I don’t know who
he is, but Ryan Giggs
deserved his privacy
Rear Window
Arnold Kemp on John Knox
Alan Fisher
Amer El Shaer struggles to fill his days. He has cleaned his shop several times, sorted his stock and reorganised his shelves. And surprisingly, his paperwork is all up to date. So now he really has nothing more to do than wait.
Sometimes he waits on the chairs in his store. Sometimes he waits on the bench outside in the sun. And sometimes he waits behind the counter, hoping that somehow it will produce a customer. There was a time when his perfume store in the shadow of the pyramids at Giza would be packed with tourists. Not now. The revolution which changed Egypt has scared the tourists away.
For Amer, it’s now not about living, but surviving: ‘Before the revolution, we were making a good profit from the goods we were selling. It’s dropped way down, but it is better than nothing. It is a struggle to feed my family’.
His story is not unique. Everywhere is struggling. Some stores don’t even bother opening every day. Any new face is suddenly besieged by offers from guides and stores, offering cut-price rates. The camels and horses which transport visitors around the pyramids look exhausted. ‘We can’t afford the good feed, we are not making enough,’ says Muhammed, one of the carriage drivers who used to make four or five journeys around the pyramids each day. Now he’s lucky if he makes one.
Figures released on Sunday by the government’s statistics agency reveal that in the first three months of the year, tourism was down by 46%. In February, just over 200,000 foreign visitors came here. The year before it was 1.1 million. Egypt needs tourism. More than one in 10 jobs are directly linked to the industry. And at the moment, it is losing $40 million a day.
One American tourist from Wisconsin tells me he is on a tour of the Middle East. He has been to Jordan and wants to go to Libya. For the moment he’s happy in Egypt: ‘If you watched American TV news you’d think people were dying on street corners every day. I know they had some trouble in January but it looks as if it is all over’.
Samir Radwan, Egypt’s finance minister, knows that tourism will be the driver for any economic resurgence: ‘Tourists used to walk in the streets of Egypt at four o’clock in the morning, no problem. We want this back so that we can regain one of the main sources of growth in this economy’.
The traders here are worried. As the temperatures go up, the number of visitors drops, marking the end of the first high season. The next begins around September. But that’s when elections are planned. If there is any trouble, 2011 could end up being a write-off,
Amer El Shaer’s family has been in business for 30 years and can’t remember a harder time. He knows the new government is trying to make things better. He’s just fed up waiting.
Routes to
freedom:
2. The politics
Christopher Harvie
I ’Tis 36 years since!
What happened on 5 May was what Harold Wilson feared might happen on 10 October 1974: the SNP surging past the breakthrough point. This was the reason why the Scottish Council of the Labour Party accepted devolution in June, after he and Alex Kitson stuck a pistol in its collective ear.
The difference is in the economic driver. The oil crisis triggered by the Yom Kippur war in October 1973 kicked in when the US majors’ oil-rigs were already on the sea. The cost per barrel would go up by a factor of seven by 1975, hitting $40 in the early 1980s: thus aided, technology – pipelaying, platform construction, subsea electrics, positioning – subsequently innovated faster than politics. The major difference from the present is that in renewables the ‘real’ hardware – for subsea generation – is still at the developmental stage and transmission networks still have to be created. But oil is now north of $110 a barrel.
In the crisis years of the mid-1970s, economists debated the economic impact of the oil: particularly after the alarm spread by the circulation within
St Andrews House of Gavin McCrone’s then secret, now (2010) public report on its impact, drafted in January 1974. After it reached Whitehall a year later Chris Smallwood, an economist in the devolution unit, argued that all this dosh would ruin Scotland by boosting the petropound Scots to levels which would ruin exports. In this he was opposed by Professor Donald MacKay of Aberdeen, then a radical, economic-nationalist voice.
MacKay as ‘born-again’ unionist in the 1980s didn’t, I suppose, want to be reminded of this. Smallwood has climbed via Whitehall into consultancy. But MacKay’s argument was sound and fair to England. By following a slow rate of depletion and tethering the Scots economy to England by investing surplus oil profits in her economy, exporting industries north and south would remain competitive. This was of course the road not taken by Thatcher, who after May 1979 added the high interest rates demanded by Milton Friedman to cut the money supply to an oil price already skied by the first Gulf War. 20% of UK manufacturing dropped dead.
II Too many tsars?
