing our private sector once again will increase employment in Scotland BUT there is a lag effect whereby these new jobs will not kick in immediately. Therefore, the state should pick up the immediate slack in two ways:
It’s time now to level up in Scotland with a Universal Job Guarantee.
Surely, its time now to end the scourge of homelessness in Scotland? We have 51,365 homeless people including 15,711 children. This urgent need requires only 30,000 additional houses and then add an additional 70,000 homes required for social rent owing to an unaffordable private sector and because of our ageing population. Combined, this requirement is only 4% of our total households of 2.5m; an eminently achievable target which would cost £1bn per annum over 10 years. And yet the SNP Finance Minister in her recent budget quietly slipped through a cut of 16% in the Scottish government’s funding of its Affordable Housing Supply Programme reducing annual spend to just £700m. The SNP are not interested in levelling up in Scotland, only down. Its time now to level up in Scotland with a Universal Housing Guarantee.
Its time now to build out the infrastructure required to equip Scotland for the 21st century where we can live and work remotely, cut our carbon footprint and strengthen our communities by boosting our local amenities. The great myth of urban Britain is exposed by the statistics; urbanisation accounts for 10% in England, 4% in Wales, 3% in Northern Ireland and only 2% in Scotland. Combined, only 7% of the UK is built upon compared with 13% being woodland. 70% of Scots live in the central belt so the Glasgow-Edinburgh axis could easily become one joined up conurbation with high-speed rail and an electric M8. Reversing many of the Beeching cuts will bring community railways back into remoter regions (the Borders railway has been a major success) and major upgrades to an electric A9 plus northern railways linking Aberdeen to Inverness could significantly reduce journey times. Add in connectivity to England through HS2/3 and a tunnel from Scotland to Northern Ireland and you should be able to travel around both Scotland and the UK by train, bus or ferry with one simple Oyster card. Meanwhile, superfast broadband will be the saviour of local communities in this digital age. It’s time now to level up in Scotland with national broadband, efficient transport, vibrant local communities and a carbon-neutral economy by 2050 thereby creating a Universal Environmental Guarantee.
Henry Stannard
Henry Stannard works for the think tank Our Scottish Future on creating a positive case for devolution and co-operation within the UK.
The promise of what a devolved government within the Union can achieve has always drawn me most to Scottish politics. Scotland is a nation whose core values – solidarity, kindness, industriousness – shine more brightly and more clearly than most other nations in Europe. The powers that the Scottish Government has extend over most of the areas that impact people’s lives the most – total control over Scotland’s health and education systems, serious influence over the economy, and most of all the opportunity to ‘set the tone’ of a nation. And thanks to the Barnett Formula, it has a long-term guaranteed income stream with which to enact its priorities and experiment without being subject to the sometimes harsh judgement of the financial markets on small and indebted economies.
However, it is fair to say that over the last 10 years the dream of devolution – of a nation that consistently shows off to the rest of the UK and the world the benefit of policy-making with socially democratic values at its core – has been a massive disappointment. Comparing how Scotland entered and exited the 2020s, it is clear that devolved politics over the last decade has done little to improve the lives of most Scots: poverty and child poverty rates have risen, Scotland’s relative standing in international education league tables has fallen, the upwards trend in healthy life expectancy has started to reverse, and even notwithstanding the oil price crash economic growth has lagged the rest of the UK.
The recovery period of the next year – boosted by the bumper recovery budgets available from HM Treasury and still unspent Barnett consequentials from COVID rescue – gives the Scottish Government a huge opportunity to take a step forwards for the kind of country all Scots want to see: one that provides equal opportunity for all to participate in a growing economy, takes the lead on the green transition and fighting climate change, and gives dignity to its poor and its sick.
Based on the feedback we had from Scotland in a Zoom – our online conversation event with Yes and No voters earlier this year – there is one thing that people overwhelmingly want the Scottish government to focus on: building back a fairer society that seeks to address the rank inequalities in Scottish society made stark by COVID. With this in mind I would have five big policies for the next year.
Male babies born today in the most deprived areas of Scotland can expect 25 fewer years of healthy lives than those born in the least. Similarly, despite being the first minister’s ‘number one priority’ the attainment gap between the most well-off pupils and the least has continued to increase.
This is clearly not the fault of teachers, doctors, nurses and care workers. Fundamentally, hungry and cold children often have more immediate needs to fulfil than learning; and the stresses and working and living conditions of people in poverty have a far more detrimental impact on health than anything doctors might be able to prescribe.
It may sound glib, but in addition to all of the small pots of money going to help public services for people who live in poverty (£215m over the next year, using the benefits system to ensure that there are fewer people living in poverty in Scotland might just be the best and most direct way to close these gaps.
