I would walk 500 miles

It is 500 miles from Westminster to Dalwhinnie and just a wee bit more to Oban. Worth the walk, if you want to live in a progressive country.

This week the Scottish Parliament has shown its mettle with two new acts. One on tenants' rights that will make life a wee bit more secure for people living in private rented housing, and the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill that will help secure tenant farmers' land, and show us who owns the big estates.

Like much in politics it is as much the signpost as the journey. The Scottish Parliament is signalling that it wants a fairer, more equal society. The bills and acts of the Parliament are important, but the attitude, the change in thinking away from 'let the rich get richer' to 'let's make Scotland a fairer place' is the piece that will stay.

These decisions are 500 miles, a million miles, from Westminster. On Tuesday Mr 'I'm-not-an-economist' Osborne passed a budget that will benefit the rich, and continue to hit the poor. This Institute of Fiscal Studies analysis shows the effects clearly, and graphically.

The road that Westminster is taking is the neoliberal one; let the rich get richer, and the money will 'trickle down.' It clearly does not. It floats up, leaving a growing wealth gap, and hundreds of thousands of families in poverty.

I would walk to Dalwhinnie to escape a Westminster like that.



Late But in Earnest, tweeting @serosedker

May London Flourish

The City of London is a building site. Walking through its courts and its lanes means navigating scaffolding, concrete blocks and cement lorries. Wobbling to work on their high heels and pencil skirts or their brogues and pinstripes, City staff divert from pavement to pavement to avoid the construction sites.

London is booming, and not just in new buildings. House prices are up (did they ever fall?) along with the salaries of its bankers, lawyers and investment managers. It is the centre for research and development, for arts and culture, for earning and spending, for broadcasting and education. London is a global mega-city, a Tokyo on the Thames.

For Scotland, London is the big business opportunity. A few hours away by train, speaking the same language (or something like it), and with a rampant consumer culture for the speciality foods that Scotland produces, London is open for business. Scottish firms are selling everything from architecture to whisky to the London market.

Long may London, the global mega-city, flourish.

London's governance - à la Boris Johnson - is about letting the free market rip along, with only the tiny inconvenience of the Congestion Charge. It is laissez-faire governance,  neoliberalism. The priorities of a global mega-city are cast in the same mould; yes, let's pack a new runway into the world's busiest airport to make it even busier (to hell with the Green Belt).

Neoliberalism is the philosophy of the global mega-city, competing for favoured investments amongst the banks and finance houses of the world. New York? Tokyo? Rio? Sydney? Nah, let's go to London. They will let us pay taxes in the Netherlands Antilles while we work in Blackfriars. London needs neoliberalism or it will be overtaken, God forfend, by Frankfurt or Geneva. London is a vortex, a Death Eater that sucks the wealth, and the spirit, from everything around it.

Westminster is in London, and Westminster shares London's dominant political philosophy, the economic neoliberalism that is the accepted paradigm of Tories, Labour and Liberals.

But the governance required for a global mega-city is very, very different from that required for the hills, glens, lochs (and cities) of Scotland. The people of Scotland - not just in the last General Election but for years before - have shown that they want other values to predominate. The people of Scotland have consistently voted for parties that propose a different model of society, one which cares for its people, which pays for the education of its young people, which helps its old-folk.

Which is why Scotland needs its own Government. We simply cannot have that fascinating, greedy, consumptive neoliberal culture imposed on us any longer. We need out, now. Because the longer we stay glued to Osbameron's nasty neoliberalism, the poorer, weaker, sicker we will get.

It is time. We must now grow our own Flower of Scotland. And may London (and its parish parliament in Westminster) flourish.

The Red Box

This week’s Budget is a metaphor for how we are governed. An Oxbridge man in a grey suit opens a red box and tells us how much we will be spending on beer next year.

The Chancellor combines magic, theatre and power. The magic is in the announcements, made so that we focus on the hocus-pocus not on the real stuff. This year’s announcements included the small beer of a penny off a pint off the tepid brown stuff.

