Left-Yes owes a debt to liberal right wing

COLIN MCINNES

REGARDLESS of the verdict of the referendum one outcome is clear: many on the left-Yes will ultimately be disappointed. I don’t say this to antagonise my fellow citizens, but simply to be clear on the journey a Yes vote would take the emergent Scottish nation the day after the referendum.

First, the Yes campaign has assembled a disparate grouping that includes factions of the far left and the Greens, both of whom have had little electoral success at Holyrood but view a Yes vote as a means to greater power and influence.

And indeed much of the wider Yes campaign has embraced a broad left-ofcentre worldview, for example insisting on a state monopoly for the delivery of public services. But for all their optimism, many on the left-Yes are careful to ignore the inner workings of other small, successful nation states.

For example, Denmark and Sweden are rightly touted as exemplars of modern Social Democracies, and often viewed as a role model for an independent Scotland. However, both nations have to an extent been used as vanity mirrors for the left-Yes campaign, cherry-picking policy which fits with their specific world view.

As I have written on these pages, local fire and rescue services in Denmark have long been provided by a private firm, while Sweden is delivering a growing fraction of its universal health care through private providers.

Both of these Nordic cousins have successfully embraced a liberal private sector coupled with a strong and cohesive social contract. Indeed Denmark is listed in the top 10 nations for economic freedom by the neo-liberal US Heritage Foundation.

This is a simple truth that has been resolutely ignored by the left-Yes, and indeed the Unionist Tories, hamstrung and unable to break ranks on questions of independence.

Now, this is not to argue for the wholesale privatisation of public services, but it does highlight that, in defending the monopoly of the state, the Yes campaign is often trapped in an inherently conservative view of the future, harking back to the supposed certainties of the past.

And while the left-Yes advocate what are promoted as radical new ideas for an independent Scotland, we should recognise that many of these ideas have their roots in the liberal right.

For example, the Citizen’s Income promoted by the Greens was advocated by the liberal economist Milton Friedman through a simple negative income tax starting rate, slashing the cost and complexity of delivering welfare. And just recently, the idea of an independent Scotland informally using sterling without a state central bank is simple liberal economics, as supported by the Adam Smith Institute.

These examples aside, it is unfortunate that the independence debate has been polarised largely along old ideological grounds, with little in the way of truly fresh post-ideological thinking.

BUT lest we forget, the question being asked next week is in principle an entirely straightforward one, a simple act of apolitical direct democracy based largely on questions of subsidiarity. Arrangements for the future provision of public services and economic and foreign policy would be decided only by the representative democracy of a first parliamentary term.

And the outcome of that first vote, and all subsequent votes, is of course unknowable. For true democrats that could ultimately mean taking a postideological high road to a future that reinvents the means of delivery of universal public services, or indeed experiments with unconventional taxation to reduce wealth inequality.

In contrast, the left-Yes has blindly assumed that the wider electorate are forever sided with their worldview. And they have been blinded by a loathing of the Tories and Margaret Thatcher’s legacy in Scotland, leading to a vision of a newly independent Scotland that often appears to be drawn from the state socialism of the past.

Worse, in their unwavering optimism the wider Yes campaign has been silent on the risk of capital flight during a period of protracted uncertainty, or the economic austerity required to build the reserves for an entirely new currency.

Delivering a future of shared prosperity in an independent Scotland, if that’s what we vote for, would likely owe much more to the liberal right than to the far left.