SARAH BOYACK MSP RICHARD KERLEY MARGARET CURRAN MP CATRIONA MUNRO TREVOR DAVIES MAUREEN PARNELL KEZIA DUGDALE MSP ANAS SARWAR MP CAROL FINLAY DREW SMITH MSP MIKE FREUNDENBERG FRANCIS STUART DUNCAN HOTHERSALL KATHERINE TREBECK DANIEL JOHNSON DIARMID WEIR FOREWORD BY AFTERWORD BY JOHANN LAM ONT MSP IAIN GRAY MSP Scottish Fabians is part of The Fabian Society, Britain’s oldest political think tank. Since 1884 the Society has played a central role in developing political ideas and public policy on the left. Through a wide range of publications and events the society influences political and public thinking, but also provides a space for broad and open-minded debate. The Society is alone among think tanks in being a democratically- constituted membership organisation, with almost 7,000 members. It was one of the original founders of the Labour Party and is constitutionally affiliated to the party. It is however editorially, organisationally and financially independent and works with a wide range of partners of all political persuasions and none. In 2012 Scottish Fabians relaunched with a programme of members- led discussions, events and publications focusing on an exploration of vision, values and policy. It held its inaugural AGM in November 2012 which elected its first Executive Committee to take forward an exciting programme of work. Join Scottish Fabians today Every member of the Fabian Society resident in Scotland is automatically a member of Scottish Fabians. To join the Fabian Society (standard rate 3 per month / unwaged 1.50 per month) please visit www.fabians.org.uk/members/join. Contributors 5 Foreword 7 Johann Lamont MSP Common Cause 8 Trevor Davies, Carol Finlay, Mike Freundenberg, Maureen Parnell, Diarmid Weir Enterprise as an act of public service 14 Kezia Dugdale MSP From trickle-down growth to collective prosperity 20 Katherine Trebeck, Francis Stuart (Oxfam Scotland) Changing Scotland requires changing Holyrood 27 Drew Smith MSP Delivering social justice through economic change 33 Anas Sarwar MP Devolution as an economic ambition 33 Daniel Johnson, Duncan Hothersall Public services – could we do better? 44 Richard Kerley Double devolution: devo mark two 52 Sarah Boyack MSP Labour, Europe and Scotland 61 Catriona Munro A choice between progress and division 66 Margaret Curran MP Afterword 71 Iain Gray MSP Scottish Fabians w www.scottishfabians.org.uk t @scottishfabians Publications & editorial: Duncan Hothersall e [email protected] This book, like all Fabian Society publications, represents not the collective views of Scottish Fabians or the Fabian Society but only the views of the authors. The responsibility of Scottish Fabians is limited to approving its publications as being worthy of consideration within the Labour movement. Scottish Fabians Executive Committee 2012/13 Daniel Johnson, Convener April Cumming Catriona Munro Tom York Ann McKechin MP Duncan Hothersall Sarah Boyack MSP is Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Local Government and Planning. Margaret Curran MP is Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland and Labour MP for Glasgow East; she was previously MSP for Glasgow Baillieston and a Scottish Minister from 2000 to 2007. Professor Trevor Davies is a former TV producer and councillor, now professor at Glasgow University, who writes and speaks about bringing values and narrative back to the heart of politics. Kezia Dugdale MSP is Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning. Carol Finlay is a former chair of the Scottish Executive Committee of the Labour Party, now Senior Assistant to Alistair Darling MP, having previously worked in human resource management. Mike Freundenberg is an artist, writer and musician, social entrepreneur and non-governmental sector professional, active within Labour, the Fabians & Unite since the 1970s. Iain Gray MSP is Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Finance. Duncan Hothersall is on the Scottish Fabians Executive, is a small business owner and is a past director of the Equality Network. Daniel Johnson is Convener of the Scottish Fabians, co-owns an established Edinburgh business and is a community campaigner in the south of the city. Professor Richard Kerley is an academic and consultant who researches, advises and writes on public service and public policy. Johann Lamont MSP is Leader of the Scottish Labour Party. Catriona Munro is a lawyer specialising in EU law, previously in Brussels and in London, and now in Scotland. Scottish Fabians 5 Ambitions for Scotland Maureen Parnell is a social scientist at Napier University, teaching enthusiastic students from every background, all concerned with the pressing need for political change. Anas Sarwar MP is Deputy Leader of the Scottish Labour Party and co-ordinator of the referendum campaign. Drew Smith MSP is a former member of the Scottish TUC General Council and Labour MSP for Glasgow since 2011. Francis Stuart is Research and Policy Adviser for Oxfam Scotland’s domestic poverty programme and is currently taking forward Oxfam’s work on the Humankind Index and ’Our Economy’. Katherine Trebeck is Global Research Policy Adviser for Oxfam looking at ways to develop a socially sustainable and just economy. Diarmid Weir is a former General Practitioner, now economics researcher, teacher and blogger aiming to expose the reality behind the numbers. 