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Home >> Articles Online, by Author >> Articles Online, by date published online >> C Harvie, Scottish Affairs, No. 65, Autumn 2008 |
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Scottish Affairs, No. 65, Autumn 2008A Year with Salmondby Chris Harvie |
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IAt 6.30 am on 4 May 2007 – after a night of electro-mechanical farce in Glenrothes sport hall – I found myself list MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife. A decade earlier, in a Tübingen university hall of residence, I had run an election party, staring at the box incredulous as the Conservatives, after eighteen years in power (they looked in 1992 like the Japanese Liberal Democrats), plunged to catastrophe. By 2008 this fate faced New Labour. It was likely that in Scotland it would in a way survive, as a pro-union party, but what of the Union itself, torn between European technocracy and American finance? The latter was to provide first the background and then the denouement to a Scottish politics at last grown dramatic. This was not the sole theme of 2007-8, rather the sense that the magic renewing qualities J. A. Schumpeter had in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942) given to the British elite – in terms of social nous and personal competence – had dwindled. This sense increasingly preoccupied the English (as a library of past slights had once preoccupied the Scots): chips grew and grew on the shoulders of Telegraph readers, as once they had grown in the bars of Rose Street. In 1999, the former Scottish Shadow Secretary George Robertson said devolution would ‘kill Scottish nationalism stone dead’. In the 2003 Holyrood election the Scottish National Party was indeed becalmed and the gainers in an anti-Labour swing were Scottish Socialists, Greens and independents. By 2007 the situation had changed utterly. Lead by a calculating, pragmatic Alex Salmond, the SNP beat Labour 47:46 and formed a minority government. As someone subjected to it, Salmond put on a charm offensive as well as a well-funded propaganda campaign. ‘Did he recite Montrose to you over the phone: “Who dares not put it to the touch. To win or lose it all?” ‘He did.’ The sense of a well-motivated cadre was as important as the backing by prominent businessmen, notably Sir George Mathewson of the Royal Bank and Brian Souter of Stagecoach (who contributed £500,000 to SNP funds). The egg-dance between this and social democracy was thus sustainable: unsurprisingly the only great Westminster name I heard him cite was Lloyd George. Yet the campaign was hard enough to make the glorious May weather count, and the result showed very variable swings. Skilful tactical voting from Lib-Labbers meant that good SNP chances – Aberdeen North, East Dunbartonshire – came to nothing. But three narrow first-past-the-post victories, in Stirling, Ochil and Glenrothes, cleared those above me off the list, and let me in. IIThe real Labour defeat occurred after the election. A minority government was a high-risk strategy in a constitution that anticipated coalitions. Salmond made it (and the party’s solidarity in the campaign) pay off. It was much aided by one Liberal-Democrat success: pinning McConnell down to PR (single transferable vote) for council elections. In these Labour lost all but two (Glasgow and North Lanark) of its local government fortresses, along with their huge patronage networks. Less predictably, Salmond and Swinney were able to harness about two-thirds (the latter’s calculation) of Scottish civil servants to his party’s policy, due to the Scotland Office’s redundancy and bureaucrats’ fatigue with Whitehall’s control freakery. A minority government has inherent problems. It loses the ‘Little Dorrit’ tactic of blaming policy backsliding on an otherwise-minded Cabinet partner. Salmond realised that the antidote was to build up a momentum of support, and the SNP became eager to please strategic lobbies. It rapidly closed a ‘social-democratic contract’ with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) to replace the earlier ‘intra-Labour party partnership’. This boosted the self-respect of the Councils, regarded as the deformed progeny of Ian Lang’s gerrymandering back in 1994-5, though doubts over this ménage of giants and dwarves – Highland and Clackmannan – were bound to persist. Familiar begging-bowls were briskly filled – abolition of Forth and Tay Bridge tolls, university fees, and some NHS charges, followed by decisions to build the remaining bit of the M74 in Glasgow, and a ‘multi-modal’ replacement for the Forth Road Bridge. Labour, ably led in this area by Des McNulty (though little did this profit him) landed punches on the government’s ambiguity about public transport. The SNP tried – under pressure from Kenny MacAskill, who had won tram-less Edinburgh East – to kill off the Edinburgh tram scheme. They succeeded in stopping an elaborate plan for an airport rail link. Had the full MacAskill plan succeeded, £1 billion might have funded, say, a reduction in student debt (estimated at £1.7 billion) but Salmond deftly manoeuvred between both sides, and, eager to keep the Greens sweet, settled for half-measures. The noisiest lobbies were satisfied and the SNP had its foot on the windpipe of Scottish Labour. Instead of charming, Tony Blair sulked, gifting Salmond on 31 May a classic line. Asked about contacts with the Prime Minister, he responded with Cole Porter’s ‘He never writes, he never phones.’ Brown made contact, civilly if briefly, on 31 May. In 2001-2 he had taken a year to talk to Jack McConnell. Subsequently the SNP would, ironically, further the proto-federal structure of Joint Ministerial Committees which Labour had previously neglected. Salmond was, given the demise of Blair and the problems of Brown and Menzies Campbell, the most confident of UK centre-left leaders. His set-piece was First Minister’s question time, well-briefed by his staff but also dependent on the attention to negotiating, scheduling and disciplinary detail of the Minister for Parliament Bruce Crawford and the Chief Whip Brian Adam: constructing alliances, processing feedback from the weekly MSPs’ meeting and consultations with Parliamentary Liaison Officers. The whole was publicised by a thoroughly professional press office, well integrated by Liz Lloyd and John MacInnes into Chamber business. Labour badly mishandled this whole galère, although the Scottish tabloids were loyal (was this an advantage?) The Conservatives (now down to 17 seats) were corralled as SNP allies. After a year, far from retreating as policies such as local income tax came under attack, the party captured on 24 July 2008 Glasgow East, Labour’s second-safest seat in Scotland. This promised Labour, and the ci-devant political establishment, a double jeopardy in 2010-2011: the possibility of a SNP majority of Scottish Westminster MPs and SNP success in an Independence referendum. The SNP was admittedly working with a body of fresh MSPs (27 out of 47) prepared to compromise and manoeuvre while most of those on the Labour benches were more jaded than experienced. The problem was that most of the SNP’s economic programme needed more powers to be repatriated from London, and the Brown cabinet, its popularity ebbing fast after autumn 2007, remained negative. The effectiveness of the Councils was doubtful, while Scottish Government demands for expenditure rationalisation tended to be met by a clever politics of job preservation and, failing this, golden handshakes. Holyrood politics had an intriguing and rather touching convention that one didn’t spy on the inner workings of one’s opponent, just as the City used to separate stockbrokers from stockjobbers. Yet an agent in IT, shaking out the data from a Blackberry, could have surveyed the lot, and little in Downing Street’s discourse argued against this possibility. Every so often something confidential broke cover, but not a lot. MSPs mix only conventionally in Holyrood’s non-alcoholic ambience, and a lobby tradition is thin. Nevertheless, Labour’s troubles were difficult to disguise. While Annabel Goldie came across as a Wodehouse Aunt (Dahlia rather than Agatha ‘the one who kills rats with her teeth’) berating an errant nephew, with some success, she was aware the future of her party depended on making compromise work. Wendy Alexander, by contrast, seemed ill-adapted to opposition. A formidable business-school intellect was rarely deployed, and no tactical gift or oratorical attack. Did matters improve with Iain Gray? An Attlee perhaps, but in a shadow-cabinet devoid of Bevans, Bevins and Cripps? IIIThe economy was less tractable. In an important article in 1975 John P Mackintosh MP urged the rebalancing the mixed economy, freeing it from a collectivist oligarchy who used it as a form of outdoor relief. The state in Scotland had become this sort of creature. Since when? In Floating Commonwealth (2008) I dated the change from World War I and its aftermath. Scotland, transformed after 1915 into the greatest arsenal of Europe, was probably crucial in defeating the Central Powers, only to be junked in 1920, when arsenals weren’t wanted. The grand capitalism of the heavy industries survived (thanks to the Bank of England) but not the smaller firms that served them, which in other European countries built up an SME level of enterprise, alongside a welfare state. The Scots retreated into the fur of the big beasts – the railway companies, the banks and insurance houses, the industrial giants, of which ICI was the prototype – and above all the state. The result of the Scottish administrative state had been a caesura between the supply and demand sides. The latter flowered in the Parliament: MSPs were deluged with PR material from worthy causes. This was perhaps interesting as woman’s route to influence – ‘third sector’ groups were sometimes completely female – but where was the material on manufacture, innovation, and technical training to be expected in any European industrial region? The economic record after 1999 was chequered. Two terms of Lib-Lab coalition had not tackled the country’s persistent underlying entrepreneurial problems: high levels of ‘real’ unemployment and consequent poverty, and micro-management rather than finance from state-run concerns such as Scottish Enterprise. The SME sector’s troubles continued, aggravated by a new, non-local economic order: of vast out-of-town supermarkets with mainly part-time staff, and low-value-added call-centre or warehouse jobs, and youth in dead-end jobs who were agin the lot. Traditional industries continued to contract, with closures of paper mills and knitwear factories, and worse would come in firms servicing the collapsing property market. Against this the