The people we could be E-Book

Alexander Bell

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Viewpoints
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 199

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

We live in a time of crises in a state with no moral purpose. This generation could become great by tackling Scotland's domestic problems, and the wider issues facing the world. That is only possible if we take charge, set the goal of equality and give ourselves twenty years to transform our society. We can lead ourselves to a better world. ALEX BELL Former Head of Policy to First Minister Alex Salmond, Alex Bell puts Scotland's future in a global context and sets out a way for Scotland and the UK to reform. This is a manifesto for the future free of party lines or the usual orthodoxies - if you read only one book on the referendum, make it this one. The sort of original thinking that has been so sorely missing in the debate. BEN THOMSON, Reform Scotland Badly needed as a guide for the general reader to the issues facing the Scottish people. KENNETH ROY, Scottish Review A rare work - a stimulating read that you would hope party manifestos would aspire to but rarely do. JOHN McLAREN, Centre for Public Policy for Regions A manifesto for the future. ANDY WIGHTMAN, author of The Poor Had No Lawyers… an eloquent and alarmingly persuasive book. THE SCOTSMAN, on Peak Water

Leseprobe

ALEX BELL was Head of Policy to the First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond. Previously he was a BBC correspondent, a writer for The Observer, The Herald and The Irish Times, and a businessman. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife, his daughter and two dogs.

Luath Press is an independently owned and managed book publishing company based in Scotland, and is not aligned to any political party or grouping. Viewpoints is an occasional series exploring issues of current and future relevance.

By the same author:

Peak Water: How We Built Civilisation on Water and Drained the World Dry, Luath Press, 2009, revised and updated 2012.

The people we could be

or, how to be £500 better off,build a fairer society and a safer world

ALEX BELL

LuathPress Limited

EDINBURGH

www.luath.co.uk

First published 2014

ISBN (PBK): 978-1-910021-55-2

ISBN (EBK): 978-1-910324-18-9

The publishers acknowledge the support of Creative Scotland towards the publication of this volume.

The author’s right to be identified as author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

© Alex Bell 2014

Contents

Preface

PART ONE  The People We Are

PART TWO  The People We Could Be

PART THREE  The People Must Choose

Conclusion

Preface

I’M ALEX BELL, former Head of Policy to Alex Salmond, First Minister of Scotland. This is an outline of the White Paper I would have written to make the case for substantial powers coming home to Scotland. To address social inequality, democratic failure, economic instability and global threats we have to take responsibility for ourselves.

I was asked to join the government in 2010 to develop the case for Devolution Max. That means Edinburgh taking control of everything bar Foreign Affairs, Defence and Macro-economic policy. I had written an article arguing for this in 2001 for the Sunday Times. Appointed Head of Policy after the election of 2011, I helped negotiate the Edinburgh Agreement for holding the referendum and set up the work-streams in the civil service supporting the White Paper. I spent two years thinking about the future not just of Scotland but also of democracy and people’s rights in general. This book is a distillation of those thoughts.

The People We Could Be weighs up the challenge, suggests a solution and argues that the existing UK can’t, or won’t, deliver on that solution. We have no choice but to argue for maximum devolution, not as an act of nationalism but of social progress. As Devo Max is not on the ballot paper, I’ll be voting YES.

Any week of the year you can attend a conference on the social problems of Scotland. There are countless books and academic studies on our exceptional bad health, life prospects and neglect of children. Equally there are libraries on the kind of political choices Scotland can make, and the wider global challenges of economic volatility or climate change. I decided not to add to this pile – this is not a footnoted or costed work – instead, it is an argument that sets out a path and ignites debate. Our first duty is to decide where we are going.

I’ve avoided the dull debate between economists on who holds economic power in the UK. Suffice to say I reject the idea that democratic societies should be led by corporations, banks or, indeed, the US Government. As humans we are duty-bound to push the limits of what is known in search of something better. If this generation gives up on that because moneymen don’t want to change then we betray future generations.

I write about Scotland because it is what I know. The analysis and suggested policies could apply to other parts of the UK or elsewhere in the world. While each place needs its own solutions, we face common problems. I argue for power to be brought closer to the people – any people.

PART ONE

The People We Are

THE WORLD WE live in is changing. Never have humans known so much, been so healthy or so rich. Yet we are threatened by financial crashes, democratic decline, climate change and ill-health. We live in contradictory times.

The world is always changing but the present shift feels big. Looking back we can see the period of 1945 to 2008 as representing great success in the rise of nations, many of them democratic, in the building of welfare states and the acceptance of human rights. We became a lot richer in this time and saw a hostile world order evolve into the beginnings of globalisation.

