Scotland And Brexit

The shambles that is Brexit has silenced almost everything else in politics for the last two years. It's a mess. But it is a mess with lessons for Scotland.

Listen

First, we need to understand what is happening in areas with social disadvantage, and listen to the people who live there. As Misha Glenny showed in a recent article in the Financial Times, disadvantaged areas in England (defined as places where less than 20% of the population are graduates, and at least 35% of employees work in low-skilled jobs) voted overwhelmingly to Leave the EU. In contrast, areas in Scotland with the same social profile voted to stay. Mr Glenny compares Wigan (64% Leave) with Paisley (64% Remain). Why this difference? What is it about deprivation in England that translates into this vote? Are the people who live in disadvantaged areas opposed to the status quo, and is this a causal link? Are people in these areas anti-immigrant, or do they have a greater sense of having been abandoned by Westminster? We need to know a lot more about how people living in Scotland's worst-off communities think. "The poor are another world," but it is a world we must listen to if we are to avoid building the kind of debate we have seen in Westminster.

Everyone at Westminster is shouting, and almost no-one is listening. Had Mrs May (it is inconceivable, but let's day-dream) involved the four nations of the UK and had she reached out beyond the four governments, to talk to the people of Wigan, Paisley and other disadvantaged communities, had she done that, we would have a very different Brexit today (and quite conceivably, no Brexit at all.)

Power and the Media

Second, power and influence. My friend, who voted Leave, reads the Telegraph; gritting my teeth, I have occasionally read it too. The Telegraph's Brexit is one step forward and three steps back into a sunny British Empire with Cricket and the Ashes as the principal measure of the health of the nation, and Brexit dismissed as a lot less difficult than the First World War.

People do not own newspapers in order to make money. They own newspapers in order to influence, normally to influence the debate around Government policy. The Barclay twins, who live on the nearly feudal Channel Isle of Sark, want power and influence. and the Telegraph editors are happy to comply.

The Telegraph, the in-house journal of the Tory Party, helped to create the mass of Conservative voters who favoured leave, achieving something quite remarkable in that it even persuaded Britons living on the Costa del Sol and enjoying Spanish healthcare, sunshine and sangria to vote leave, apparently unaware of the bullet in their foot, and the mote in their eye.

So which are the media in Scotland with power and influence? Will The Press and Journal come out in favour of independence? No, I don't think so either. And what, oh what, are we to do with the BBC? Overwhelmingly, people in Scotland watch the telly, so getting the BBC onside would be a major coup. Again, highly unlikely. Which leaves us with social media. Set aside the ease with which people of power can buy influence in social media, we will have to hope that the Reverend Stu at Wings, the Wee Ginger Dug, and the erudite James at Scot Goes Pop, are the seeds of a million social media flowers. 

Where is the Backstop?

Third, and even more scary; what will be our "Northern Ireland Backstop"? By which I mean, which currently obscure, unthought of issue will leap up and bite us in the bum after we vote Yes? The most obvious possibilities are;

• The nuclear submarine base at Faslane
• North Sea oil and gas, and the territorial limits thereof
• And, conceivably, the Orkneys, which have consistently voted No

Any of these issues could trip up the negotiations to separate our conjoined nations. Money will be at the heart of a divorce agreement but that is something we all know and can anticipate (and was, indeed, anticipated in the detailed white Paper that preceded the last Referendum). But it's the Backstop, the last thing you'd think of, that I fear the most.

Decline and Fall

But Brexit has also shown us the opportunities. By shining a very bright light into the corridors of Westminster power it has shown us how easily an Empire can decline and fall.

The decline of Imperial Britain is obvious in its Parliament, whose benches are full of Oxbridge white, male, public-school educated chaps, people from privileged backgrounds, with far too little experience of difficulty, deprivation. Brexit has exposed them in all their shouty, tousle-haired egocentricity. These (very) privileged few will now steer this land through a series of crises, because they completely fail to understand that too much wealth, and thus too much poverty, destroys a county.

Brexit is horrible, and will do great damage to Scotland, and to democracy. We need to listen and learn, so that when at last it is our turn, we can win Indyref2.

