Red Tories

Imagine the scene. It is November, 2020. England has Brexited and immigration controls are in place.

You are the boss of a small software company in Shropshire. Your latest computer game, Zombies on Mars, has gone viral and you urgently need to recruit games animators and developers. No-one in London seems to wants to work in Shropshire, so you plan to recruit people from Spain, Poland and Germany.

These people, post-Brexit, need a visa to work here.

You apply to the new Ministry of Work. They tell you that the 2020 quota for software engineers has now been filled and that you must reapply in January 2021 and 'join the queue.' 

You complain to your Member of Parliament. How can you grow your business if you cannot recruit these people? She replies that it is 'our Government's duty to ensure England's jobs go to English people.'

The Ministry of Work website says that there are still visa places available for;

• Dog Groomers
• Ball boys (tennis courts)
• Polo pony Stable Assistants
• Golf Caddie drivers
• Beaters and Gun-porters for Hunting and Game Estates

If you enjoy golf, polo and shooting, you can employ anyone. But if you want to run a business, you are throttled by the Ministry.

The light starts to dawn. You now live in a planned economy in which a central government body is controlling the flow of the one resource that all businesses need - people. 

The Ministry of Work becomes increasingly powerful, for it dictates how the economy will function. Lobbyists work hard to persuade the Ministry to favour their industry, and senior civil servants are offered sexual services (provided by migrant sex workers) as part of a widening scandal of corruption.

As part of the government's Northern Powerhouse programme, the Ministry of Work announce that unemployed people 'who do not hold British passports' are to be moved to northern England where they will be employed in vast new factories to make golf balls and 12-bore cartridges. People refusing to move will have their benefits cut off, and if they continue to refuse will be moved by the police.

Amnesty International publishes photographs of the new 'factories' and reveals that they are surrounded by razor-wire. Amnesty compares the camps to the Gulags.


Welcome to the planned economy of Stalin's England. The Ministry of Work is now in control and she or he who runs it, runs the economy. As Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang pointed out in '23 Things they don't tell you about Capitalism', controlling the supply of labour controls the economy by controlling wages; 'Wages in rich countries are determined more by immigration control than by anything else.'  ['Thing 1', page 5]


This is, finally, the supreme irony. The Conservative Party is now the party of the planned economy, the party that tells you what you can do and where you can do it. The party that will be faced with a choice between visas for care workers and visas for stablehands...and will favour the horses over the nurses every time. These are the real Red Tories.



Back in Shropshire it only takes the boss a few minutes to work out that the best thing she can do is relocate her firm to Scotland. In newly-independent Scotland there is free movement of labour, and open access to the vast market of the EU.

This is the independence bonus, the huge boost to Scotland that will come when England Brexits and an independent Scotland Remains. Let's get there.

It’s the economists, stupid

What is the cost of deploying 80,000 French police officers over two days? What is the cost of 17 lives cut short? When will economists include these costs in the balance sheet on poverty?

There are many, many reasons behind terror attacks, some of them delusions in the heads of the individuals who carry them out. But there is one clear reason behind the war that is currently being waged from Baghdad to the banlieue; poverty.  People with nothing, with nothing to lose, excluded from a society that appears wealthy and comfortable. Imagine if Afghanistan were a prosperous country, or if Syria were Norway, full of people engaged economically, emotionally, socially with their society, and whose growing prosperity depended on that society. In that world people would have no need to create terror.

But Afghanistan, Syria and the Levant, and most of North Africa are not like that. Nor is the banlieu. In all of these places there is poverty, defined as people having an income that is under 50% of the median income in the place they live. In all of these places people have emerged who are able to gather and organise the poor and the dispossessed and turn a few of them into bombers and fighters. A few, but enough to cause death and destruction in the rest of the world.

We, the rest of the world, have allowed these places to get poor or to stay poor. We have allowed some suburbs to rot while others, often only a few kilometres away, enjoy all the fruits of wealth. Through our trade rules and our geopolitics we have allowed North Africa to grind along in poverty while we sun ourselves across the water on the Riviera or the Costa del Sol.

According to normal economics, that’s all fine. We measure ourselves, economically, as having prosperous lives and economies. The World Bank says that Afghanistan has a GDP of $20 billion, while that of France is $2.8 trillion, more than 100 times greater. This is the wealth gap – and to underline that, the World Bank says that 35% of the Afghan population live in poverty.

But “normal economics” is wrong, stupid.

France is now paying the economic cost of allowing other parts of the world, including its own banlieue, to fall into poverty.  So are all of us in the rich countries.  These costs of poverty should feature in our accounts. From France’s GDP we should deduct some cost for the fact that she (alongside all of us in the West) has allowed other places to fall into poverty. Some cost reflecting the 80,000 police officers and the 17 lives lost. Some cost reflecting the hundreds of thousands of life-opportunities lost to the people who live in her banlieue. Some cost reflecting the ways we all pay for poverty.

That would be real-world economics. A world in which we could not balance our books without taxing ourselves heavily for the true cost of poverty.
 