One of the more bizarre aspects of Holyrood life has been encountering a quangocracy equipped for the aftermath of this earlier crisis. In the 1970s, like most Scots social democrats, I had seen the extension of the state sector in classic Fabian terms as the growth of a collective ethos overcoming the economic divide by improving education and the social services. But in the days of Shaw and the Webbs and as late as the 1960s this had still fronted the ‘industrial democracy’ of the trade unions, and the technocrat level voiced by
H G Wells and later C P Snow.
After 1980 in my own line of regional studies I found myself forced to be an entrepreneur, using a limited income to get technical back-up. But I was living in, and being influenced by, Europe’s most heavily-industrialised region, where most students had advanced industrial connections, banks were open and friendly, and the press was determined to be technically informative. Result: eco-hi-tech transport engineering – in my own field the rebirth of public transport via the Karlsruhe-modell tram-train – photovoltaics, passive-houses, etc: the pathway to renewable electrics had already been cleared.
In Scotland the avocati in the economy were professional consultants or bureaucrats, rather than engineer-entrepreneurs – in the lazy slang of Scotmedia ‘tsars’ rather than ‘technocrats’. A politics oriented at screwing investment out of the London centre, and a reputation – in part deserved – for sensible finance, would after the 1990s winter into bureaucratic empire-building and self-protection. The national potential of ‘power as manoeuvrability’ in the field of technical innovation must again be invoked.
III Scotland and the Nordics
This used to be called the ‘Nordic’ line, and its lure was real enough to the Nords. I spent part of the summers of 1977 and 1978 touring for the British Council in Finland and remember a lunchtime do in Helsinki hosted by the foreign minister Keijo Korhonen, where I gave a position paper, at which he said that Scotland in the Nordic Union seemed quite a good idea, as it meant its official tongue could de facto become English instead of Swedish. Who knows? An organisation thus materially and collectively empowered might have restrained ‘irrational exuberance’ and qualified German power in the Baltic 12 years later after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Norway’s pre-oil evolution had been through the vital interest of her merchant fleet, by 1914 the fourth largest in the world. The impulses behind this growth were various, partly by taking trade away from federal American ships during the civil war, then the shrewd buying-over of UK sailing ships as our fleet went over to steam in the 1880s. This interest was found to be incompatible with the Swedo-Norse dual monarchy created by the 1814 constitution, and after a gradually loosening process steered by Sigurd Ibsen, son of the dramatist, formal separation came in 1905.
The situation at present takes its point of departure from the oil business. ‘High-depletion’ Britain hit its peak in 1999 when ‘light-touch’ Broon let the stuff be sold off at $10 a barrel. UK reserves are now down to a fifth, while Norway still accesses about a third, though what remains continues to appreciate in value as Peak Oil takes over. Germany, increasingly likely to go non-nuclear and with little coastline access to strong swells, tides and currents, will have to look north. Her general engineering expertise can be used to transform the North Sea into a multivariant power producer: oil, gas, wind, tide, wave, current. It can also be used to bury carbon dioxide in the former oil strata. Estimates vary, but there’s at least 15 years capacity there for North European needs.
IV Paying the piper
How do we pay for this? It’s important to distinguish between essential investment and ‘popular’ investment, and circumstances compel us to change industrial strategy. Sea freight is important and presently constrained by the privileges granted to CalMac.
Professor Alf Baird of Edinburgh Napier has suggested that it would be better to have a powerful ministry of marine promoting a market in carbon-neutral marine innovation of the sort favoured in Scandinavia. Elsewhere among the key developmental factors Scotland requires industrial powers, presently incompatible with UK policy, which confer international authority to negotiate partnerships that will realise and co-ordinate such critical long-term assets. As with the oil in 1978, a settlement based on UK party-political and City interests – themselves increasingly nebulous – rather than on prudential long-term development will simply feed delusions which ought long ago to have moved on.
We can have renewables, because the potential of new marine turbine and power storage technologies forecasts the same sort of revolution that 250 years ago James Watt saw in the clumsy atmospheric steam engine. But only if we concentrate investment by junking the luggage of an old and soon- unaffordable hydrocarbon world: Trident, the aircraft carriers (whose price-escalation alone – £2billion – comes out at four Edinburgh tramlines), the second Forth Road Bridge. With the $200, maybe even $300 barrel likely within a decade, we either steer the new vehicle, or it runs us over.
Professor Christopher Harvie was SNP MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife and has held senior academic posts in both Germany and Scotland
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