The much trailed (and still not done) doubling of the Child Poverty Payment is a start, but will reduce child poverty only by around 20%. Quadrupling it – at a cost of £300-400m it will almost eliminate it. Similarly, a disability payment – supported by Scottish Labour at the last election – will directly help households that we know are much more likely to live in poverty today.
Although the results will begin to pay for themselves over time, funding this initially will not be straightforward and will likely require confronting one of the sacred cows of Scottish politics – the cult of universalism. As my colleague Ross Newton so eloquently put it, the £300m we spend on free tuition fees (which disproportionately goes to kids from the upper two quintiles of household income) acts as a ‘cap on aspiration’ to the poor. Similarly, universally free personal care for pensioners with fixed incomes and assets is fundamentally unfair on our elderly struggling to get by on a low state pension, spreading the jam thinly and without enough thought to real need. A genuinely progressive society will see the obscenity that is Scotland’s drug death rate and declining healthy life expectancy and re-allocate resources from the rich to the poor to solve it.
Secondly, the Scottish economy can expect at best a bumpy recovery from COVID. Although we are in the midst of a consumer bounce at the moment, the high street is still gearing up for a ropey Q3 and a difficult 2022 when emergency coronavirus loans will need to start being repaid. The real risk is on our young people (including those on furlough), who enter a virtual jobs market that is not ready for them yet and fall prey to a cycle of poorly paid, low security jobs.
At the same time, all of Scotland’s public services – from forestry to oncology – have a huge amount of catching up to do, much of which is admin-heavy. There is not a public institution in Scotland that could not do with an extra pair of willing hands over the next year.
So for a year (initially) we can square the circle. We can offer a temporary job to everybody that wants one on living wage, staffed into the public sector (or potentially paying businesses in key sectors – particularly in the rural economy), with a day a week for training and jobseeking. This will have the impact of both keeping people in work, and raising the standards for everybody by providing a universal ‘floor’ on working conditions and pay.
Without ever being implemented, the Green New Deal is at risk of becoming passé in British politics. This would be a tragedy. Scotland has a huge proportion of European green energy in its land and off its shores, but most projects barely touch the sides of the economy, with equipment being fabricated elsewhere, put up once, and then maintained rarely.
It is not hard to imagine Scotland’s Green Energy industry – currently no more than land and a few engineers – becoming a lot more than this. But it needs properly channelled investment – both from the public sector directly (in skills and subsidies for new technologies) and in regulating the private sector (through procurement and licensing laws). There is no single body in Scotland with enough capital firepower and remit to do this.
So to get this done we need to wean ourselves off the current ways of doing industrial policy. There have been too many examples of seemingly bottomless pits of money being given away to shady characters purporting to protect heritage industries so that politicians do not have to confront the realities of the 21st Century Global Economy and Environment. Before you even get to ferries and airports, the story of Liberty Steel alone, where the Scottish Government behaved like the marks at a poker table, should be enough alone to have ended many careers. All these projects should be re-assessed and some cancelled.
Similarly a politics that seeks to demonstrate progress by ‘starting a commission’ rather than ‘actually doing anything’ has led to an alphabet soup of overlapping, underpowered, and unproductive Executive Non-Departmental Public Bodies (Quangos in old money), headed by well-paid and well-connected civil servants operating outside of democratic scrutiny. Many of these overlap with UK government bodies – in an area where policy and ambitions are almost entirely aligned, and levers to make improvements are shared. Taking a ‘zero-based’ view to these bodies, merging and closing many down, and finding ways to co-operate more formally with UK institutions could create some serious teams with proper money capable of investing now.
Finally, it is fair to say that according to most observers precisely none of Scotland’s political discourse for the last 7 years has been driven by the sorts of policy debate that Scotland Can is fostering this week. The constitution, and the ‘will they won’t they’ on referenda and re-referenda have dominated the agenda. By my count at least two of the parties have gone into the last three general elections and two Scottish elections talking about the constitution first and foremost.
This has led to bad politics and bad government. The Scottish Government has become an insurgent force in its own nation – proclaiming that the problems in Scotland are the responsibility of the UK government whilst refusing to co-operate fully on basic issues such as COVID testing and road-building. On the other hand much of the shrill, negative opposition comes across to average punters as a blaring siren crying wolf.
It is absolutely right that the future of Scotland as a nation is for the Scottish people and nobody else to decide. But that does not mean that every democratic event should be interpreted through the primary colours of constitutional politics. Similarly, it is entirely wrong that the timing, question, and preliminary requirements of a direct democratic exercise to determine Scotland’s future should be decided solely by the eventual winner of a decade-long electoral wrestling match.