This penny off beer is meant to work with the young and with “working people.”  This is theatrical parody – because these ideas fit with our stereotypes of the manual labourer (he is always a man) in the flat cap walking home in some idyllic Hovis-loaf Yorkshire village and stopping off for a pint with his mates in The Prince Edward. It is a theatrical, or better an ad-agency view of how Britain works, reassuring middle England that everything is normal.

The penny is also part of the magician’s show, the distracting handkerchief being waved in your face as the magician palms the Ace of Spades. 

Watch the magic penny!

The maths is simple: the British Beer and Pub Association tells us that we drink 31.5 billion pints a year. A penny off each pint means we will save £315m on our beer. Gosh. That sounds like a lot!

That is the magic. While we focus on the homely image of the smiling working man saving a penny on his after-work pint, Giddy George Osborne has lifted 100 times as much out of our pockets as he has put in. Because in the same budget he announced spending that imply a £30.5 billion cut in total Government spending between 2015 and 2018, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Who will bear the brunt of this? With £13 billion being taken out of welfare expenditure it will be the poor who suffer the most. Our honest working man in the Hovis-loaf village will suffer. So will his wife and his children. And, to step away from the stereotype, so will the single parents, the homeless people, the women working in zero-hour contract jobs, the sick and the lame. To be clear, these cuts are steeper (despite Giddy’s promise of jam sometime around 2019) than in any three year period up to now. If you thought the poor were already suffering, wait until these cuts hit local councils, bus services, pre-school support and social services.

The red box waved in our faces as the grey-suited man leaves number 11 Downing Street is the magician’s handkerchief. It distracts us for a moment, reassures us that we live in a country that does things as they have always been done, where history can repeat itself. And the flourish of a reduction in beer duty is in the same vein, a hypnotic flash of brown that blinds us to the big picture – the drab grey of a Government that will cut another pound of flesh from its poor to feed to its friends in the City.

It is time for Scotland to move away from this parody of a Parliament, to craft budgets that help the poor without the suffocating theatrical tradition of the magical Gladstonian Red Box.

St George Slaughters the Poor (Again)

The most significant number in yesterday's Autumn Statement by Chancellor George Osborne was "£13.6 billion."

This is the amount he intends to cut out of the UK economy if the Tories are reelected in 2015. He means to take all of this in 2015-6. 

This is a typical political strategy; get yourself elected on populist policies ('Google Tax!', '£15m to repair church roofs!') and then suck out of the economy sixty times more than you won from Google, Starbucks and Amazon.

These cuts* will affect Scotland disproportionally. They will be targeted on welfare and thus at Scotland's higher proportion of poor people; welfare spend is expected to be at least '... £1 billion a year lower than forecast at the Budget...' said George yesterday. And the cuts will mean big reductions in staff numbers for Civil Service jobs.  Because the Scottish economy depends more than the English on public sector jobs, we will be harder hit.

 

There is one other announcement that did not hit the headlines. Our George, he who would not countenance Scotland using its own oil wealth, has created a '...Sovereign Wealth Fund for the North of England so that the shale gas resources of the North are used to invest in the future of the North.'  

Politically this is the equivalent of a childish smack in the face for the SNP; just because the SNP proposed a similar Sovereign Wealth Fund for Scotland it can't have it. Ya boo to you. Culturally, it confirms what we already knew; Scotland is simply a colony of England, whose resources are to be sucked out of her in order to prop up the English Exchequer. 

But its real impact is social. Money from oil and gas licenses could be used in Scotland to help the poor and to develop our economy. That's OK for Yorkshire, but not for Scotland.

One day, St George, the Dragon will bite you back.



*There is more on the cuts in a Financial Times analysis here: http://blogs.ft.com/off-message/2014/12/03/the-cuts-to-come/  This uses OBR figures from, er, page 149 of their report (so not what you'd call the headlines...) to show that spending on local authorities, transport and other areas important to Scotland will have to fall from £147bn in 2014/15 to £86bn in 2019/20 to meet the Government's own targets. A lot, lot more than they will earn from taxing Google et al...