This period is over and the new era is yet to be shaped. The rapid increase in nations may have ended 19th-century colonialism, but the limits of the nation in addressing poverty, ill-health and human rights failures are evident. Welfare states are creaking at the seams and popular opinion is much less accepting of them. Democracy as currently operated is failing in established states through a lack of trust and engagement. Globalisation, underpinned by international finance, has taken a body blow in the crash of 2008 and we are yet to see a more robust model emerge.

We sit between the old and the new, unsure of where to go. There is comfort in turning to the past and trying to preserve the 20th century order of states and power hierarchies. It’s always nicer to hold on to what we know. That is the reactionary thing to do, to cling to the wreckage and hope the next storm is a wee bit gentler. The progressive choice is to accept change and help shape the new world.

For a multitude of reasons, Scotland is having a referendum at this time. We cannot cast a vote or get involved in the argument and ignore the bigger global picture. We have a choice between reaction and progression.

Our public debate doesn’t seem to represent these forces – the discussion is often superficial. We are either patronised on big issues like pension failure and welfare reform or we are bullied into accepting ill-conceived reforms. What we want is an honest conversation on how to prepare for the future.

Voters in Scotland and the UK face two referendums. In September 2014 Scots will vote on ‘independence’ while in 2017 the UK may vote on ‘independence’ from the European Union. Everyone involved in these arguments accepts there is no such thing as ‘independence’ in the modern world. You and I have to work out what is meant by the debate and how relevant it is to our needs.

This book is in three parts. The first will set out the problems we face. It also asks if we have the language and ideas to tackle them. Can we build a fairer society in an age when we don’t trust politicians and have run out of big ideas?

The second part looks at a way of addressing the problems. It is not a complex economic work, but a series of policies that would make life fairer, society more stable and our future happiness more secure.

The third part looks at how the options before voters in the referendums relate to actual policies that will change things for the better.

Context

You are here. Scotland. A country sitting on the edge of Europe surrounded mainly by sea and a land border with England. Over five million people live on a landmass of 78,000 square kilometres. The UK has 70 million people on 240,000 square kilometres. Scotland has a third of the land, but a fraction of the people of the UK.

Most of the people are in an urban belt that runs from Glasgow in the west to Edinburgh in the east and up to the cities of Dundee and Aberdeen. The population was predicted to steadily decline in the 1960s but is now rising. People from states like Poland are settling down and having families.

The demographics show that 17 per cent is over 65, 66 per cent are over 16 and under 65, and 17 per cent are under 16. Each year 56,000 babies are born and 54,000 people die. While births outnumber deaths, the effect of people living for longer means our population is ageing.

The people who live in this part of the world like to think they are religious more than they are; church attendance is falling. In effect Scotland is a secular society with a cultural bias to Christianity. Scotland is unusually white for an era of mass immigration – only four per cent is from non-Caucasian ethnicities. Scotland is tolerant to the same degree as other nations, which is to say racist like other nations, mainly toward people of different skin colour.

We are one of three nations and one province in a political union called the United Kingdom. We have been in this union for 300 years. The UK has frequently changed in status and form. It once sat at the top of a pile of countries in a huge empire. Now it has a scattering of dependencies. Ireland was once part of it, and then left, while a new entity called Northern Ireland stayed with the UK. All the parts of this broken empire have different tax rules and laws – most use sterling as the currency, but not all.

The UK’s future is being questioned by the two referendums. Are these the right changes and if others are better, why are they not on offer? For example opinion polls show a significant number of Scots want powers over immigration, tax and welfare but to stay in the UK. This is not an option they are offered. We are offered a referendum on leaving the EU by politicians who don’t want to leave the EU, but not a referendum on more powers by politicians who apparently do want us to have more powers.

Polls reveal many Scots do not think they have the information to base a decision on how to vote in the 2014 referendum. There is a large amount of information and it may be that what people are actually saying is it is surprising how uncertain and subjective the details of a modern state are.

Scotland is a rich nation – somewhere in the world’s top rank of economies. She has a well-educated, English-speaking population used to the luxuries of wealth and European welfare policies. In historical terms, she has never had it so good.

We are healthier, longer living, better educated and richer than ever before. This is the best the human race has been, if measured by the number of people living comfortable lives. You are less likely to die in pain, be killed by a wild animal or industrial accident, endure a crippling condition, witness the death of your children or degenerate through a sexually transmitted disease.

You are less likely to be homeless, live in a hovel or be thrown out of your home by a cruel landlord. If you fall out of work, there will be financial support. If you fall ill, there will be medical help. Clean water will be on tap, power for your lights – the streets will largely be safe, the shops full of food and the chance of illegal imprisonment remote.

