Stewart McDonald: We are living in the early days of a new world

The elections of 2015, 2017 and 2019 were defined by vigorous debates over constitutional change, Scottish independence and the UK’s exit from the European Union – political contests that were fundamentally grounded in competing visions of power, the world and Scotland’s place in it.

Today, with two thirds of Scots viewing the economy and cost of living as their primary concerns, the battle lines for the next General Election are already being drawn firmly in the material world.

People across the United Kingdom will go to the polls this year with two things in their mind: a desire to improve their material standards of living after years of Conservative economic mismanagement and political chaos, and an accompanying determination to remove the culprits from office.

For voters in England, there is only one option: Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.

In Scotland, people have another, better choice: the SNP. In contrast to a Labour Party defined by its propensity for hedging, hesitancy and timid triangulation, the SNP can offer Scottish voters a platform firmly grounded in their values and fit for the modern world.

The SNP can offer a platform focused on delivering prosperity, fairness, resilience and independence for Scotland and give Scots a manifesto they can be proud to vote for – one that keeps the next prime minister honest and ensures vocal Scottish representation in Westminster until independence.

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With that in mind, it was welcome to hear First Minister Humza Yousaf give the first in a series of speeches about driving up Scotland’s living standards, and how the opportunity of independence in the European Union is key to doing so.

During a visit to the University of Glasgow, the First Minister put forward the case for a modern industrial strategy to equip Scotland to tackle the deep-rooted economic problems that successive UK governments have proven unwilling to face head-on.

In addition to articulating the immense harm that Brexit has done to Scotland’s current and future economic prospects – something Keir Starmer cannot bring himself to do – Humza Yousaf’s wider diagnosis was correct: the current low growth, high inequality economic model peddled by successive Westminster governments can never deliver long-term economic security for Scotland.

As he made the case for sustained investment in industries where Scotland has a genuine capacity to lead the world, like renewable energy and carbon capture and storage, the First Minister highlighted the extent to which the UK’s economic decline is the result of a series of active choices by successive Labour and Conservative governments who saw no wrong with abandoning their citizens to the mercy of market forces.

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In 1963, Harold Wilson delivered his famous “white heat of technology” speech that marked him out as a moderniser and winner.

That single sentence prompted Canadian sociologist Robert Mackenzie to remark that Wilson had “moved the Labour Party forward 50 years in 50 minutes”. Humza’s speech has the potential to be similarly transformative.

If the First Minister backs it up with delivery of a strategic plan, and empowers the right people to implement it, then his speech last week could be a similarly defining and transformative moment for him and for the cause of independence.

I. The cocktail of insecurity

We live in an age of insecurity and uncertainty. From the cost of monthly energy bills to the effects of the climate crisis, it often feels impossible to imagine how the world might look in a few months – let alone the years to come.

At home, our society and economy have been battered by 15 years of Conservative government, Brexit-induced political and economic crises and a global pandemic. Meanwhile, newspaper front pages feature increasingly regular reports of heatwaves and drought alongside reports of war on the European continent and in the Middle East.

That’s before we get to increasing tensions with China.

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The heady sense of optimism that defined the start of this century has long vanished, replaced by a pessimism and uncertainty about the future. The SNP must craft a platform firmly rooted in this new world – one which explicitly recognises these insecurities and is laser-focused on addressing them by making material improvements to people’s livelihoods, jobs, communities and economic resilience.

This is the only way that we will move the dial on independence.

Economic insecurity

The UK’s economic outlook is bleak. Wages, GDP and productivity are stagnating and chronic underinvestment from the UK Government has left a public realm creaking at the seams.

The current parliament has been the worst for living standards since records began, with the Office for Budget Responsibility’s most recent Economic and Fiscal Outlook reporting that UK residents are experiencing “the largest reduction in real living standards since ONS records began in the 1950s”.

Average household income has declined by 5% – a real-terms loss of more than £1000 per year – since 2019 and the Resolution Foundation predicts that there will be 170,000 more children living in poverty by the end of the decade than there were in 2020.

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Meanwhile, even as the Labour and Conservative parties maintain their joint omerta on the topic, the effects of Brexit continue to ripple through the economy: the Office for Budget Responsibility notes that business investment in the UK has “stalled in the years after the EU referendum” and continues to underperform relative to other G7 countries.

There is no magic button to fix any of these, but the SNP must offer the Scottish electorate hope in the form of a credible roadmap to a more prosperous country.

Social insecurity

Already struggling to recover from the pandemic, public services across the UK are labouring under the weight of inflation, labour shortages and funding cuts. This is most pronounced in the NHS, as waiting lists reach record levels and access to basic services feels out of reach for too many but is seen right across the country, from potholes to public libraries.

This has led to a feeling that our public and social realm is increasingly dysfunctional, out of date and falls far behind the kind of high-quality and reliable public services enjoyed by our western European neighbours and counterparts. Scotland is no exception to this.

My party must face these problems head-on, demonstrating to Scots that the modern SNP are more agile and able than the two ancient Westminster parties, each burdened by decades of vested interests and out of touch with modern Scotland.

Global insecurity

The return of land war to European soil has caused instability on our continent and across the world, as Russia seeks to overturn the international rules that govern our world.

Across the world – from Guyana to Gaza – governments of all stripes have seen fit to overlook or ignore international law when it brushes up against their national interest.

But the crumbling of the post-war architecture of global governance comes at a time when we need it most, with the global challenges, from the climate crisis to emerging technologies, demanding a global response in kind.