government’s concessions on business rates could only bring a partial relief and the road-based public works looked questionable, given the escalation in the oil price – 15-fold by summer 2008. There was discontent of a market, petit-bourgeois sort. Yet it was balanced and reinforced by much anger in Scotland at Labour’s foreign policy – the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and new Trident nuclear weapons in particular – and at their impact on local communities. As the price of oil rose towards, then passed, $100 a barrel (in 1999 at election time it had been $10), the revenues from North Sea oil were being used to keep the artificial prosperity of Gordon Brown’s stewardship – really confined to the real-estate-retailing motor – going, while long-term investment in renewable power and essential infrastructure (rail and road) was neglected. With Salmond, and his North-East, oil-economist background, the social-democratic wish-list was always balanced by a consideration of the supply-side, a route down which the other parties were ill-adapted to go. He was inspirited by the challenge of the minority government, and at least until the autumn of 2008 cut an impressive dash. In retrospect should we have seen the massing of compact, fist-like clouds, small because far away? From late 2006 news came in of house-purchase loans going beyond the edge of rational speculation. ‘Sub-prime’ came to imply that many such transactions had their roots in fraud: attempts by career criminals to launder cash from a boom in people-trafficking, arms-dealing, counterfeiting and drugs. Clever bankers bundled these together with reputable securities in ‘instruments’: declaring that good money would keep the deals afloat. The opposite happened: the good was debauched by the bad. Perhaps Bute House ought to have read John Mack and Hans-Jürgen Kerner’s The Crime Industry, commissioned by the Scottish Home Department in 1975, which was a chilling forecast of the merging of tough business practice and the methods of organised crime, through the use of computers, tax havens and global transactions. The last, and the lure of the ‘housing-retail driver’, meant that British and Scottish banks were deeply committed to it. The Royal Bank had stretched itself with its expensive takeover of the Dutch AMRO bank; Halifax Bank of Scotland after its 2001 merger was deeply into the housing market. In summer 2007, there was a run on an ambitious former English building society turned mortgage bank, Northern Rock: the first since the traumatic failure of the City of Glasgow bank in 1878. The interbank lending structure froze, Northern Rock had to be nationalised, mortgage feast became mortgage famine, and the driver stopped driving. With his Council of Economic Advisers (28 June 2007) Salmond seemed to regard the Edinburgh financial establishment as an ersatz foreign office: there were Scandinavian precedents. Was that prospect already in doubt? Scots manufacturing (still around 14% of GDP) took longer than elsewhere to contract, but by autumn 2008, and the end of HBOS, it was apparent that Scotland’s financial services, had been hobbled, and with it the economy of the Edinburgh region. This depression, on both sides of the Atlantic, had already hit the tourist industry in summer 2008. Contemplating 5% annual growth between 2005 and 2015, it had instead to cope with a 7% fall. IVBute House had another string to its bow: the Atlantic swells crashing on the beaches of the Hebrides, could generate ten times the nation’s energy demand: more impressive than North Sea oil, and without any end in sight. But the machinery had to be invented, let alone installed. This required not just ingenuity, but practical grounding and training in technology. When North Sea oil was discovered, Britain’s manufacturing sector was 30% of GDP. By 2008 it was 12%. Who would convert the inventions of the universities into exploitable innovation? Norway, with its oil fund, £200 billion accumulated since the mid-1990s, was one option. Germany, industry-rich but renewables-poor, was another. By late 2008, events were shaping up into a crisis: support for Gordon Brown was in free fall. The SNP won Glasgow East in July 2008; Glenrothes (neighbouring seat to Brown’s Kirkcaldy) voted on November 6. As the Scots Conservative stagnated around 18%, the prospect of the SNP winning any referendum on Scots independence gave way to threat of it gaining a majority (30 seats) at the next Westminster election, which had to take place before May 2010. VOn 4 March Tom Nairn buried Ukania in his Lothian lecture, an appreciative Salmond in the chair. But outside politics, the omens were varied and (unexpectedly?) depressing. The face of Scotland had anglicised and not improved. The architectural tundra of out-of-town shopping centres, mediocre housing and urban developments and the commercial decline of the small towns which had charmed in the 1970s, were somehow paralleled by fast food and grunge fashion. Had the social-political transition been too much of a wrench? If a rackety private life – drugs, drink, obesity, alienation, family fragility all claimed European records – provided little solidarity, what price the public sphere? Secondary schools seemed to frame the problem. The primary kids were sharp and original, but what happened at 11: hormones, e-numbers, ear-to-ear infotainment, or worse? I had actually