My British Identity

Watching the Paralympics this week made me think about all the column inches I have seen written about the Olympics helping the image of being British in Scotland.

I've read a lot about us all getting behind team GB and their achievements somehow affecting the way Scots feel about their nationality.  Maybe it has, but if it has I think something more fundamental has been happening than getting enthused about the Olympics and the Paralympics.

You see, I believe many of us have a sort of two pronged nationality - we are both British and Scottish at the same time - they are not mutually exclusive.  Britain is a very old country and has grown organically that way.  It is quirky and ancient.  Great Britain and Northern Ireland - the United Kingdom to give it its Sunday best title - is a country of nations and regions.  That is just the way it is - but it is a nation state and one that makes plenty of sense.

After the remarkable victory of the SNP in 2011 I was beginning to think that maybe - just maybe - the SNP might be on the right side of history and maybe there was an appetite for independence.

I began to hear the arguments repeated loudly over and over again: 'The Union has had its day', 'Independence will solve our problems', 'The union is broken and dysfunctional', 'Scotland is just like the last colony and the Secretary of State is like a Governor General', 'We must stand up and look after our own affairs', 'Where is the positive case for the Union?'

I thought - ok, these people have a cause, and it has gone on for a lifetime! Every argument has been refined, every line trialed and every objection answered.  The National question has not pre-occupied the other side, and the other side, although probably bigger, is a more disparate group.  The case for the union will come - instinct tells me there is plenty to say here.

But, for a while, I thought maybe the case for the union would stumble and would never become clear?

But, this summer it has begun to come and it has begun to deepen and it has begun to spread out.  The case for Independence on the other hand has begun to look a little threadbare, a little predictable in comparison perhaps.

For me the Olympic opening ceremony began to express some of it.  Someone tweeting about it (not a Scot and not hooked in to our National question) noted just how much there was to being British.  We captured that sense of a quirky, eccentric spirit and a sense of humour.  We captured a sense of invention and ideas - in science, in technology and in engineering.  We captured an off the wall, open, dare I say it - liberal - spirit that helps fuel our diverse arts and music.  We captured our political progress - and this is a hard one - but we have always been able to progress on a journey improving and making better what needs to improve - adult suffrage, the fight against slavery, religious emancipation, a dignified retreat from empire, rights for women, the welfare state, the journey away from racial discrimination and to a multi-cultural society - one we are probably still tackling.  The list can go on.  But what a marvellous, open, liberal, progressive, inventive people we are.

And no - we are not a dysfunctional Tory conspiracy, we are not some regressive Westminster power block somehow alien to Scotland and holding her back.  We are so much more than that.

And nor is Scotland a colony or something grafted onto a foreign and alien body.

Many nationalists regard Scotland as a separate entity to England and Wales.  They regard the UK as a union of separate parts.  It is almost as if they are separate pieces stuck together like a couple of Lego bricks - related but separate.

Scotland is absolutely part and parcel of Britain and Britain is part and parcel of Scotland.

That inventiveness has so much to thank Scotland for.  Scots engineering is widely respected and that feeds into British engineering.  Scots financial governance has a high reputation and that contributes to the success of the City (and I'm talking about high standards of banking and accountancy here, not the casino banking that has contributed so much to our troubles).

Scotland and all the constituent parts of the UK have their traditions intermingled like waters from different streams converging together into a great river.  And that is something you can't simply separate.

Gordon Brown talked about some of this recently.  He argued that “Scottish ideas of justice and community” combined with “traditional English ideas of ordered liberty and individualism” to create not only “common political rights” but also “common social and economic rights”.

I believe quite a view nationalists are romantics at heart.  They have a patriotic vision of what Scotland is and of what a separate Scotland can be - sometimes a little Ruritarian perhaps.  But we are an essential part of Britain and I want to argue that Britain is a nation state.

One language, one integrated economy, one island (almost).  And while there are cultural differences they are not large enough to amount to being a separate country.  Indeed much of our culture is a fully shared culture - and again an intermingled one.

Danny Boyle showed that to be a very modern and dynamic country - not something where we are always looking into the past.

I believe Scotland is a marvellous place, a great nation and a distinctive part of the United Kingdom.  But so much of who we are is as British people, not just Scottish people.  And its not so easy or particularly desirable to separate that out.

For Britain is a nation state - a nation of nations and regions - its quirky that way!

That went well!

Well, that went well!

The local elections were an unmitigated disaster for the LibDems in Edinburgh, where I live!

I scribed most of my thoughts on a comment on the Better Nation website, so I thought I would lay them out on my own blog.

We all knew this was coming a year ago. Things were always going to get worse for us before they get better and fighting locals as the lead party what with the Trams, some big budget challenges and LibDem group’s ‘talent’ for self promotion was likely to lead to another pasting.