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Although geopolitics are not necessarily always front of voters’ minds, the spike in energy bills after the Russian invasion of Ukraine should remind us that the confluence of foreign and domestic policy is now greater than it has been for decades.

See also the impact of Houthi attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea, and the unimaginable hit to the global economy if there is a Chinese invasion of blockade of Taiwan – which, just last week, Bloomberg modelled as hitting global GDP by as much as 10% at worst.

That’s the equivalent of the recent pandemic and global financial crash combined.

This means that we must be an active and credible voice on foreign, security and defence policy – not only because of what these mean for domestic policy but because the challenges of our age demand it.

II. A winning platform: Answering anxiety with credible ambition

It is not enough to offer hope. We must respond to the three branches of economic, social and global insecurity that trouble Scottish voters with credible ambition that will make a positive difference to their livelihoods, jobs and communities – this year and in the years to come.

This means that our offer must be firmly underwritten by a commitment to a Just Transition to Net Zero and, in the best traditions of the SNP, must be a confident cross-society pitch to all of Scotland.

We need look no further than the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to boost the economy, lower costs and fight climate change, and the EU’s Net-zero Industry Act, to see how this can be done.

Combining this agenda with a compelling case for Scotland’s right to choose its own future as an independent country within the European Union represents a vision of the future that Scots can be proud to vote for.

Prosperity

Capitalism is the greatest poverty alleviation scheme in human history, with the power of the market having lifted billions out of poverty, improved living standards to a hitherto unimaginable degree and created the circumstances for us to live more freely than anyone before us.

But untempered capitalism, as we see in the UK today, entrenches the power and privilege of the already wealthy and leaves inequality and misery in its wake. An economic model which tolerates private monopolies and encourages rent-seeking behaviour creates a society which smothers aspiration.

The founding dream of the United States was one of a capitalist society without the barriers of aristocracy and social class, where genuine hard work and innovation would result in upward social mobility for oneself and one’s children.

It remains the ideal that every capitalist society should drive for – and one that the First Minister should not be shy in seeking to emulate.

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Removing barriers to entrepreneurship, innovation and wealth creation is firmly in Scotland’s national interest. This does not mean deregulation. It means making Scotland the most attractive place in the United Kingdom to innovate: somewhere capital can find greater returns in investment than in an Edinburgh Airbnb.

Growing the Scottish economy is key to driving up living standards across Scotland, and ensuring that our people, public services and public realm enjoy a standard of living in line with our western European neighbours and counterparts.

Fairness

Prosperity means nothing if the fruits of those economic gains are not shared across society.

Fifty-one years ago, the trade union leader Jimmy Reid (below) spoke at Glasgow University. All around him, Reid noted “the cry of men who feel themselves victims of blind economic forces beyond their control”, and “the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the process of decision-making”.

The conditions of industrial society, he said, had filled working people with a “despair and hopelessness” and a feeling that they “have no real say in shaping or determining their own destinies”. That speech could have been delivered yesterday.

The SNP must always make the case for a society and economy underwritten by fairness, decency and dignity. This means continuing to push for a fair system of taxation, social security and employment rights and remaining firm in our commitment to a just immigration and asylum system. It means creating a society where everyone has the chance to succeed.

Resilience

The pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine made clear how necessary societal and economic resilience is. If the past parliament was the pandemic parliament, the next one is a chance to show that we have learned the lessons of the past five years and are preparing ourselves for the shocks that we know are coming – sooner or later.

There are a range of opportunities for policymaking on this front that spans across about every portfolio, from health to housing, all of which offer the SNP a chance to show that we are aware of the challenges we face and demonstrate that we have the ideas to steel Scotland against the next pandemic, technological advances, climate change and future shocks.

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The world is not short of ideas: from the Finnish whole-of-society model to the German Bundesanstalt Technisches Hilfswerk, an agency made up partly of volunteers which can be utilised by state authorities whenever a crisis occurs, there are so many countries which are light years ahead of the United Kingdom when it comes to resilience.

Independence

The 2014 independence referendum now sits a decade behind us.

Those 10 years, as the First Minister made clear in his recent speech, represent an entire lifetime in political and economic terms. The way we think about the role of government and the purpose of the economy has changed dramatically since then – and so has the world around us.

The path to independence cannot stay the same while all else changes.

The SNP must push for increased powers for Holyrood across the board, from greater economic levers to migration and an increased voice on the international stage. Above all, the party must use the upcoming General Election to make a bold and confident pitch for the power to hold a referendum to be devolved to the Scottish Parliament. We must put this front and centre of our campaign.

III. Conclusion

THIS essay has outlined the three common strands of insecurity that people across Scotland are battling. I have suggested four pillars – prosperity, fairness, resilience, independence – that I believe would offer a solid foundation upon which to build a more stable and optimistic Scotland.

But optimism alone is not enough. It is vital that, as we do so, we ensure that we focus on delivering impactful and material improvements to people’s lives and communities. This cannot be overstated. We must deliver.

The First Minister was clear on this in his speech. In promising the creation of wholly new institutions to fuel Scotland’s engine for growth after independence, the First Minister showed his recognition that the kind of change we need will only come if big levers at the heart of government are pulled.

As I noted above, however, the next election will be fought firmly in the here and now – not after independence.

While independence is and will remain the SNP’s North Star, we must not lose sight of the here and now. The late Alasdair Gray once wrote that we should work as if we lived in the early days of a better nation. I would take it further.

We are living in the early days of a new world – we must seize the chance to make it a better one.