Do More, Tax More – and Scrap the Unfair Council Tax

Aveek Bhattacharya | Twitter

Aveek Bhattacharya is Chief Economist at the Social Market Foundation, a cross-party think tank. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, comparing education policy in Scotland and England.

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The key to any good piece of utopianism, in fiction or political writing, is to clearly establish the ground rules. Which constraints do we keep in place, and which do we imagine away? Here are the parameters I am setting myself for this fantasy programme for government: I cannot take on any powers that the devolved administration does not already have and I cannot spend unlimited money. The coming years are going to be extremely challenging for the Scottish Government, facing growing demands and restricted funding from Westminster. I suspect the proposals I am making here will stretch the Budget, but hopefully not too far.

What makes this a fantasy is that I am not going to worry too much about political feasibility and implementation. The Scotland I envisage is one with a bigger state that does more to protect and support its citizens, and takes more in taxes in return. That may turn out to be a hard sell, and it will certainly take more than the single year a programme for government is meant to cover, but those are not my problems for now. 

‘Building back better’ – recovering from the COVID-19 crisis and using what we have learned to develop a better society – should be central to the programme for government. I would start with mental health. It was heartening to see the topic receive such attention during the election campaign, as one of the most significant things government can do to affect people’s wellbeing. Waiting times are too long, and there is evidence of a spike in rates of depression and anxiety during the pandemic, which seems to have persisted through 2021. This needs a substantial response, and I would favour the guarantee of some form of support even for those with mild to moderate issues within six weeks proposed by the Mental Health Foundation Scotland. 

Education will also be central to the pandemic recovery. While the terms ‘catch up’ and ‘learning loss’ are controversial, it is clear that young people have been significantly disadvantaged by the disruption to their lives and schooling. The Westminster government has rightly been criticised for its “feeble” response, leading to the resignation of education recovery commissioner Kevan Collins, but at least he was hired in the first place. Planned catch up spending in Scotland is of a similar magnitude to England, but barely a tenth of the amount committed in countries like the US and Netherlands. I would commission an independent assessment of school needs (perhaps led by Collins, if we feel like being mischievous), as was initially done in England, but actually follow its recommendations in allocating resources in the months and years to come. 

Unfortunately, even with the best possible efforts, schools are unlikely to protect every child from damage to their life prospects. A universal job and training guarantee, rolled out initially to young people but extended to the whole working population could mitigate economic ‘scarring’ from the crisis. By ensuring every person is entitled to a minimally decent job, through public subsidy or direct government employment, it would avoid harmful lengthy spells of unemployment and give workers an alternative to the worst insecure and exploitative jobs. This should be part of a broader effort to support and promote adult education and training: the Scottish Government should significantly increase the scale of its Individual Training Accounts (currently worth £200 a year) to be closer to the £9,000 allowance proposed by the Independent Commission on Lifelong Learning.

Another major educational issue exposed by the pandemic are the limitations of our school qualifications system. The chaos and dissatisfaction that have accompanied the last two sets of National and Higher results have shed light on the pressures and inequities of the way we do assessments: three sets of qualifications squeezed into three years, assessed largely through high-stakes exams that encourage teaching to the test. Worse still, this approach largely contradicts the approach to learning and assessment the Curriculum for Excellence tries to promote up to the age of 15. Those curriculum reforms were launched on the back of an impressive consultative process – the 2002 “national debate on education” – in which 20,000 people are estimated to have participated. The Scottish Government should build on that history by convening a citizens’ assembly to consider the appropriate objectives of school assessments and qualifications, and how best to achieve them. A randomly selected group should be presented with evidence and expert testimony reflecting different perspectives on the issue and encouraged to debate them in order to reach some degree of consensus. 