A Stroll to the Polls

It's a sunny, breezy September afternoon and we are walking arm-in-arm to the polling station. Someone says "a penny for your thoughts." 

Here are mine:

I think of the poor. The poor in Ferguslie Park or Possil Park, where you are three times as likely to be unemployed and if you are unemployed, almost five times as likely to be sick and unemployed as folk living in the least deprived areas of Scotland. Your baby is likely to be born underweight and is much less likely to be breastfed - meaning that her daughters will also be underweight. You are locked into poverty. Why? Because the UK government is structurally and philosophically unable to deal with Scotland's poverty. Structurally because its main focus is on London and the South East. Philosophically, because since Margaret Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph all our main political parties believe that by reducing direct taxation and allowing a few to get very, very, wealthy, that wealth will "trickle down."

It doesn't.

It floats up. The wealth gap widens*. And we create a broken society. The poor live in one world - what Abbé Pierre in France called the "4th World". We, the better off, live in another. We, the better off, think that poor people are just shirkers or lazy or dependent; we don't talk to them, find out who they really are. Neither the poor, nor the rich, feel part of the same society...and as a consequence of that the poor occasionally break up the street furniture as happened in 2011 in London, and the better off and powerful feel free to impose extra taxes (the "Bedroom Tax") on people they don't know and don't care about.

Westminster believes in this neo-liberal philosophy down to its very soul. Holyrood doesn't. Scottish politics has barely been touched by these ideas and as a consequence is willing to work for the poor. But its hands are tied by Westminster. So long as Westminster can carry on imposing its taxes on our poor, and its tax breaks on our wealthy, the poor of Scotland are condemned to poverty. We can break out of our poverty trap on 18th September.

We talk about your working lives, and business.  Imagine, I say, a country on the edge of the world's largest trading bloc. It's an English-speaking country with a tradition of enterprise, trade and export. It has massive oil reserves and loads of wind and wave energy. It has a highly educated population and a strong research and technology base, with more universities per head than any other country in the world. It's relatively easy to meet the people in charge - they are just down the road. Fancy building your new factory or headquarters there? Yes, of course you do! As an independent country it will do what everyone else does and nudge business rates here or taxes there to encourage inward investment. But it won't have to. Scotland will be a dream to invest in.

You mention the Commonwealth Games - so good for Glasgow. Those nations - almost all of them once ruled from London. Even the tiny Sovereign Republic of Kiribati has its own government. Scotland can be a member of the Commonwealth too - as a sovereign nation, with the Queen still on her throne and the sun still rising each morning.

And then there is Trident. Set aside the madness of parking nuclear bombs 25 miles upwind of Glasgow, and of a heavily indebted country spending £4bn a year for 20 years on a new Trident. Trident is a metaphor. It's from the time when "Brutain's hardy sons" dominated an Empire. The missiles still get us a place in the UN Security Council, give us a role in US military adventures, and signal that we are an imperial power. It's time to stop, and think. It is time for Britain to grow up and out of Empire, to become a modern, constitutional state. Remove the bomb and we can do that. On 18th September we can take that step away from bombs, America and Empire and towards a modern, fairer union of equals with our neighbours.

And now we stop for a moment to take a look over someone's lovely garden. We take a breather. Because I am about to make a more controversial point.

I think we've been hypnotised.

All our lives we've been told that Scotland is poor. Too poor to look after itself. So poor that it is only kept alive with a dripfeed of Barnett-formula handouts from Westminster. And now I've woken from this hypnosis, and looked away from the propaganda. And I see a country that is an oil-producing nation, with productive, profitable industries (whisky, tourism, alternative energy). We're an oil producer! We are not poor! We've been sucked dry of resources and of talent, and then told we're handout junkies. This (take a deep breath, because this really is strong stuff) is how colonial powers work. Time for Scotland to crawl out from under the Empire and pay for itself. We can do it.

We talk about leaders. You comment that Holyrood is full (you acknowledge, gracefully, that there are a few exceptions) of small-minded politicians. So I tell you the story of a brilliant young advocate. With a good education at Loretto and the University of Aberdeen, he was an outlier in his cohort of young law students. He was a socialist. He dabbled in politics at university, and then as a councillor in Edinburgh. But he knew where the real power lay - in Westminster. He went to London to seek his fortune, eventually becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer.

That's what you do if you want to change the world in the UK. You join the Westminster brain drain. But now imagine March 2016. Our brilliant young advocate can play a role in running a whole country from just down the road in Holyrood. He doesn't have to head to London to do politicking. He and others equally clever will fight to get themselves elected in Scotland's Parliament. We will get the leaders we need. We can do it.

We are getting close to the polling station now, and it's time for you to go in and vote. There is a crowd of silent, thoughtful people outside, because this is a big choice. I don't say anything - you must decide which way you will vote. But in my head I'm hoping. I'm hoping that you will vote for the poor of Possil Park, not for the whirlpool of Westminster.

You decide, and step in.

