BITTER TOGETHER
As one of devolution’s architects, GORDON BROWN knew cooperation was vital to goverment success north and south of the Border. Now the Nationalist grievance machine turns every issue into Scotland v the UK, while No 10 is guilty of ‘devolve and forget’. And, warns the former PM in a blistering intervention, it’s Scottish families who are paying the price...
More than 20 years ago, in the first year of the new Labour Government, I sat down with the late Donald Dewar as he was drawing up our detailed plans for a Scottish parliament and writing the Scotland Act that created devolution.
We grounded the new legislation in an unstated assumption: that whatever party labels were attached to the Scottish and UK administrations in edinburgh and London, they would, out of a sense of duty, work together when it really mattered.
They would, we believed, put the everyday needs of people in Scotland first, especially at times of crisis. We thought – and expected – that as a matter of course, common sense would prevail.
No bigger crisis has hit Britain in the 20 years since than the coronavirus pandemic of the past few months. I find it shocking – and deeply saddening – that in this moment of real need, the co-operation that in 1997 Donald Dewar and I had thought likely, has been almost entirely lacking.
The joint working and constructive dialogue needed to help Scottish people survive the crisis has been sparse and often non-existent, as we have seen most recently when Nicola Sturgeon’s speech outlined her Programme for Government this week.
Manufactured conflict, political grievancemongering, one-upmanship and institutional carelessness are all the order of the day, even in the midst of the worst health crisis families everywhere have faced.
And the Scottish people do not like it. We know that most Scots want something better: a poll by the Scottish Fabians last month found that 76 per cent believe our two governments ‘should be better at co-operating on issues affecting my life’.
A dismal fraction, 8 per cent, think the UK and Scottish Governments work well together. This is illustrated perfectly by the bitter battle between the two governments over the name we give to the 2022 UK-wide festival. It is akin to Nero fiddling while rome burns.
Both governments have to take their share of the blame, as illustrated in two recent examples that have shocked me.
A week ago, UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced that a special ‘furlough’ payment would be made to people on low incomes who are forced off work due to local lockdowns. Mr Hancock declared this would apply to and benefit the ‘British public’.
I welcomed the intention but then, on closer inspection, I discovered Mr Hancock was not addressing Scotland or Wales.
By ‘British’, he actually meant ‘english’ despite him announcing a social security payment administered by the UK Department for Work and Pensions. Nobody in Whitehall appeared to have noticed the mistake in advance and that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should have been included.
BUT instead of the Scottish Government reminding the UK Government they should be included, they have done nothing. If Glasgow or Aberdeen face more intensive curfews in the next few months, this local furlough payment would not be available.
And when we look at the SNP’s Programme for Government we know why.
The employment crisis we face is now so serious that a less partisan, more confident Scottish Government would have said that in the interests of Scots families worried sick about their family incomes, they would seek the maximum co-operation on this and other issues across the UK.
Despite all the political differences, that should have been possible – and would have furthered Scotland’s interests.
Instead, the First Minister reverted to type. Her speech will be remembered NoT for what she said about jobs or healthcare, but for what she said about her real priority – a new independence referendum. Speaking only to her party activists, she ramped up the rhetoric on the timing of another vote.
Coming at a time of enormous uncertainty for Scotland, the importance she attaches to this above all else is out of kilter with the priorities and wishes of most Scottish people, who want their leaders to devote all of their energies to the ‘here and now’ of saving lives and livelihoods. Some lament the divergence in approaches to the crisis between Scotland and the rest of the UK.
This has certainly caused confusion. But, for myself, I do not question the SNP Government’s right to use the devolved powers to do things differently and to respond to local needs – after all, that is what devolution was supposed to be about.
The far bigger problem is that, despite our common interests in attacking the same virus together right across the UK, our leaders in edinburgh appear determined not to work jointly and co-operatively even when we share the same objectives and there is a common cause.
The end result is that, through the partisan nationalism on the part of the Scottish Government and the neglect and oversight on the part of the UK Government, the Scottish public, who need their governments to be working in partnership at this time of need, are being utterly let down. If Nicola Sturgeon’s priority really is to save the jobs of Scottish workers, then she would be advocating joint working with the other nations and regions to fight for full employment, acknowledging the cold reality that thousands of Scottish jobs can be saved only in tandem with, or with the help of, the rest of the UK – not by the current stand-off nor by ceaselessly manufacturing grievances with London.
The UK Government needs to change the way it behaves, too. But for a few mainly uncoordinated interventions and fleeting visits north of the Border, Boris Johnson appears utterly disengaged, pursuing a policy which can be summed up as ‘devolve and forget’.
Indeed it is clear that the Conservatives are so unsure what to do about Scotland
that when they do choose to act, they jump between two quite different strategies.
One road takes them to an alltoo-superficial approach that is about advertising the benefits of the Union by flying more Union flags and putting up signs talking up UK-financed projects.