The government’s openness to deliberative and participatory democracy is admirable, and has the potential to increase people’s engagement and sense of empowerment from politics while ensuring the public debate is better informed by expertise. It has already gathered one citizens’ assembly with an open-ended brief to provide a vision for Scotland’s future, and the SNP manifesto promised more in the coming parliament. The tricky thing – as France is learning from its climate assembly – is ensuring that these initiatives lead to action and do not just end up as talking shops. Hopefully tasking the citizens’ assembly to tackle as specific and pressing a topic as school qualifications will lead to clear recommendations, which the government should be compelled to respond to, if not adopt in full. If that experiment goes well, it should be the model for addressing other contentious and/or technical policy issues, such as social care or criminal justice reform. 

This parliament should also be an opportunity to accelerate progress towards the target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. The jobs and training initiatives outlined above should contribute to building green infrastructure, such as electric vehicle charging points, decarbonising heating for homes and buildings and cycle routes. The Government should also raise taxes on activities that are bad for the environment, with higher (not lower as initially proposed) air departure tax and a move to road pricing. 

Those policies will raise some revenue, but to help pay for the stronger safety net and more generous public services I envisage, the Scottish Government should seek to reform property taxes, from which it raises proportionately less than its counterparts in England and Wales. House price rises have increased household wealth by £10,000 per person in Scotland over the course of the pandemic and that windfall ought to be shared with those that face struggles emerging from the crisis. While not quite as bad as other parts of the UK, Scottish council tax is regressive and outdated. Moreover, the commercial property tax regime – business rates – creates inefficiencies and disincentivises investment. Both are ripe for change, and in an ideal world I would seek to integrate them into a single land value tax, removing the distortions they cause. As the name suggests, this would tax people according to the estimated value of the land they own, rather than the value of the buildings that sit on top of it. That should encourage people to use land more effectively according to its best purpose. It will also increase taxes on those owning large properties in more expensive (and therefore affluent) parts of the country. 

The fact that this already feels like an extremely ambitious programme for government despite that fact I have not even mentioned economic productivity, welfare, drugs, alcohol, obesity, the prison population, childcare or housing highlights the scale of the challenge facing the Scottish Government. There is a lot to do and limited time and resources to do it with. We can only wish them luck.

A Call to Action: What Scotland can do to support Afghan Refugees

Evie Robertson | Twitter

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I look across Scotland and I see freedom. Freedom for children, young girls to learn. Freedom for people of all genders, ethnicities, sexual orientation to work, earn a living, socialise. Freedom from persecution. Equal rights. The chance of a future and a say in what that holds.

It is something we all, to an extent, take for granted – whatever your politics.  A luxury of birth-place, of living in a liberal society. 

The situation in Afghanistan today reveals how truly lucky we are.

As a young woman in the UK, the events of the last week have invoked a personal sense of despair – and anger – for our sisters and brothers in Afghanistan. For a young generation, with hopes, aspirations and a belief in equality much like myself and my friends, whose futures now lie uncertain, facing life under a repressive regime for the first time in their lives. Hard-earned rights their parents’ generation and that before them fought for, lost in a matter of days… to a regime where your gender will determine your ability to be seen, be heard, be educated. A regime with a record of innocent slaughter and ‘scorched earth’ in the name of the caliphate. A regime with a record of implementing a ferocious interpretation of Sharia law. 

In the coming days and weeks, the record and legacy of British and American intervention in Afghanistan will be analysed and debated. Many people across Scotland, across the UK, will feel the same sense of helplessness that I feel watching these events unfold. Yet, as the political dissection occurs before us, there are things we can do. Supporting humanitarian relief, children’s and women’s rights charity campaigns for one. But we can go further, calling upon our government to lead by example, and fulfil its moral obligation and stated intention to welcome, support and accept more than 20,000 refugees and asylum seekers from Afghanistan that the UK government has pledged, as well as those from other conflict and crisis torn nations. To support a small but significant proportion of the 82.4 million people worldwide who were forcibly displaced as of the end of 2020,  6 million of these Afghani. And in doing so, provide an offer of a different future for those who have lost – or stand to lose – so much. The usual political rhetoric and hollow promises will not be enough. 