Having suffered exceptionally from industrial decline and the effect this had on health and communities, there is now solid evidence that Scotland’s health is improving, new economic activities are starting and she has a reasonable chance at succeeding in the future. It doesn’t sound like a crisis.

Crises

All ages think they face great challenges, but there is reason to think ours are very serious. How we organise ourselves on the planet, how we feed ourselves, who is in charge and how we make money is uncertain.

The most obvious of these is the financial crash. In 2007 and 2008, the world’s financial system imploded. It has affected every household in the world. Developed economies have shrunk, many jobs have been lost and there are unusually high levels of youth unemployment.

In the UK, we will be paying the debt from this failure for at least the next 30 years, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. According to the current Chancellor of the Exchequer it will take 20 years to rebuild the UK’s economy. We face a generation of recovery. The UK will not return to the same level of national debt it had in 2007 until sometime in the 2030s, if nothing else comes along to rock the boat.

The crisis occurred because too much money was lent to people who could not afford to pay it back. These debts were bundled into bigger units that were then traded between banks. When the banks realised the original debts were bad the bigger products became worthless, and that meant banks had much less money than they thought. Some financial institutions failed and others would have folded but for state intervention.

No-one in government knew what to do. Past crises, such as the Wall Street Crash of 1929, suggested letting banks fail would damage recovery – ordinary people would also lose all their savings. So the banks were rescued by the state nationalising the debt.

Historically, economic failure on this scale has led to depression, revolution and war. This has yet to happen in the west, partly because China, which holds large amounts of western debt, didn’t call it in for cash. Another reason is that there appears to be no alternative to the current system. Lastly, for whatever the faults of national and international governance, they still enjoy broad support.

We are here because the global system broke and nobody knew how to fix it. It has created a debt that we may never pay off. This came after 30 years of neo-liberalism that saw the world get richer, but also a lot less equal. People seem to be paying the price through stress, hardship, poverty and debt. This is not a sustainable way to organise our affairs.

Reaction

At the time of the crisis, two things happened. Governments spoke of banking reform, and of how ‘we are all in this together’ – meaning the nation had to unite against a common challenge. There have been changes to international banking, and banking within the UK, but nothing of a scale which would prevent another crisis. There has been no public enquiry of legal proceedings around the crash.

The economic collapse that followed the crisis has affected wages, government services and the standard of living. It would appear that our democratic structures are less powerful than our financial ones. The Government pursued a series of cuts that suggested we were not all in this together. They targeted welfare claimants and women in particular through a series of budget reductions.

Wider Issues

Developed nations were already facing deep problems. The cost of state provision was getting more expensive as people lived for longer and demand on health systems became greater. Older populations presented a tax problem as the working population could not meet the demands of the retired population.

The UK state cannot afford to meet its existing commitments on pensions or the NHS. By 2050 every tax penny raised will only just cover the pension obligation, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Developed states were also coming to terms with a decline in public trust and voter turnout, jeopardising the legitimacy of government, while a technological revolution was changing how people dealt with the world around them.

Wider threats such as climate change, food shortages and global population growth meant, by the end of the first decade of the 21st century, a sense of the old world running out of steam while a new model had yet to be invented. This added to the sense that nobody was in control.

The following gives a bit more detail on these issues.

Demographics

We are getting older. Average life expectancy is steadily rising. The older you are, the more likely you may reach 100. Some of us are healthier and more active as we get old. Dementia and physical decay will mean many people spend their last decade in a diminished state. At the same time, new conditions such as obesity will kill some of us before we get old. For the first time in human history, the next generation is likely, on average, to die sooner than this one.

These demographic and health issues present major questions about how we organise ourselves. For example, housing stock needs to be adapted for greater access, ideally people would live close to medical assistance while transport systems (such as the reliance on the car) need to be questioned.

There are philosophical issues too – what’s it going to be like being a young person in a country of old people. How do you rebel in a system geared to looking after your grandparents? Life expectancy began to markedly increase about 200 years ago and has substantially advanced in recent decades. The problems we face are new.

Health

Clean water supplies and sewers made urban life safe. The majority of the world now lives in cities, for the first time in history. Unfortunately many city-dwellers are in slums not served by clean water and health standards are poor. Dense populations spread diseases faster than more dispersed ones – for most of the world, the rush to the city has a negative effect on personal health. Poverty kills.

Wealth has its risks, too. The main health threats to the developed world are diseases and conditions of wealth: obesity, cancer and heart disease. These are related to diet, exercise, smoking and drinking. Previous generations did more exercise, often in the form of manual labour, ate less and could not afford to indulge in tobacco or alcohol.