6 Scottish Fabians Johann Lamont MSP The debate about Scotland's future is dominating our politics at the moment as we build towards a referendum on independence. My frustration is that that debate is too narrow, too focused on whether we want to remain part of the United Kingdom or not. I believe the debate about Scotland's future could, and should, be so much richer. The nationalists have a single idea. They get to put it to the test next year. But the radical voices of the left have many ideas. These ideas have changed people's lives for the better, and I am confident they will again. Those are the ideas I am interested in hearing. I want Scotland's future to be a battle of these ideas, competing visions about how we transform an education system that creates opportunity for all; build a sustainable health service which delivers the kind of care we would want for our sick, our vulnerable and our elderly; deliver a justice system that ensures our streets are safe; and construct a new economy that allows all of us to share in future prosperity. The Fabian Society has been always been a melting pot for radical ideas and has helped shaped Labour's past. In taking forward this project, I am sure Scottish Fabians will be central to delivering the radical change we aspire to for Scotland. Scottish Fabians 7 Trevor Davies, Carol Finlay, Mike Freundenberg, Maureen Parnell, Diarmid Weir We are at a fork in the road. We have been beguiled along this gilded path only now to find, in anger and dismay, that the place at which we stand is where the gap between rich and poor is the greatest for a hundred years, where austerity threatens to rend our social fabric for generations, and where divisions between classes, races, regions and nations are being widened, accidentally and deliberately. We have a choice. We can continue, through timidity, or lack of imagination, or preoccupation with the day-to-day, along the crowded path which may still deny to every citizen the chance of a good life of their own choosing. Or we can take the adventurous path which delves into our core values and, from them, begins to configure a different Scotland. The present is stark. In families everywhere, parents, if they can find work, are working harder than ever before and yet are falling behind in a struggle to provide a decent life for themselves and their children. Their living standards, flat from 2000 but propped up by give-away credit, slumped from 20081 and will do so for the foreseeable future. Those same parents, giving their working lives to a local factory, now find the owners are an anonymous off-shore fund doing deals that for ‘efficiency‘ require the factory to shut. Without work they fall back unwillingly onto state support. But the state, its revenue destroyed by tax scams, is slashing its support. The determined single parent of two schoolgirls studying at home for a specialist science degree so she can better provide for her growing girls, reading at night, writing essays at the kitchen table in school hours, paying her own tuition fees and 1 The Resolution Foundation 2013 8 Scottish Fabians COM M ON CAUSE living on the margin, now faces losing her home and the end of her ambitions, because the girls have the ‘luxury’ of a bedroom each – and the government wants therefore to take 40.00 from her support every month. In our low wage, low skill, low productivity, de-unionised economy, the young face a future less prosperous, less certain and more dangerous than their parents. Despite their efforts to keep up, more people live in poor health, more children grow up in poverty. Many eat anonymous adulterated food. Nearly a quarter are in permanent debt. And most of us fail to properly acknowledge that we all live beyond what the planet can provide. Yet, still, we are nagged by a feeling that what we do buy does little to support its producers, but instead puts yet another pound into the collecting boxes of the corporate rich. In a time of debt and disruption, 6,000 hand bags and 245,000 cars are best-selling products. This is not ‘the politics of envy’, as apologists for the old order claim. If we confront those disconnections, it can become instead ‘the politics of justice’. Because at last the economists, the political theorists, the business ‘experts’, their cheerleaders in our far-from-free press, who have persuaded us all over forty years of the ‘truth’ of feudal dogmas of trickle-down economics and the unfettered free market, have been found out.