The UK’s track record on accepting and welcoming refugees and asylum seekers is far worse than our European neighbours. In 2020, the UK received 36,041 asylum applications, just a quarter of those Germany received, and a third of those of France. Despite being the 2nd richest country in terms of GDP in Europe, we received only the 5th largest number of applications – and only the 17th largest intake when measured on a per capita basis. And whilst British government point to their Syrian Settlement programme, an additional programme outside the usual asylum application route, as an example of British support and a model for Afghan resettlement, the programme has failed to provide the levels of support we have capacity for – just 20,319 refugees since 2015, at a time when Germany has accepted 560,000, Sweden over 100,000. With Afghanistan we must at least meet our fair share – it is our responsibility to do so. 

So what is the role that Scotland should play in supporting Afghani refugees?

In the last week we have seen Nicola Sturgeon calling upon the government to urge the Home Secretary to ‘lead by example’ and ‘take a humane and welcoming approach’ to accepting more refugees. Immigration is of course a reserved matter for Westminster – though refugee integration remains devolved. The SNP have cited its record of resettling a fifth of all the resettled Syrians in Scotland by 2019 as an example of their track record – an admirable record one cannot deny.

Yet in the same breath, recent immigration and asylum seeker issues have not been all welcoming and ‘smooth sailing’ across Scotland. Our same leader last year defended Glasgow City Council’s ban on accepting asylum seekers as part of the UK Government’s asylum seekers’ dispersal programme. A ban that could last a further 2 years. A ban that meant Scotland no longer currently partakes in the scheme, given Glasgow was the sole council to offer support. The blame was focused on the inadequate housing outsourced provider Mears put in place, and leveraged towards the Home Office for financing – yet no solution was advocated for by Scottish government. Nicola Sturgeon instead focused on the narrative that we cannot criticise the Council when ‘it’s not a problem of its own making’. 

The question here then is not Scottish Government’s willingness to support the refugees, but its capacity to do so, and how the Government intends to step up and support the Councils, who have the responsibility for resettling the refugees. These Councils are struggling to meet the needs of current asylum levels, failing to provide and deliver services – let alone having the capacity to welcome the mass influx of Afghan refugees we must support. 

So then how do we ensure we support the Councils? How do we ensure we have the sufficient facilities – from GP surgeries to schools – to meet demand? And how do we encourage not one or two councils, but all across Scotland, to take on refugee families?

Funding inevitably is the first hurdle. Local councils receive funding from central government to take in refugees to cover the costs of accommodation, translation, administration and support. The Syrian model saw councils claiming £8250 per person from the government in the first year, decreasing over time to £1000 by year five. However council leaders estimated at the time that this only covered 70-80% of the cost of housing refugees – a cost that needs to be plugged. Given Scottish Local Authorities receive 85% of their funding from a block grant from Scottish government, it is up to Scottish Government to ensure that any funding shortfalls are provided for and ringfenced, with conditions over acceptance over a minimum number of refugees to receive. Ensuring additional funding to fill this gap is vital given the funding deficits the councils face given the pandemic and Brexit. Every council must stand ready to receive refugees. 

Supporting the councils in the adequate provision of services and housing is the next. The Councils, Scottish and the UK Government must work together to ensure that the providers chosen for the contracts are fit to operate, identify and support needs, manage community cohesion and work with Local Authorities for integration in the community. Sufficient monitoring and contingency plans must be put in place to signpost any inadequacies early so the people do not bear the brunt of any issues with contract delivery – the exact opposite of last year’s situation in Glasgow. All parties must accept their role and responsibility in ensuring this monitoring and delivery.

Finally, Scottish Government must continue to support refugee community integration, by increasing funding for integration in proportion to new arrivals, and dealing with issues such as social isolation, media portrayal, multiculturalism, employment, educational attainment, social service uptake and security. The timely, and welcome announcement this week that refugee projects have been awarded £2.8 million by Scottish government – for schemes such as employment and training support, work certification in construction for Arabic speakers, English learning and improve mental health – is a great start, but we must continue to build on such schemes. For instance, we must commit to supporting and providing every new refugee with a job guarantee once their application is accepted, and ensure we overcome employment barriers such as recognition of qualification and skills matching, as well as providing them with access and knowledge of health and education services available to support them.