It's Jeremy's Fault

He was reading a book, a thick book, probably one of those long, complicated novels about family sagas or multiple intrigues. Totally engrossed, he was about a third of the way through the book, his grey hair falling over his eyes and with one hand occasionally stroking his stubbly beard. He looked comfortable, cosy even, in his sleeping bag…

…which was on a cardboard ‘mattress’ on the edge of one of the narrow streets in Barcelona’s old Gothic Quarter, one of those streets that has no pavement. I spotted him and the delivery lorry swerving round him at the same moment, the driver swearing at the invisibility of a dark-blue sleeping bag on the side of the road. The reading man did not even look up from his book as the lorry swerved, such was his concentration.

The man in the Barcelona sleeping bag is homeless. One of the thousands of people in Barcelona who spend each night in doorways, on cardboard mattresses.

A few of these folk find their way into squats. We’ve just had three fires in and around Barcelona in buildings occupied by squatters. All of them linked to multiple causes, but principally to the fact that the squats either had no electricity (and the fires were caused by candles) or that they had an illegal and as it turns out dangerous connection to the electrical mains, in one case with equipment from the 1960s that blew up with the electrical load. I witnessed one of these fires on the way in to work on Monday, with three firefighters leading an injured man to an ambulance.

Poverty is Murderous

Poverty is murderous. It’s murderous in part simply by being poverty (as anyone who has read Pickett and Wilkinson's ‘The Spirit Level’ will know), but it’s also murderous because of what it forces people, desperate people, to do. To squat an old council building and to risk their lives hooking up wires to the nearest street light; or to leave a candle burning next to the mattress where mum and two kids are sleeping. It is the source of stress, of accepting poor working conditions and the ill-health that results from them, and it results in the distinct pattern of life expectancy that we can see in Catalonia or Scotlandwhen we compare poor districts with rich.

The solutions are complicated but not impossible. They include personal actions (what you give, where you shop, who you complain to) and public actions, to improve benefit systems, and to tax the wealthy.

This last point should be the aim of any government, but especially of a Labour government. So you would hope that there was some reasonable chance that, with poverty such a widespread disorder in Britain, the next Government would be Labour.

Corbyn, Confused

Today, there is almost no hope that that might happen. The extraordinarily confused leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, and the indecision that seems to have rent the party into at least four quarters (combining pro- or anti-Brexit, and socialist or centrist), mean that Labour keeps falling in the polls. And yesterday’s YouGov poll seems to confirm that Labour voters will abandon the party if it colludes in a no-deal Brexit.

Like a lemming in the springtime, Jeremy seems to be heading straight for the cliff edge. His pre-Christmas Guardian interview was a classic, inventing a future full of fluffy unicorns and hairy fairies in which he would win an election, head over to Brussels, demand a whole new deal and come back triumphant by March 29^th. Utterly unbelievable, and fabulously fantastical.

He must know that. 

Which means just one thing: that Jezzer is, indeed, aiming for a no-deal Brexit so that he can then blame the Tories and force their resignation via votes of confidence.

He is massively misreading the situation. If Theresa May gets her Brexit she will, as she has promised, organise a huge Brexit celebration on the night of the 29^th March. She knows, and Jezzer does not, that this will inflate a Rule Britannia bubble over England, a re-ignition of right-wing patriotism, anti-foreigner patriotism, that will keep the Tories in power for a generation. (Until the "patriots’" sons and daughters realise that they have been swindled by their parents).

The fires and deaths amongst the poor in Barcelona are a powerful reminder that we need left-of-centre governments in power, that it is the job of left-of-centre politicians to get back into power. That means honesty, and pragmatism, with voters.   

It is Jeremy’s fault that Labour is dreaming of utopias when it should be on the doorsteps winning voters, and on the Commons floor winning votes.

From Clay to clay

I'm in a town in the Potteries, in England's West Midlands. The town was built on clay, and what you could make from it, and there are still the tall chimneys of the ceramics works that were the employers of the region.

The ceramics works are now heritage museums. Which would be fine, if this was part of a successful diversification of industry. But it is not. The scene is desolate, crumbling, bleak. Walking through the city yesterday, Saturday evening, there were too many boarded up and empty shops, with the only thriving retail business, the betting shop. The grocer, who serves as the local branch of Western Union, has his windows barred and meshed so that it appears more like a cop shop in Blade Runner than a place to buy your greens. The roughly-painted restaurant set up by - from what I can read of the flaking signage - a Polish couple has been closed for months. A Wetherstones pub provides a cheery change, its bulky, white, clients spilling out onto the pavement to sing football songs.