spoken to more German gymnasia (with lively, well-briefed, kids) than Scottish secondaries: whose silence verging on sullenness was as depressing as the articulate asociality of fee-paying Glenalmond. The youth movements of all parties were weak; cultural bodies rarely saw anyone under bus-pass age. Although lawbreaking was down, the government’s law-and-order preoccupation increased. It might be explained by the relative importance of parliamentary manoeuvre (keeping the Tories sweet) over a media which was past it. ‘Little Maddie’, not an SNP government, made a tabloid summer 2007. The BBC’s antics reflected a one-time elite in decline. A well-qualified hater like Hugh MacDiarmid would have had a field day with Ross or Paxman, but the report of Salmond’s Broadcasting Commission in September 2008 was mild. The traditional mass-media would weaken with the housing market: something seen in the collapsing share price of the Johnston Press, proprietors of the Scotsman and Press and Journal. The tabloids gave me my fifteen minutes – through the transparency of Holyrood and my over-generous interpretation of Chatham House rules in the Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee. Appearing fully clothed on the front page of the Sun and Record, accused of insulting Scots youth and small towns, rebounded on them, but their semi-literacy was disillusioning. No modern European state deserved such a ‘popular’ press, though it was perhaps explained by a social morbidity which we intellos had tended to underestimate. In any week, travelling from Melrose to Edinburgh and the central Belt for parliamentary sessions, I saw more drunkenness, heard more obscenity, saw less read and studied, than in nearly thirty years in Tuebingen. Parliament was civil and articulate, but sometimes seemed more refuge than powerhouse. Kulturpessimist Carlyle preoccupied me in the autumn, in advance of a speech to the Carlyle International Conference in Dumfries. A Sartor Redux was needed to detail the signifiers of dress and behaviour in the new state: from the dark suits and elaborate ‘dinner-kilts’ of the male elite (Who invented the kilt-and-tuxedo? And when?) to the ragged denim of the drudges, and infinitely expandable sportswear (unerringly sketched by Francis Boyle of the News). Had the high-visibility waistcoat become the new garb of ‘Ye cannae dae that!’ authority? On 21 June I found myself leading the SNP’s Bannockburn March. The Young Nats were in day-glo, worn over jeans, but they were followed by bearded, long-haired figures from Siol nan Gaidheal, black teeshirted, carrying black saltires, who had seemingly been hibernating in caves in the Ochils since their last outing. How to fathom that? VIIn summer 2007, as the Brown government started to become locked into the crisis of the City, the SNP went on the attack. Instead of a ‘sound and steady’ programme of familiarisation, on 14 August Salmond published ‘Choosing Scotland’s Future’, an independence white paper, and began a ‘National Conversation’ to continue until a referendum in 2010. Was this a step too far? Going through the motions of a party commitment? Sure, Parliament rarely reflected the drama of its situation. Outside First Minister’s Questions the political play was subdued, and youth, nationalist-inclined in most polls, seemed (as above) comatose. Nationalist bloggers didn’t advance on traditional girning. Yet perhaps the Scot in the street now saw that independence hindered good relations with England and Europe less than the centralised UK constitution, or any likely variation. UK federalism was as pointless a runner as Scottish Conservatism, while independence, qualified by Europe and ‘social union’, could develop through the confidence of both players to make ad hoc deals, regardless of differences of size. In 2008 London had better relations with ‘independent’ Dublin than it had with Edinburgh and Cardiff, while Edinburgh’s dealings were good with Democratic Unionist-Sinn Fein Belfast and the Labour-Plaid Cymru government in Cardiff. Besides Salmond’s detection of North Sea Oil Mark 2 in ‘renewables plus carbon capture’ – initiatives had been taken by the previous government, but without a coherent strategy – the SNP presented a reasoned challenge to a pro-nuclear power London government, which was as attractive to Scotland as the party’s opposition to Trident. Without success, could Scottish Labour stay together? Would its west-coast Scottish oligarchy tolerate continuing weakness? Glasgow, hitherto impervious to the SNP, was and is still in many respects Irish republican at base, and could move in a surprising way. At the very least the minority SNP government will produce a lastingly different Scotland. The longer it can keep up its egg-dance, the worse for the Union? Or the better the chance of ‘these islands’ at last becoming post-imperial? October 2008, online March 2009 Chris Harvie was elected as SNP list MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife in the 2007 Scottish Parliament election. The following essays written in the year can be found on <www.intelligent-mr-toad.de>: ‘The New Democratic Intellect’ (June), ‘Carlyle and the Second Scottish Enlightenment’ and ‘The Economics of a Patriot: the 2007 Fletcher of Saltoun Lecture’ (both September). Toad also has a link to Harvie’s Guardian CommentisFree blogs.
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