Inevitably, Scottish and UK government cannot act in silo here. To fulfil its moral duty to support the most in need Afghan citizens we need collaboration. Collaboration over funding, collaboration over support offered to both refugees themselves and to the councils and providers, and an aligned strategy for integration. We need both governments to work in tandem to ensure that we not just deliver, but over-deliver in our capacity to open our arms and hearts to the refugees. Never has such cooperation been more critical. 

Scotland and the UK do not have to let the legacy of the last 20 years go up in smoke with the gunfire across Afghanistan. There is still time to recover and work together to help those most in need. But this can only be achieved with willingness, open-hearts and cooperation for delivery. The people of Afghanistan need to be at the heart of what comes next. 

A Government Cap on Aspiration

Scotland is a nation of romantics. We have always taken pride and pleasure in our nations stories and myths. However, there is danger in delving too deep into the pool of mythology, of becoming too intoxicated by our own self-proclaimed values that we lose sight of both evidence and the modern world. That is what has happened in the debate around free tuition in Scotland.

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A Town in Scotland

There’s a town in Scotland that most of us prefer to ignore. It’s bigger than Ayr or Inverness and contains nothing but poor people, most of whom don’t have jobs. The adults’ health is terrible: in the last couple of years, nearly one in twenty of them has died. Tens of thousands of children live there too, and every stage of their lives, from conception to adulthood, is damaged as a result.

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Millions on Middle Class Freebies – While Drug Services Are Cut. Is Scotland Really a Progressive Society?

An image of blue pills in the shape of a map of Scotland, overlaid on a larger grey map of Scotland on a dark grey background

Susan Dalgety | @DalgetySusan

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There’s not a single politician in Scotland who does not profess to be angry or ashamed at the shocking level of our nation’s drug deaths, the worst in Europe and three-and-a-half times higher than the rest of the UK.

On the day it was revealed that a further 1,339 Scots died last year, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said it was “unacceptable” and each death was “a human tragedy.” Leader of the Scottish Tories, Douglas Ross, slammed the statistics as a “stain on Scotland,” and Scottish Labour’s Anas Sarwar insisted that the annual toll, devasting as it was, should not be the wake-up call, “the daily deaths should be.”

Sarwar is right. Every day in Scotland, three or four people die of the effects of street drug misuse. They die from a lethal cocktail of drugs, taken over years, that can include heroin, benzodiazepines (street Valium, or ‘blues’), alcohol and methadone, the legal heroin substitute prescribed to supposedly keep addicts safe. But these are not the underlying cause of their premature deaths. It is poverty and alienation that kills them.

The data shows that if you live in the poorest areas of Scotland, you are 18 times more likely to die from drug misuse than your peers in more affluent neighbourhoods. Scotland’s drug epidemic mostly infects people who are already suffering from the effects of insecure employment, poor nutrition, sub-standard housing, inadequate schooling. Their addiction to the quick thrill of street drugs is their response to a life devoid of hope.

The level of drug deaths is not the only barometer of how poverty destroys lives in Scotland’s poorest communities. The latest data from the Scottish government shows that the gap in healthy life expectancy at birth between the most and least deprived areas is 25.1 years for males and 21.5 years for females. This may not have been surprising in 1921. In 2021, it is simply not acceptable.

Scotland is a very rich nation. It is part of the fifth largest economy in the world. It boasts the world’s first public education system, and was the laboratory for some of humanity’s most important inventions and discoveries, from penicillin to television. Today it is home to a global finance industry, cutting-edge life sciences, and has 19 universities attracting nearly 40 per cent of Scotland’s school leavers annually. And the Scottish government has, every year, 30 per cent more cash to spend on public services than England, thanks to the Barnett Formula. 