Our Scotland in a Zoom sessions hinted at a definitively Middle Scotland answer to this conundrum. The settled opinion of most of our groups was that a referendum should only happen when a clear majority of Scots say they want one in the next couple of years, and when the key questions from both sides have been answered to the satisfaction of independent experts.
This would have enormous benefits both to committed Nationalists and Unionists – who, freed from the burden of fighting indirectly about whether to have a referendum could go and actually refine their cases and answer the questions that the last process failed to do – and most of all to Middle Scotland, who could finally get a day-to-day politics rooted firmly in delivery.
Alex Neil | Twitter
Alex Neil was a SNP regional list MSP for Central Scotland from 1999 until 2011, and for Airdrie and Shotts from 2011 until 2021, when he retired. He served as Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing from 2012 to 2014 and Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Communities and Pensioners’ Rights from 2014 to 2016.
The three biggest challenges facing Scotland today are how we are going to provide the high-quality jobs we need for tomorrow’s world, tackle climate change and deal with the endemic levels of poverty and deprivation suffered by so many of our people.
As an independence supporter I believe that Scotland would be much more able to deal with these issues as a sovereign state. But even in the most optimistic scenario, independence is some years away. We must therefore meantime make maximum use of the powers the Scottish Parliament already has if we are to make serious progress in the years ahead.
In my view, under successive administrations, the Scottish Parliament has been too timid and small ‘c’ conservative during its first 20 years. It needs to adopt a more ambitious and radical programme of action than hitherto if it is to fully live up to the aspirations the Scottish people have for our nation.
I have a long list of measures I would like the Scottish Parliament to take across a range of policy areas. For the purposes of this short article, I am going to focus on four which in my book are of the highest priority.
Our tax system needs to be radically overhauled to make it fairer and to incentivise people and businesses to invest in Scotland. We should abolish the council tax (which is totally unfair), business rates (which discourage business investment) and the Land and Buildings Transaction Tax (which is a very inefficient way to tax land and property.)
These three taxes should be replaced by two new taxes: a local services tax for both individuals and businesses, based on the principle of ability to pay; and a Danish style land value tax, which encourages investment and development and ensures that the community gets a fairer share of the increased value of land arising from public investments.
There is a dire shortage of housing throughout Scotland stretching across nearly every part of the country and every type of tenure. A much more ambitious housebuilding and repair and renovation programme is needed to meet the demand for housing as well as create many thousands of new jobs and apprenticeship opportunities in the construction industry.
The existing set-up of housing associations, local authorities and private sector developers does not have the required capacity to deliver the scale of housing investment needed in Scotland.
A new, dedicated Scottish National Housing Association is urgently needed to create enough capacity to massively expand the programme for new housebuilding, renovation and repair.
Such a body should operate at arms-length from the Scottish Government so it can take full advantage of the low-cost loan funding currently available for investment in new housing projects without being subject to the constraints of the Scottish Government’s borrowing limits.
The core remit of the SNHA should be to at least double the number of houses being built annually in Scotland, within the next few years. In so doing it should enhance the quality of new housing as well as introduce more choice for prospective tenants and buyers, in terms of location and funding; along similar lines to the national housing agency of Singapore.
Although there is much to commend in the Scottish education system, we should be honest enough to accept there is also much that needs sorted. We can only offer the best possible chance in life to our young people if we invest heavily in their education and schooling. Our aim should be to get Scottish education back up to the top of the world rankings for performance, standards and attainment.
The policy makers in government must listen to what the people involved in Scottish education are telling them, including teachers, parents and pupils as well as those who are experts in Scottish education and who are willing to talk truth to power.
We should also stop making education policy into a party-political football and instead try to build a cross party consensus on the best way forward.
Top priorities for action include:
A prerequisite to improving young people’s life chances is to close the attainment gap. To close the attainment gap, we need to do much more to reduce the unacceptably high levels of child poverty in Scotland. The most effective way to do that is to substantially increase the Scottish Child Payment as well as extend its eligibility; and to use the Scottish Parliament’s powers to increase Child Benefit for all recipients. This should be given top priority for funding, even if it involves cutting other Scottish programmes of lesser importance.
Despite not having “macro-economic powers” there is till much more the Scottish Government can do to stimulate the creation of new jobs in Scotland. Here are just a few examples:
Every Scottish Government since devolution has made improvements to the lives of people living in Scotland but not on the scale and breadth they could and should have done. All of them have significantly increased the centralisation of decision-making in the governance of Scotland. This has been detrimental, especially to our poorer and remoter communities and should be reversed.
A big dose of audacity and dynamism urgently needs to be injected into Scotland’s body politic. Otherwise our dreams will never come true.
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