Well, we got that, but it was slightly worse than I expected. I had hoped for 7 and feared for 4 – we got 3!

Interestingly, I don’t think the liberal (small l) vote has disappeared. In large part, it has gone Green and to the National Party of Scotland.

Places like Meadows, Fountainbridge and Stockbridge have always had an inbuilt liberal block. People who are in touch with their inner tank-top and eat vegetables. Since we have blotted our copy book it has helped the Greens get 6 councillors and some big wins.

The Nats are the opposition to Labour – there to give scrutiny and an alternative way to do things. I think Labour need that. As such they carry the responsibility of representing many who are cautious about how a Labour administration will perform.

So in a non tribal sense I don’t despair for our city.

I’ve been a Liberal for a long time and I’ve met in both taxis and in large halls. I had always felt things to be ok because the ‘market’ demand for a centre party was there. A pragmatic party with a perfect mix of individualism and collectivism, strong on the environment and civil liberties and positive about Europe and the need for effective devolution within the UK (Federalism even).

I’m a bit more worried this time – in Scotland at least. I saw the Greens come through in the late 80s but they faded. Today they are much more coherent, rounded and a mature proposition. I think they have potentially more staying power as we look jaded and yesterday’s party.

There has always been a strong place for a non socialist alternative to the Conservative party – that is in a nutshell what the LibDems were in the 20th century. The Nats and the LibDems (Alliance in the 80s) have ebbed and flowed around this one over the last 40 years – over time and over different regions of Scotland.  Well currently the Nats have well and truly blocked us out of that one. It doesn’t help that we have blotted our left of centre copy-book with the coalition and everything that that involves during an era of global financial crisis.

The point is there isn’t really an opening there as the Nats are currently much more than just a nationalist party or the party of Independence.

So where does that leave us – in Edinburgh terms.

Well, I think we need to go back to our areas and form Focus action groups and get on with some of the things we do best – community action. We need to stay engaged and involved. I think in Edinburgh a core of activists and members will remain in the parts of the city where we have been strong.

For us in a lot of ways politics was re-booted 12 months ago. So we now put this behind us and move on.  This means we can start to hold the big groups on the council to account. Including the Nats and the Greens as they represent the interests of liberal minded voters (amongst others of course).

We can free of being in administration during a difficult period promote our ideas for the city and constructive criticisms of what goes on.

I actually believe the LIbDems have done a lot of good across Edinburgh in recent years. The LibDem councillors increased nursery places and care for older people and started building houses again. They also increased recycling, and importantly sorted out the financial mess the city faced after the previous administration. (Leaving aside the costs associated with the Tram project).

In the manifesto the group put together they developed a lot of detailed and valuable thinking of where the city should go next and what the priorities are.

The point is that stump politicking or internet trolling aside there is some good thinking there to continue to contribute albeit as a depleted group and to continue to think and develop ideas is a key thing we should continue to do proudly.

I don’t know what is to come in the years ahead. The Nats may decline if they loose the referendum in 2014. They may face pressures and fissures between those who see independence as building a new socialist Utopia in Scotland and those who see themselves as an effective disciplined centre left alternative to Labour. Who knows.

The point is we have re-booted the computer and the LibDems should get out there and campaign in this city.

Public sector pensions is not the issue!

All power to Steve Webb with his work on looking for alternative pension methods for British workers in the years to come.  This is the real issue, not public sector pensions.

Final salary pensions are dead.  They have been for over a decade now.  The public sector unions are either being King Canute like or don't understand the economics of providing pensions - or both!

A number of factors but primarily increasing longevity - we are living longer - means final salary pensions are no longer affordable.  No large company offers them any more.  Some are even moving to withdraw them for existing employees or members of the scheme.  They are too expensive.

The offers on the table for the public sector seem pretty reasonable.  Average salary schemes protect the lower paid and CPI growth rather than RPI growth at least gives inflation proofing based on the cost of living rather than none.

I'm sure there are still aspects to negotiate over but I hope a settlement can be made that is reasonable for us to pay for - that is 'us' who no longer have such pensions widely available in the private sector!

Where the unions have a point is that it is not a race to the bottom.  The withdrawal of final salary schemes and the oncoming auto-enroled pensions mean employers are tempted to put far less into pensions than they did before.  Employers  running a final salary scheme might have been putting 15% of their payroll cost into pensions.  In the future it could be down to 4%!!

We need alternatives for big British firms that allow them to provide decent pensions but the big issue is - as Tom McPhail the pensions commentator said tonight - that employers need to put more in their employees' pension pots.

Some form of guarantees for workers' pensions may be important but getting employers to pay more is vital.

We can accept that pensions must be paid by a combination of employer and employee.

