The Arab spring
is with us. But is
winter far behind?
John Cameron
It’s a gas
The football manager who
had ‘no comment’ to make
– even about the weather
Joyce Gunn Cairns
A portrait of A L Kennedy
The survivors
Bob Smith has been taking a look at the minority of MSPs who are not members of the SNP. He continues with what is left of the Conservative Party:
Jackson Carlaw:
might have been expected to win Eastwood. Didn’t. Survives as a list MSP
Murdo Fraser:
deputy leader of the party in Scotland. The one who isn’t known as a national treasure
Ruth Davidson:
does she has the makings of a new national treasure?
Unlike many publications SR doesn’t have an online comment facility – we prefer a more considered approach. The Cafe is our readers’ forum. If you would like to contribute to it, please email islay@scottishreview.net
SR accepts no advertising or corporate backing. We depend entirely on the generosity of our individual supporters. Help SR to flourish by becoming a Friend. [click here]
Routes to
freedom:
1. The cash
Christopher Harvie
I
Exactly two years ago, at a Commonwealth Parliamentary Association hoolie in Guernsey (where else?) I heard an Aberdeen academic give a fascinating talk on ‘shadow finance’. Tom Burns lectures in law and had wanted to write a thesis on the law relating to that mysterious empire of initials, SIVs, CDOs, CDOs squared, which only six months earlier had made off with most of the Scottish financial sector.
Tom – who will surely forgive me if I describe him as looking (though not sounding) like a younger version of Captain Mainwaring – was told, in short order, that there was no such law. It was all contained in computer software, and the purpose which determined the creation of that software was the maximisation of short-term profit to the trader.
The nature of the credit-cultivation business is quite lucidly explained on pp83-92 of Gordon Brown’s ‘Beyond the Crash’, published in December 2010. Only to be followed directly by:
In September 2008, like almost everyone else, I was surprised by Lehman’s problems and the rapid sequence of events that followed: its huge losses, its frantic attempts to secure a rescue, and its final bankruptcy.
Oh that such enlightenment had prevailed over ‘light touch’ in 2004. After this rapid learning curve, Brown and company have used the banking crisis as a stick to beat Alex Salmond, most recently by Alistair Darling on Michael Portillo’s programme: ‘A disaster generated in Scotland that the small Scots economy simply couldn’t have coped with’. But the sort of going-over that the FSA and other bodies have been trying to give the now-state-dominated RBS and HBoS has rarely extended itself out of London.
This suggests a quite different picture: of a co-ordinated banker-driven manipulation in which Scotland, Ireland and Iceland, and their local magnates were simply the ‘useful idiots’ enveloped by the practices set by a universal banker-driven machine. Such inquiries don’t seem in any sense regional, except to the extent that physical distance might have slightly diminished an already cursory oversight.
II
Following Tom Burns, what were investment banking’s values? Not legally-conferred but – as Gillian Tett of the Financial Times argued – tribal? Under questioning from the Economy Committee at Holyrood in 2009, she seemed in some difficulty when asked what socially useful role tribal bankers might perform. Some could become philanthropic, she suggested, rather wanly. But this didn’t seem much more positive than the fact that, up to 2008, some locals were allowed in on the bonuses, while others, notably those to whom the banks had a duty of care, such as shareholders, pensioners, charities, were simply shafted.
Doubtless recollecting the cash-fed legal resilience of the likes of Robert Maxwell, whose thuggery (palliated by Transport House) I endured for four years in the Buckingham Labour Party, the bonus boys were able to exude enough squid-ink to obscure their gains being cashed – much of it, I am told, in landed property. Lord Braxfield would be pleased. Theirs was a sovereign state on the ‘feral Machiavellian’ lines of ‘The Prince’, as opposed to the ‘civic virtue’ of his ‘Discourses on Livy’. To reverse Bailie Nicol Jarvie’s famous line in Rob Roy, ‘credit (rather than honour) is a homicide and a bloodspiller, that gangs about making frays in the street!’.
III
In the great days of Scottish industry its specialisms were strung out along trade routes, largely supplying capital goods to developing economies, many of which, like South American republics, or imperial India, were prevented from producing these themselves. In the 1970s this impulse and some of the hardware adjusted itself to serve the offshore oil and gas industry, yet without establishing, as in Norway, a public interest in it. In many respects the impact of oil actually lessened self-reliance as its wages outbid other local industries – paper, shipbuilding, general engineering. The result has been an economy introverted without gaining lasting expertise and investment from the experience.
It’s now becoming conventional wisdom that energy patterns have to be seriously reassessed, along lines familiar enough in ‘old Europe’ : passive housing, electric generation and traction, the rationing of mobility. At one level this suggests a critical assessment of our own living accommodation, obsessive in a country whose once state-run housing system has effectively become a speculative alternative to inadequate pensions. Makeover shows have masked – even before a time of falling house prices – their mediocre quality and the absence of low-carbon urban planning in favour of ‘Americanised’ exurbia. But what future has this in an epoch of scarce commodities, particularly hydrocarbons?
Professor Christopher Harvie was SNP MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife and has held senior academic posts in both Germany and Scotland
website design by Big Blue Dogwebsite development by NSD Web