*I have data and sources for all of this if you want. But this is a conversation, remember.

To a First-Time Voter

The Referendum on 18th September will be your first ever vote. So it's a good opportunity to find out about how politics works. I mean how it really works, not the theory.

You can see a good example of how it works in the "Plan B" issue that has been top of the news this week and last. As you will know, this is about Scotland using the pound.

Alastair Darling asked Alex Salmond 20 times, during the infamous TV debate "What is your Plan B?" In interviews and statements, Mr Darling and his BT colleagues have focused on the "lack of a Plan B." And now there is a poster campaign about the lack of a "Plan B."
 

What is going on?

Mr Darling is a clever politician. He knows that it is relatively easy to make people worried. You just have to find out what scares people - so he and his team will have been surveying and questioning people to find that out. And they will have discovered that (as Bill Clinton said) "it's the economy, stupid" that most people are concerned about. So they have picked something big and obvious like "the pound in your pocket" (these are favourite politicians' phrases - hence the inverted commas), and a catchy phrase about "Plan B." This is propaganda.

"Propaganda" just means information that is used to persuade people of a point of view, or to act in a particular way. It has been used for good and for bad through history, and comes in every flavour, shape and size. The "Plan B" campaign is a good example:
 

How Do I Know It's Not Butter?

You can check whether or not something you hear, read or see is propaganda. Here are some easy tests:

Is this stuff everywhere?

Effective propaganda is widespread - so you can expect to see it everywhere. You'll see it in Facebook and on Twitter, in the newspapers, on the TV and in adverts in the street. "Commentators" will talk about it, long and often. "Analysts" will appear to, er, analyse it. Propaganda works when it is everywhere.
 

Are you feeling emotional?

Propaganda is often designed to make you feel emotional. So emotional that you stop being rational. I hope that you never live through an era when there is the worst type of propaganda - that which engenders hatred - but you may feel twinges of fear or anger. The "Plan B" story makes people worried, and that may be enough to trigger them to vote "safely" for the status quo.
 

Is someone trying to make me do something?

All through history, propaganda has been used to make people do stuff. Before you were born, Mrs Thatcher created a war with Argentina over a tiny archipelago of islands called the Malvinas. I remember standing in Charing Cross Station in London seeing the Sun newspaper headlines about the "Argies" and realising that I was in the middle of a propaganda campaign. The Government wanted me to feel that Argentina was our enemy. But I knew that Argentina had for years been a friend of the UK. There was and is a huge population of Britons there - I think it has the largest population of Welsh-origin people in the world (I mean, more than are in Wales!) But the newspapers, the TV, the radio, were full of bad stuff about the "Argies." This was propaganda.
 

Look the other way, at the stuff they are not saying

If you think you are being fed propaganda, look the other way. Think about the stuff that is NOT being talked about. Politicians often try to hypnotise us - like rabbits in the headlights - and the "Plan B" campaign is just such a trick. BT are shouting about the lack of a "Plan B" but they are NOT talking about, well, everything else! They are NOT talking about the health service, or poverty in Scotland, or the £4bn-per-year Trident missile, or making a fairer society, or free university education, or… Get the idea? Propaganda tries to grab your attention. Turn away, and think.
 

Think it through, for yourself

What happens when you think it through for yourself? Can you see the flaws? Walk through, in your mind, what would happen if Scotland voted Yes on 18th September. There would be a massive negotiation afterwards, of course. England would want some oil, Scotland would want rid of the Trident nuclear bombs, England would want access to Scottish fishing grounds, Scotland would want to keep the pound… It would all be negotiated.

What the politicians are doing now is they are preparing themselves for that negotiation. They are trying to get into the best position to negotiate with the winning side. Scotland can use the pound if it wishes - it's an international tradeable currency. But the Scottish Government wants more; it wants a currency union. Darling knows this, so he is making it hard to get. Salmond is also focusing on the pound, because he wants the voters to support Scotland's demand for currency union. No-one is admitting to any Plan B, Plan C or Plan D because to do so would look like weakness in the negotiations that will follow the vote.

When I think it through for myself, and look away from the propaganda I see Scotland's poor. I know we could have a better Scotland in which the poor are not abandoned. That's why I want a Yes vote.
 

And This, Too?

And you'll have worked out the logical conclusion. It's all propaganda, this note included. So what do you do? Think for yourself! How do you want your country to be governed, in your lifetime?

The real Scottish Question

The recently released (22 July 2014) Public Sector Finances figures from the ONS show that the UK’s Public Sector Net Debt is now £1,304.6 billion. Divide that by the number of adults in the UK and we each owe £25,833.

Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Miliband have announced that, should Scotland vote for independence on 18 September, the Scots can’t have the pound. The Bank of England has said that it will honour the whole UK debt.

If the Scots can't have the pound, then they are not responsible for the debt. That will pile another £2,400 of national debt onto each voter in the rUK.

The real Scottish Question is; do the voters of England want £2,400 more debt?

We should agree a shared currency and a shared debt.