THE other is to mount a hardline in-your-face attack on the SNP with a die-in-the-ditch defence of the status quo. ‘Cultivating your base’, as the Americans call it, may have appeal for die-hard supporters but does not appeal to the rest.
When advocating what they now call ‘muscular Unionism’, they fail to see they should be championing joint working in the interests of the jobs and welfare of the Scottish people – and that this is the best way to expose and challenge the SNP’s narrative that every issue has to be seen as a fight between Scotland and the UK.
For if we are to do our best by the people of Scotland, constructive co-operation, not endless conflict, needs to underpin the relationship between the UK and Scottish Governments.
Later this month, a coalition of business chiefs and union and civic leaders will be joining the think-tank Our Scottish Future in calling for an Alliance for Full Employment across the United Kingdom.
I am calling on the UK and Scottish Governments to join that Alliance today and end the petty squabbling and counterproductive stand-off.
There are hundreds of thousands of Scottish jobs at stake over the coming months: hundreds of thousands of incomes that, together, support families and businesses right across the country. Our two governments must now join together to save as many as we can.
Our Scottish Future has published a detailed plan (www. ourscottishfuture.org) showing how the scourge of unemployment can be properly addressed only by the two administrations working together. We urge the two governments to implement its key proposals immediately.
Post-October – when the UK-wide furlough scheme ends – there has to be continued UK Government support for the wages of workers who are forced to stay at home if local lockdowns are enforced.
This UK scheme should be backed up by a vastly improved testing and tracing regime administered by the Scottish Government.
That is the only way we can persuade people who fear they will have no weekly pay cheque if they are to be quarantined in their homes.
I would suggest that the two governments do far more to help small businesses.
ANOTHEr new thinktank, Scottish Business UK, will tell you that Scotland’s 350,000 small firms (barely mentioned in the Scottish Government’s Higgins report or in the First Minister’s Programme for Government) need help not just with the rates relief and training support that the Scottish agencies can offer, but also through the extension of the loan guarantees that the UK Government has offered.
In my view, they should also have access to a UK-wide ‘equity for loans’ scheme – taking a stake in viable firms through the already established Growth Fund.
The tourist industry, which employs one in every 12 Scots workers, and the wider leisure industry will require special support if they are to return to pre-crisis levels of trade.
They need both the on-theground help of the Scottish Government AND direct backing from the UK, extending furlough support as has happened in France and Germany, who have offered full-time or part-time wage subsidies for up to two years.
It’s time to think of a nextgeneration North Sea, where we focus our energy and expertise on wind and wave power to transform the basin into a new ‘Green Sea’. That requires an improved Scottish planning regime and the retraining of oil workers, delivered by the Scottish Government.
IT also needs a new UK tax framework to help decommission the rigs and develop the more marginal low-profit fields. Here again the Scottish and UK Governments will have to work together, not least to use the new post-Brexit state aids regime to move manufacturing jobs for North Sea wind and wave from Asia and mainland Europe to yards closer to home.
And, perhaps most importantly, the two governments must work together to support young people. No country should have tens of thousands of teenagers and under-24s who have nothing to do. This summer 50,000 Scots young people left school, college, university and training schemes.
They join 25,000 unemployed youngsters looking for jobs.
The Scottish Government has already been too slow to provide the unprecedented numbers of extra places for which they have full responsibility – not just in universities but in colleges, apprenticeships and training programmes. But youth unemployment cannot be eliminated without heightened co-operation between those who run the UK’s social security system, the apprenticeship levy and the UK Kickstart scheme, and those in Scotland who deliver training and skills programmes.
Sadly when, on Tuesday, the First Minister unveiled her proposals for youth unemployment, she did not deem it worth proposing that Kickstart be extended or even mention the places available from the UK Kickstart scheme, designed to create far more additional places – around 20,000 – at a cost of around £200million.
She did offer a guaranteed place to every Scot with the promise of work education or training.
But to honour that guarantee all she could offer on Tuesday was a £60million Scottish fund which will cater not for the tens of thousands looking for work but just a
few thousand a year for two years at an annual cost of £10,000 a place.
The young people of Scotland need Kickstart, as well as the UK apprenticeship levy and the UK social security system, to start creating the kind of places we need and to begin to guarantee every Scots youngster some hope.
Instead of her refusal to acknowledge anything that has a UK label on it, the First Minister should have argued that, in the interests of thousands of the young unemployed, she would work with all those who want to persuade the UK Government to improve its offer.
There has been much talk about creating a ‘new normal’ after the virus. My sincere hope is that our two governments think afresh and differently to adapt to these new, changed circumstances.
If the Scottish National Party really is about protecting the Scottish national interest, then it will accept the imperative to co-operate this autumn.
Equally, if the Conservative and Unionist Party really is promoting the value of the UK, it will agree to reciprocate in kind – and not forget about Scotland, as it seems to do right now.
Co-operation, not conflict, is what Donald Dewar and I hoped would be our modus operandi for dealing with crises.
I urge those parties in power to make those hopes become reality – for the sake of the millions who right now need both governments to work for them.