The immediate response to Scotland’s drugs crisis is, rightly, to demand better treatment and support facilities for the 60,000 people with a drug problem, and if that means the Scottish government making different spending choices, then so be it. Free prescriptions for all, even those with healthy bank accounts, may resonate with voters at election time, but is it the best prescription for better public health? The Scottish government spent £57 million on free paracetamol alone between 2011 and 2018, yet in 2015, Scotland’s Alcohol and Drug Partnerships saw their central government funding cut by £15 million, with health boards expected to make up the difference. 

Scotland has to decide what kind of country it wants to be. It is not enough to boast, as the Scottish government’s National Performance Framework does, that “We are a society which treats all our people with kindness, dignity and compassion.” We have to bring these slogans to life. 

That means investing in those communities that need the most public support. The government happily subsidises the university tuition fees of middle-class school leavers while slashing frontline council services, essential to the wellbeing of children in our most deprived communities. 

A teenager’s drug addiction does not start at fifteen with his first handful of ‘blues’ washed down with tooth-rotting cider. Its roots are in his mother’s poverty, his grandfather’s unemployment, his own struggle with literacy and numeracy. 

Our national focus should be on supporting those children most at risk, from birth to eighteen. There are many examples of interventions that work. Labour’s Sure Start programme, which was area-based and well-resourced, is just one. Nesta, the UK innovation agency, has made this work with children its priority. “Our mission is to narrow the outcome gap between young children growing up in disadvantage and the national average,” writes Adam Lang, head of Nesta in Scotland, on its website.  

And the Scottish government’s Best Start grant for babies is, well, a start. But collectively we can – must – do better. If that means, for example, a graduate tax for those privileged enough to get a degree so that national resources can be invested in children who need life-saving support, then surely that is the mark of a just nation.  

It’s too late for the 1,339 Scots who died needlessly last year, but if we stop wringing our hands and start facing up to the inequality that divides our country, then we can nurture the next generation of Scots so that they all grow up safe and respected, irrespective of their family income or postcode.

Finding a Glimmer of Hope

Blue and white drug pills on a purple and grey background

This video by the charity Change Grow Live gives Carl, a former heroin and crack addict, a chance to tell his own story of recovery. It’s worth watching as Scotland reflects again on the enormous human cost drug addiction.

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Solve the drugs crisis? Listen to the ‘Real Experts’

Ewan Gurr | Twitter

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Reflecting Upon Drug Deaths

It is that time of year again. Today, the drug death statistics for Scotland will be released. The media will clamour for comment and politicians will line up responses to meet print deadlines. By contrast, those working in deprived communities to combat the consequences of substance misuse, families mourning the lives of loved ones lost on the altar of addiction or even those carrying scars while on the journey towards recovery, there will be another set of emotions altogether. 

For many, this time of year is not one for pontification but for reflection. Late today, I, alongside others who work in this area, will take part in a memorial service on Buchanan Street organised by Glasgow-based charity, FAVOR UK. Many of those who plan to gather work at the coalface or are on their own path towards wholeness. There will inevitably be a sombre tone as we consider those whose lives have been squandered within a framework where adequate support is desperately limited.    

A Public Health Emergency

In the latter half of 2019, following the news of 1,187 recorded lives lost to drugs in 2018, the Scottish Government finally buckled to public pressure and described the situation for what it was – a public health emergency. Since then, we have observed how quickly, and with laudable coordination, the Scottish Government can deploy its resources and support in response to a pandemic but voices from the frontline have drawn attention to another pandemic taking place for many years in Scotland.  

The number of deaths rose again last year to 1,264 and, at the epicentre of the figures was my home city of Dundee, where Scotland’s then Minister for Public Health was based. Finally, drug deaths entered into mainstream public and political discourse. Growing up in Dundee, I was always aware of the presence of poverty and the reasons underpinning that poverty but our political leaders in 2019, rather than taking a period of sober reflection, started grasping for solutions and answers.

National Records of Scotland, Drug-related deaths in Scotland in 2019 

Meaningful Solutions for Dundee?

Following the release of the figures last year, the Scottish Government pledged £20 million of funding to “help tackle the drugs emergency” in its Programme for Government but those resources were deployed to the very services Dundee Drugs Commission described a few months earlier as not fit for purpose. The Commission stated: “We learned about inadequacies in our local systems and services [and] frequently heard from individuals and families who feel the system has failed them.”