But it is the buildings I notice most. Nineteenth century brick buildings, with the carved and moulded additions that signalled ostentation, English-style, with what were once neat little sash windows and once-gay window-boxes for flowers. Now? The buildings are rotting. The roof of one - occupied, with tattered greying curtains at the windows - is curving inward, broken-backed. The brickwork on all of them - made from the clay that also fed the potteries - is crumbling. Clay is returning to clay. How long will it take? How long before this once busy town melts into the earth again?

The census - England is dilligent in charting its decline - tells us what is happening here. The data is from Nomis, based on the 2011 census. This is a poor town, with almost two thirds of the population in socio-economic grades C2, D and E (overall in England, just over 45% of the population is in these grades). One person in five (20%) is on benefits (England 13%). Worse, young people are being abandoned. Amongst 16 to 24 year olds, one in three has no educational qualification whatsoever, and 48% have either no qualification or a Level 1 qualification - the lowest grade (England, 35%). Their future is bleak.

This town has all of the illnesses of the neoliberal economy, the preferred model of Westminster governments since Margaret Thatcher. The state has not intervened, except to pay, grudgingly, the increasingly faulty and impoverishing benefits that its citizens are due. The state has allowed London, its financial quarter and its southern-county hinterland to flourish, while it has left the north to rot.

Why did the state not intervene? The decline of the ceramics works was well-signalled. Their carefully collected census data showed Westminster, long before it became physically obvious in the crumbling façades of the buildings, that this town needed help, needed to diversify, to build a well-educated young population, to be given a hand to climb out of poverty. But Westminster, hypnotised by the snake-oil sellers in the City and the tax-dodging barons of the tabloid press, abandoned the north of England to focus on the comfortable homes and voters of Surrey. 

What now? Like the Scottish Highlands, this town has been cleared. Not by the Duchess of Sutherland and her ghillies, but by Margaret Thatcher and her dodgy economists. A young person with gumption will have caught the privatised Virgin train to London and have looked for work there. It's a town, built on clay, sinking.

Poor Evidence

When Mrs Thatcher came into power in 1979 she, with Sir Keith Joseph, introduced a set of policies which are now known as ‘neoliberal’. The core idea was to cut back on government and reduce tax for the wealthy to encourage them to invest more in business. The wealth would ‘trickle down’ to the poor.

Westminster governments since then have all followed the same policy. Whether they were Tory or Labour, they continued to believe that government should be cut back – and that tax on income was bad for the country (they meant, bad for votes…)

So by now, 38 years of neoliberal policies later, you’d expect to see some pretty good results. You know, evidence that wealth had in fact trickled down.

The data on wealth and income inequality from the Office of National Statistics goes back to 1978. The key measure is the ‘Gini coefficient’ https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/datasets/nowcastinghouseholdincomeintheuk . 

The Gini coefficient is a measure of the way in which different groups of households receive differing shares of total household income. A higher Gini coefficient means greater inequality of household incomes, a lower Gini means more equality.

In 1979, when Mrs Thatcher came into power, the Gini coefficient for non-retired households in the UK was 24.5. Since then it has risen steadily, and in 2014-15, the last full year of data, it was 33.2. That is more than one third (35.5%) more inequality than at the start of the neoliberal experiment.

Failure. The neoliberal experiment failed. Wealth did not trickle down. It floated up. (You don’t need statistics to tell you this. Spend an afternoon at one of Scotland’s busy foodbanks and you’ll see the real human suffering behind the Gini data.)

You would think that decent, honest politicians would admit the failure. Confess that Tory and Labour neoliberalism has not worked, and admit that they are looking for an alternative.

Wrong. Brexit Britain is built on neoliberal policies. The ‘Singapore’ model is low tax, little government and little welfare. And a ‘Hard Brexit’ means more austerity because (a) Scotland will lose its currently relatively generous EU grants and (b) the UK will lose businesses, and thus tax income, to the EU.

In heading for Hard Brexit, the Tories are not only condemning people in Scotland to more and deeper poverty. 

They are also fighting the failure of their 38-year experiment.