We can accept that the risk taken by employers should be reduced and that there can be fewer guarantees (which cost and are hard to deliver)

What we shouldn't accept is employers paying a quarter of what they used to into workers' pensions.

All power to Steve Webb.  He is proving to be an outstanding minister.  Auto-enrolment is great and will bring a lot of workers, previously unpensioned, into the fold.  But lets do this work at finding a decent replacement for final salary schemes for larger companies who have always offered pensions, to offer in the 21st century.

This is the real fight for pensions that the unions - and others - should be fighting. 

What are the Liberal Democrats for?

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to meet with Willie Rennie, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, for a bloggers' interview.  So it was that Andrew Page, Nicola Prigg, Douglas Mclennan and I spent an evening discussing everything from the constitution to youth unemployment.

The LibDems have been through a torrid time over the last couple of years in Scotland.  Being aligned with the Tories in government brought the party to the brink of oblivion at the Scottish elections last year.  Being the junior partner in a government dealing with the global financial crisis and an enormous structural deficit has drawn the LibDems to be associated with unpopular NHS reform, draconian changes to the assessment o disability benefits and tertiary education tuition fees.

The question many people ask is that it is all very well having the ministerial cars but what difference have the LibDems made?  What is the point of the Liberal Democrats?

I asked Willie Rennie what he thought the LibDems are for.

He picked out four things

• Opportunity
• Community
• Internationalism
• Sustainability

 He argued these are four key values all based around the individual.  By way of example he expanded on this by describing how he believes public services can be made more responsive to people.

This is clearly a passion of Willie's and a topic he has given a lot of thought and devoted much reading towards.  I was worried for a moment that we might start to exchange some lame platitudes on this subject but as Willie expanded on his thinking I was pleasantly surprised that there was some real substance as to how we might make public services more effective and there was some real depth to Willie's thinking.

For Willie Rennie making public services more responsive to people is about moving control away from the centre of our providers of various public services and empowering staff.  They know what to do and are well trained.

It is why the Liberal Democrats remain opposed to a single Scottish police force!

Willie is extremely interested in developing some of the latest thinking on the provision of effective public services.  He sees it as a partnership between the consumers and providers of services.  This is getting at the fundamentals.

He went on and gave some examples of what he meant.  We take too bureaucratic, too controlling an approach seeking safety first - we don't innovate enough in this segment of the economy.  He told the story of a housing department in a central Scottish local authority - authority that was top rated regarding achievement of service targets but near the bottom regarding public satisfaction..

"Somebody fills in a form wrong, no one at the desk takes initiative and comments - they just let it go.  It goes to the office and they send it back.  And so it goes on to and fro until the matter is solved 6 weeks later.  But the council feels they have done well which is completely different to the perception of the service consumer!  The council was focussing on its processes not its outcomes.  The form was passed to the department, the form was processed, queries were answered - all within the set SLAs (service level agreements).  They didn't fix the problem but they processed the form in the right timescale."  

A focus on outcomes and allowing frontline staff to make sure the form was right before they sent it for processing would have improved this story. It is also about encouraging and embracing community capacity and voluntary action.

It is also about the need to change attitudes councils to the independent/voluntary sectors, particularly the perception that if the council doesn't directly offer a service it isn't good enough.

I was struck by Willie Rennie's charisma as well as his ability to commuicate.  He has a twinkle in his eye.  As he spoke about how society can work better he looked forward to how Scotland can be better in 50 years time.  It is a liberal vision based on communities and giving opportunities to the individual to improve all our lives.

I will visit some more of what I discussed with Willie Rennie and share some of my thoughts over two or three subsequent blogposts

 

Scottish Roundup 2

As some of you will know, Scottish Roundup does a sort of "What the Papers Say" of the Scottish blog scene every week.  This includes covering some pretty momentous events that will affect Scotland and the entire UK over the next few years.


I had the pleasure of reviewing the Macblogosphere in such a significant week.

You can read the roundup here.


Have a read and discover some first rate bloggers, if you don't know them already.

PS
I also highly recommend Frances Coppola's learned and very informative blog on the currency conundrum facing any independent Scotland.

We need to develop policies for life long learning!

This first appeared on Scots Gazette on 12 September 

The whole university fees issue continues to be a hot issue as they take shape.  Recently the Scottish universities have been announcing what fees they will charge students from the rest of the UK and non EU foreign students.  This has of course put into focus the absurd situation where we are charging students from other parts of the UK but not from other EU countries.

However, this got me thinking about the issue of lifelong learning and mature students. I read an excellent piece from LibDem blogger, Richard Morris which prompted my thinking.  Richard picked up on the fact that the Open University students studying for an equivalent or lower level degree to one they already hold will have to pay their fees up front from next year (The TES describes the issue).  He argued that many students will now be priced out of the system which will have a significant effect on the economy.  Furthermore he made the point that while other aspects of education rightly took priority this was an important issue and made a plea for the LibDems to address it as a policy issue.