Decriminalisation may disempower illegal drug dealers but if the result empowers a kind of legal drug dealing run by pharmaceutical services, who have a vested financial interest in the ongoing prescription of substitute drugs, then we are no further forward. Furthermore, many still on the journey of recovery tell me they have concerns about using a safe injection room. One friend said: “Who do you know that buys a half bottle and drinks it in front of the owner of the off licence?”

Meaningful Solutions for Scotland?

Credit where credit is due, the Scottish Conservatives have engaged the voluntary sector and published its Right to Recovery Bill. The principles state any individual seeking addiction or substance misuse treatment should be able to quickly access it, and not be refused, unless a medical professional deems it would be harmful to the individual. If they do, the specified professional will be required to provide a written explanation detailing the grounds of refusal within 24 hours.

If I had a pound for every time I heard plans for a bill about enhancing people’s rights in Scotland, I would be able to comfortably retire. Currently, there are plans for a right to food, a right to assisted death and now a right to recovery that creates more statutory levers. I am not convinced arming the state with more power to implement rights in a year which has seen some of the most authoritarian legislation in peacetime is a credible approach but, nevertheless, it is a welcome contribution. 

Lived and Learned Experience

Like many young people growing up in Dundee, I have had a turbulent relationship with class A drugs. Two years ago, I was sitting in a room with Leslie Evans, the Permanent Secretary to the Scottish Government, who engaged with individuals and organisations in Dundee. I raised my concern about the Government-convened Drug Death Task Force which, at the time, had an absence of people with experience of addiction situated on it. Evans said she shared – and raised – similar concerns.   

We need to utilise both lived and learned experience but the lack of interaction with those experiencing addiction, on the journey of recovery or having overcome addiction is fundamental to our current failure. How can we administer an antidote to address an ailment we have not fully understood? In Dundee, the two major links to addiction I have consistently observed over the last 15 years are adverse childhood experiences and lack of purpose. My affliction was acquainted with the latter.

Between Addiction and Abuse

The link between abuse and addiction in Dundee, however, is deeper. I remember my first encounter with Narcotics Anonymous in the Hilltown in Dundee and it was not only my first meeting but also Caroline’s. She was a glamorous, middle-class redhead in her late-twenties and married with a six-year-old daughter. However, she had been raped by a paedophile aged only four and, unable to shake flashbacks, she self-medicated via the use of heroin at the age of 26. 

Her husband did not know how to help Caroline but when she failed to pick up her daughter from school or was under the influence when she did and teachers alerted the Social Work Department, he became seriously concerned. Unable to cope with the enormity of her spiralling addiction and concerned for his daughter, he threw Caroline out. She came to the foodbank I was running months later and told me she was prostituting herself five times a night. A year later, she was dead. Overdose. 

From Margins to Mainstream

Following the Second World War, investments made by the World Bank to promote poverty reduction and stimulate economic growth yielded successful results in developed nations but less successful results in developing nations. To understand why, the World Bank decided in 1990 to engage in a decade-long piece of research to consult people experiencing poverty, whom they later described as “the real experts”. The result, 10 years later, was one of the most ground-breaking reports on poverty. 

The Scottish Government already has a precedent for these types of approach, as evidenced by Social Security Scotland and The Promise Scotland. Both organisations gleaned input from those with experience of social security and the care system to develop policy. People who have entered, experienced and exited addiction are equally crucial to policy around treatment for substance misuse but, even now, these voices are situated on the margins rather than being brought into the mainstream. 

When we change this then, and only then, can we change the narrative on drug deaths. 

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.

Scotland and Malawi can Show Modern Britain the Way

Susan Dalgety | @DalgetySusan

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When Malawi-born artist Professor Samson Kambula first discussed submitting his statue ‘Antelope’ as a contender for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, he said it was considered a bit of a “wild card’. 

