Great Scots:
Twelve faces of
the last 25 years
Great Scots:
Mick McGahey
Great Scots:
A selection of
nominations by readers
Great Scots:
Winnie Ewing
The Cafe
Several months ago (2 March) Kenneth Roy published the article ‘The questions they are asking our children’. This highlighted the fact that Falkirk High School was forcing its pupils to use the supposed ‘voluntary’ Young Scot Card to obtain school meals.
Prompted by this I made a Freedom of Information request to Falkirk Council to ascertain whether this was an isolated occurrence or essentially council policy. Two FOA requests later (yes, they really weren’t too forthcoming at first!) it seems that it was indeed implicit council policy. My three FOA requests can be accessed here:
whatdotheyknow.com1
whatdotheyknow.com2
whatdotheyknow.com3
The Young Scot Card is, of course, a National Entitlement Card (NEC), and pensioners and the disabled were the very first to be conned into accepting them back in 2006. They were deceptively informed that these cards were merely a new kind of bus pass. However, they are very much more than that, and there is no doubt that this was a New Labour ‘slow burn’ plan to introduce a Trojan Horse ID card. Moreover, the fact that in the registration process each pensioner or student has been issued with a Unique Citizen Reference Number (UCRN) and placed on a national database means that such cards are so intrusive that they would not be permitted as ID cards in other European countries, such as Germany, which actually issue compulsory ID cards.
As a pensioner and a campaigner against ID cards there was no way that I could accept my new so-called ‘bus pass’ back in 2006, and I therefore sent it back. And so despite the fact that I have a proper entitlement to free bus travel the Scottish Government continues to withhold this from me. It is clear that many Scottish councils are applying similar bullying techniques to force school pupils to take these supposed ‘voluntary’ cards. Meanwhile, even our SNP government, avowedly firmly opposed to ID cards, remains thoroughly duped by the New Labour plan.
Dr John Welford
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Growth? In Scotland,
the word is missing,
presumed lost
Alf Young
In its first minority administration at Holyrood in 2007 the SNP set out as its core purpose ‘to create a more successful country, with opportunities for all in Scotland to flourish through increasing sustainable economic growth’.
We would all know it was delivering on that mission if it met two self-imposed targets. The first was to raise Scotland’s GDP growth rate to the UK level by 2011. The second to match the GDP growth rate of small independent EU countries by 2017.
Some of us wondered at the time why a devolved minority government with limited economic powers would choose to place its credibility at the mercy of objectives it has such limited control over. Even governments with a full suite of fiscal and economic powers find it hard to boost growth when they want to. Look no further than Washington right now if you doubt that.
Alex Salmond and his cabinet openly monitor progress on both their GDP targets. You can go on to the Scottish Government website and see how they are doing. Currently progress on matching UK growth by this year is apparently flat-lining. And progress matching what Mr Salmond used to call his ‘arc of prosperity’ by 2017 is going backwards.
On another part of the government’s website you can find more detail on how we are doing trying to match UK GDP growth this year. We know nothing yet about Scottish GDP growth this year. The first stab at the figure for the January-March quarter won’t be released until 20 July. But we do have the story up until the end of 2010. And, on the face of it, our performance is indeed flat-lining.
The Scottish Government’s own data tells us that, over 2010 as a whole compared with 2009, ‘GDP in Scotland increased by 0.8%, whilst UK GDP increased by 1.4% – a gap of 0.6 percentage points in favour of the UK. This compares with an annual decline in GDP up to the third quarter of 2010 of 0.2% in Scotland and an increase of 0.4% in the UK, again a gap of 0.6 percentage points’.
However, the government’s website goes on to reveal that, if you go back a little further, you find that while it flat-lined over those two quarters at the end of last year, the gap in annual GDP rates between Scotland and the UK had actually been ‘widening’ before that. The site even provides a simple graph, charting annualised Scottish and UK GDP changes way back to 2001.
In the first two quarters of 2010 Scottish growth was matching UK growth. In all four quarters of 2009, Scottish annualised growth was actually ahead of the UK. Now it’s 0.6 percentage points behind. But, in terms of any core ambition to grow at least as fast as the UK as a whole, all this signifies very little.
If Scotland was growing faster than the UK over the period 2003 to 2007, why would an incoming SNP administration in May 2007 select as its core purpose boosting Scotland’s sustainable growth to match the UK’s by 2011?
For throughout 2009 and most of 2010 both the Scottish and UK economies weren’t growing at all. Output was contracting thanks to the recession that followed the great banking crash. Families weren’t flourishing. They were watching their living standards falling in real terms, fearing for their jobs and pensions and wondering what the future held for their children.
Even in the pre-crash years back to 2001, when both economies were growing consistently, the gap in GDP performance between Scotland and the UK see-sawed back and forward. In late 2001/early 2002 Scotland was growing faster than the UK. Then the UK surged ahead again in 2003, only for Scotland to reassert its growth advantage in 2004. The government’s own graph shows these regular oscillations continuing right up to the banking crisis and beyond.
This month the Centre for Public Policy for Regions published a briefing note on the changing pattern of Scotland’s economic growth since devolution. It split equivalent comparative data into three successive periods. From 1998 to 2003 the UK overall outgrew Scotland. From 2003 to 2007, Scotland outgrew the UK. And from 2007 to 2010 both economies contracted at about the same rate.
But if Scotland was growing faster than the UK over the period 2003 to 2007, why would an incoming SNP administration in May 2007 select as its core purpose boosting Scotland’s sustainable growth to match the UK’s by 2011? That target was already in the bag before the SNP got the keys to Bute House. All that’s happened since then is that growth, thanks to the great banking crisis and the recession that followed, has been off everyone’s agenda.
It’s not even clear, in this new age of austerity, that it will be back on the agenda any time soon. Financial services, with banking at their heart, were a massive driver in growth in mature western economies in the years before the crash. With many banks still deleveraging and facing more stringent controls on what capital they should hold, with companies hoarding cash and households spending less, any early return to pre-crash trend rates of growth looks increasingly unlikely.
One former deputy governor of the Bank of England recently suggested the sustainable UK growth rate going forward may be more like 1% to 1.5%, rather than the 2.5% the independent Office for Budget Responsibility assumes, far less the 3% plus rates of the boom years.
It may even be that Mr Salmond and his cabinet colleagues are beginning to sense that all that 2007 talk of higher sustainable growth as their government’s over-arching purpose is becoming something of an albatross around their necks. You can still find all the GDP data on their website, but all the talk, from the May manifesto on, has been much less about growth and much more about employment. This manifesto tells us that ‘creating and protecting jobs will be at the very top of our agenda’. Bold claims about growth are nowhere to be seen.
Alf Young is an award-winning journalist who writes regularly for the Scottish Review
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