“… Where there is money, we have chosen as a party to direct it towards the youngest in society (in England and Wales), through initiatives like the pupil premium and free nursery places, where we believe tight funds can get the best results and have the most profound impact. I agree with this approach.
But I cannot pretend that the knock on effect of this sits easily with me. As Liberals we are philosophically wedded to the notion of giving every individual the opportunity to make more of their lives – and the best chance of delivering that must come through lifelong learning. A quick Google search indicates we have had very little to say on this subject since May last year – which is surprising….”

I absolutely agree with him.  Moreover, I think this is a terribly important policy area with patterns of work becoming more disjointed over peoples’ lifetimes.

With the rise of the contract worker and many more people finding themselves working for a large company for a period of time then choosing – or being forced – to change direction, the need for workers in the 21st century to be adaptable is very high.  Patterns of work are changing and the days of the paternalistic large organisation are gone.  Large companies don’t do social welfare anymore – just look at pensions. Nor do they provide a culture to train and nurture a worker throughout life any more.

Companies will in the future employ a small group of uber managers and a core of key workers.  Other tasks will be performed by outsourcing, staff on short term contracts or professional contractors.  Workers therefore need to develop themselves and build new skills and knowledge to match a changing economy and changing technology – and each of us is responsible for our own development.

All this means that in building a modern, adaptable, knowledge economy, a coherent policy for adult learning is as important as education for the young.  Some of the young will need it too if they struggle to get careers off the ground in their early 20s in the current environment!

This is a key issue for developing Scotland’s economy and society in the future along with initiatives like Investors in People to encourage companies to invest in their staff for business success and to equip their employees for the modern world.

Europe - 10 things I think happened last week

This post first appeared on Scots Gazette on 12 December

I do not yet know what to make of what happened in Brussels last week and what the consequences will be for the UK as a result.


My feelings are these:

1.  I think the EU has failed to reach an agreement that will solve the current financial crisis.  I think this agreement will fail to save the Euro.
2.  I have some concerns that the aim of European leaders is a little too much to save banks that have loaned money to various European states rather than about saving any national economy.  There is a little too much of the poor paying the price for this global financial crisis.
3.  I have some concerns that the French are no friends of the importance of London as a financial centre and wish merely to curtail its power.  I also think the French have a bad habit of thinking France and Europe are synonymous.
4.  I worry that with the Euro, fiscal and monetary policy is basically aligned to what suits the German economy and that it is almost the case that a common European currency may as well be the Deutschmark.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for every economy, but I doubt it would ever work well for the UK economy (and incidentally I doubt it would be right for any independent Scottish economy, should that ever happen, in the future)
5.  I think France and Germany were trying to get Britain to bail the Euro out.  I believe the UK should participate in doing what needs to be done to bring financial stability but we are not part of the Euro and should not bail it out.
6.  I think David Cameron went over there to veto the deal and to appease the many Euro sceptics in his party.  There are rather too many Euro sceptics in his party and their Little Englander nationalism is not good.  I think, therefore he was far too quick to veto and could have taken a far more subtle approach.  There was no win-win created.
7. In fact I think David Cameron was somewhat out manoeuvred by Sarkozy and my impression is that he has not done a good job with his diplomacy – rather overplaying his hand and getting a quite unnecessary result.
8.  In actual fact we have vetoed the Euro Zone doing something we don’t mind – the Eurozone working within the EU to support their fiscal union.
9.  However, in doing this we have failed to stop something we do in fact mind – the 26 countries acting as a bloc on  single market issues with the UK on the outside.  This is not good.  It is not good for the UK long term and it may damage our trade and industry.
10.  I argued previously that we are right not to be part of the Euro – a currency zone that does not work for us and is, and seems likely to remain, inherently unstable.  It is right and very important that we are part of a supra-national body like the EU that is far more than a free trade area, but stops short – and always stops short of full integration.  Our global relations and flexibility – especially openness to the growing far east and so-called BRIC countries remain important.

This may be a watershed moment.  It is just possible that Europe may never be the same again.  If this all means a two tier Europe, then so be it (I’m not sure how the Euro Zone will play out anyway).  However, we must remain an integral part of the EU and we must work to achieve our interest within it and to take a lead.  France are too self interested to be left alone to it and so, in the final analysis, are Germany.
The EU needs us and we need the EU.   It is important that we avoid total isolation because there are trade deals to be done and diplomatic influence to be wielded – if we have any left!  To this end, as a puzzle what happened and where that leaves us I am asking, “David Cameron, what was that all about?”