His work, depicting Malawi freedom fighter and pan-Africanist John Chilembwe, who led a 1915 rebellion against his country’s British colonial masters, was not considered to be a serious contender for the prestigious spot. “It was before George Floyd’s death, and before Black Lives Matter became mainstream”, he told the BBC World Service recently. 

But the national conversation about Britain’s colonial past has intensified recently, and Kambula’s wild card has just proved a resounding winner with the British public. The man who was executed for leading an armed resistance against representatives of the British Empire will now stand proudly at the very heart of Britain’s establishment from next year. 

Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said Kambula’s work would shine “a spotlight on important issues that our society continues to face, and…will spark debate and interest at home and abroad.” And The Scotland Malawi Partnership – the organisation that co-ordinates Scotland’s many links with Malawi – warmly welcomed Professor Kambula’s success, describing his work as a powerful, practical and constructive expression of the Black Lives Matter movement.  

The story of Chilembwe is a familiar one to many Scots. In 2005, the then First Minister Jack McConnell pushed the devolution settlement to its limits when he announced a bilateral co-operation agreement between the governments of Malawi and Scotland, building on links that stretched back to Dr David Livingstone. 

The relationship between Scots and Malawians began in 1859, with the warm welcome extended to David Livingstone and his companions when he entered what is now Malawi for the first time.

The challenge posed by the United Nations Millennium Development Goals was taken up in Scotland in the late 1990s by David Livingstone’s alma mater the University of Strathclyde when, in partnership with Bell College, they launched their Malawi Millennium Project.

The Scotland Malawi Partnership was officially launched in April 2004, and in 2005, the Scottish Government published Scotland’s first international development strategy, with a particular focus on the relationship between Scotland and Malawi. That same year, the historic Co-operation Agreement between the governments of Scotland and Malawi was signed. 

Today 46% of Scots personally know someone with a connection to Malawi. This is now one of the world’s strongest bilateral civic links.

This new approach to international development, one that was rooted in people-to-people links and focused on only one country in the global south, was not universally welcomed. On the eve of President Mutharika’s visit to Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon took to the airwaves to criticise McConnell’s decision to host Malawi’s head of state, citing reports of corruption as her main concern. 

Others queried the legitimacy of Scotland having its own international development policy, separate to that of the then Department of International Development (DFID). But 16 years on, the scheme has proved to be a great popular success, with more than 100,000 Scots and 200,000 Malawians actively working together each year, and around 8.5 million Malawians benefitting directly from work in areas such as health, education and climate change.  

Glasgow University’s Dental School has joined forces with Malawi’s College of Medicine to establish Malawi’s first dental school. More than 250 Scottish primary and secondary schools have active links with Malawi, and the Scottish Government’s Climate Justice Fund supports community efforts to alleviate the worst effects of climate change in rural Malawi. 

And there are many more examples of practical, life-changing partnerships that benefit people in both countries. Even Nicola Sturgeon was convinced, and despite her early scepticism, the SNP government embraced McConnell’s approach after coming to power in 2007. In recent years it has increased its sphere of influence beyond Malawi, supporting work in Zambia, Rwanda and elsewhere. 

But it is the relationship with Malawi of which Scotland should be most proud. Former DFID Secretary Rory Stewart described it as,” genuinely one of the most unique, remarkable, interesting and human interweavings of two nations anywhere in the world,” and suggested that it could form the model for international development across the UK, with different regions taking the lead in partnerships with different countries.  

As well as being an effective way of supporting practical links between regions such as Yorkshire and Pakistan for example, this partnership model could also provide an excellent platform for young people to learn more about the British Empire and the impact its legacy still has to today on their peers in sub-Saharan Africa and south east Asia. 

Scotland’s education secretary, Shirley-Anne Somerville, said in Holyrood recently that there was a need for an “inclusive” curriculum that examined issues such as Scotland’s colonial past. Her commitment should be welcomed, and all parties should work together to ensue her warm words become action.  

As the blurb on Sathnam Sanghera’s excellent new book Empireland asserts,‘…imperialism is not something that can be erased with a few statues being torn down or a few institutions facing up to their dark pasts, it exists as a legacy and explains […] who we are as a nation’.  