Over the last century penicillin and antibiotics did much to combat levels of disease and infection, but the over-subscription of antibiotics has resulted in them becoming less effective. This is why some diseases, thought to be eradicated, are making a return.

Tax

These shifts in the population affect taxation. To illustrate, the very first state pension was introduced in Germany in the 19th century – it paid out to men over 65 years. The average life span of a man at the time was 45 years. Few people collected the pension, while most people were paying tax.

This has changed: we now have many more people collecting their pension, and other benefits, while the working population is shrinking. Promises made in the early decades of the welfare state become hard to honour under such conditions. However, people who have paid tax for 40 years feel they have a right to collect benefits, even if the money is not there to pay them.

We also have the problem of tax avoidance – the richer people become, the less inclined they are to pay tax. It is very hard for the average worker to avoid tax, but quite easy for the wealthy. In our economic model top earners own most of the wealth. When they do not contribute an even share to the state, the state struggles to pay for services.

While no-one has ever looked forward to paying tax, understanding that it ‘paid for civilisation’, as the writer Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr said, meant people understood the link between contributions and services. Neo-liberalism has undermined this bond and citizens demand high services and low tax.

Democracy

Participation in democracy has fallen steadily across the developed world. Existing systems are not good at reflecting popular opinion, leading to fewer people voting, which makes the system even less representative. The decline in deference means mistakes and corruption which once went unquestioned are now publicly examined, leading to a further decline in deference.

The system appears too set in its ways to be changed – the task of getting your voice heard and affecting reform seems like shouting at the sea to change the tide. Another weakness in current democratic systems is that we suspect money counts. Big business and the interests of global capitalism seem to trump popular opinion. This is called ‘Crony Capitalism’.

Declining turnout could mean that we are satisfied with how things are and see no need to change. When we say of politicians ‘they are all the same’ we should add ‘but that’s fine because things are OK’.

Power

It is not obvious what constitutes power in modern society. Voters will tell you they feel powerless, that the vote counts for little and representatives are remote or robotically loyal to a party agenda. MPs and MSPs will tell you that they feel powerless once elected, unable to influence the things that affect their constituents’ lives. Traditional points of power – the doctor, the minister and the bank manager – no longer carry the same weight. We don’t respect them as we used to.

Governments aren’t that powerful – when a global bank or company decides to move on to a new territory, there is little a government can do to protect jobs or the loss to the economy. The traditional power of military might is unclear – wars of the last 20 years waged by ‘big’ powers have had mixed success while proving very expensive and unpopular. Military power is only as good as the force it is meant to oppose – what use are missiles in an age of terrorism and cyber threats?

There is uncertainty as to who is powerful and who is not at the moment. In global terms, the presumption is that China will soon be the most powerful state. It is unclear if the USA, the EU and Russia are going through minor dips or facing more significant falls in stature.

Much of what we think about Britain stems from an idea of power – a powerful empire, influence on the world stage, a global leader. Britain’s ‘annus mirabilis’ was 250 years ago, her economic leadership eclipsed over 100 years ago. In recent years China, Russia and the USA have publicly questioned her relevance. China rates the UK as the third most powerful state within the EU, behind Germany and France, according to the Chinese media.

The power behind the idea of the UK also comes from the social revolution of 1945–51, when the post-war Labour Government built the welfare state – the NHS, free education, disability benefits and much more. The welfare state is perhaps the only common element of identity we can agree on. It has been notable that defenders of the old UK haven’t promoted other ideas that we can collectively support as a part of being British.

An individual’s power is hard to locate. Much of it stems from where you were educated and your job. Individuals appear powerful because social media allows everyone the same access to comment. The power to be heard is confused with the power to affect things. There are dedicated campaigners who have brought about great acts of reform but this requires a level of commitment beyond most of us. Our power rests in what we choose to buy and a sense of liberty which is ill-defined – we want the liberty to go about daily life unmolested or cheated, but should we want to challenge the state or protest an injustice, we may discover we are powerless.

We appear to have lots of ‘rights’ but essential liberties are vague in a changing world without a written constitution. Technology companies have made it possible for the details of any life to be scrutinised and shared by governments and private companies. The right to personal safety varies in strength according to where you live, how wealthy you are and your religion. If you do commit a crime, the penalty seems to vary wildly according to whether the crime was financial or physical.

Living within a developed society is power – ready access to the liberties of fresh food, clean water and sanitation make the ‘White North’ a lot more powerful than the southern hemisphere. Those of us in the north may fret over our powerlessness but we have more influence over the global agenda than the vast majority of the world.

Wealth