And welcome though Samson Kambula’s powerful homage to John Chilembwe is, we need more than a handful of new statues going up if our children are to learn from their ancestors’ mistakes. 

A proper understanding of the economic, social and cultural forces that created modern Britain is required if we are to build a better country, one that celebrates our diversity and is united in a common purpose. Scotland and Malawi can help show the way.

Susan Dalgety is a Scotsman columnist (every Saturday). Her first book, The Spirit of Malawi, was recently published by Luath Press. She is also a director of the Scotland Malawi Partnership. 

The Costs of an SNP-Green Alliance?

A North Sea oil rig on a grey, cloudy day

Nick Butler

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What is the price of the prospective marriage of convenience between the SNP and the Green Party? The Scottish Greens are no pushover and will want something substantial in return for their support. No Green Party member can want to see a repeat of the London based coalition between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats which gave David Cameron a majority but destroyed public trust in Nick Clegg. History suggests that junior partners tend to lose out from such deals.

The Green Party’s co leader Lorna Slater stresses that cooperation will not amount to a coalition. The engagement will therefore be based on trading policies. For the Greens the obvious prize would be an accelerated rundown of all activity in the North Sea ending exploration, development and production of oil and gas. The Green Party’s leaders would look opportunist if they supported the SNP Government without demanding progress on something they themselves have defined as essential.

Abandoning the North Sea might secure the SNP’s majority but it would also have serious consequences in the real world away from Holyrood.  Even after the consolidation and cost cutting of the last decade the industry still provides tens of thousands of jobs offshore and onshore, directly and indirectly.  Whole communities still depend on the industry’s survival.

From the consumers perspective the abandonment of the North Sea would be easier if there were readily available low cost alternatives to oil and gas.  More electricity is being produced each year from wind and other renewable sources. But electricity accounts for less than a quarter of total energy consumption. Electric vehicle numbers are growing but still account for only a tiny fraction of the total number of cars on the road.  For freight lorries and other heavy vehicles there is still no readily available low cost alternative to oil. Shutting down the North Sea cuts off supply but does nothing to change the level of demand.

That means that if North Sea production ended Scottish drivers would be  dependent on imports from OPEC and other oil exporters. The only real beneficiaries would be the princes of Saudi Arabia and others whose authoritarian regimes are funded by oil revenue. 

The transition to a low carbon economy is not a simple or easy process. Changes in the way energy is produced and consumed require long term investment in technology and infrastructure. Some progress has been made but there is much more to do, and the transformation required now will not be easy. The process of change requires a broad consensus around measures which do not cause sudden large scale job losses or undermine security of supply.  

The transition also needs an awareness of the global nature of the challenge. In contrast to the SNP, climate change takes no notice of national borders. Scotland accounts for less than 0.2 per cent of global emissions, the UK as a whole just 1.5 per cent. A clean Scotland in a dirty world would be a meaningless achievement. If Britain is to make a difference to the challenge of eliminating the risks of climate change we should all be working together to find the low cost low carbon solutions which can help countries such as India which are the frontier of the issue to develop their economies and pull people out of poverty without relying on coal. 

As the pandemic is showing us, global challenges need practical global responses. Many people across the UK are working to deliver those responses. Scotland should join them.

Nick Butler is a Visiting Professor at King’s College London and the founding Chairman of the Kings Policy Institute. He chairs Promus Associates, The Sure Chill Company and Ridgeway Information Ltd. From 2007 to 2009 he was Chairman of the Cambridge Centre for Energy Studies. He was a special adviser to the former British prime minister Gordon Brown from 2009 to 2010. He served as a non executive Director of Cambridge Econometrics from 2010 to 2018. He was appointed in 2018 to the expert panel of advisers for The Faraday Institution, which works on the development of batteries and energy storage. Having served as a Member of the Strategic Advisory Council of the Norwegian state company Equinor (formerly Statoil) he is currently editor of the Energy Agenda for the Norwegian based energy organisation ONS.