Owning Scotland's Land

Scotland's land. 

OK, yes, it is my croft.

The white saviours, led by Benedict Macdonald, are again taking up the white man's burden to save Scotland's 'Wild Land' from the wild Scots. His business model is essentially to rent-seek off subsidies provided by the Scottish government intended to support rural communities and rural development, and divert the money, instead, to his friends in the City of London. Yes, this is just the latest cover of a very old tune, but it's long past time we said 'enough'.

The Right Solution

It remains my view that the right solution to Scotland's land problem is to apply a single, universal, highly progressive land tax to every square metre of Scotland, with the proceeds going to local government at a layer far closer to our current community councils than to our present regional councils. This taxation should be so progressive that it would essentially bankrupt all large estates immediately, causing them to surrender the vast majority of their land to those same councils, which would hold it as common.

These councils would be empowered to let parts of their common land to individuals on a non-heritable liferent basis, and to let parts to corporate entities on a maximum term of fifty years, but they would not be empowered to sell common land. At all. Ever.

However, for this solution to be implemented, we'd need a bold, far-sighted and progressive Scottish government, and there is at present no prospect of our ever having one. So we need to look for other solutions.

The Co-operative solution

So, let us suppose we set up a co-operative fund, called for the remainder of this document 'The Co-op Land Fund'. This fund would sell shareholdings to members of the public, who could put in any amount (over a set minimum of perhaps £100); but each member would get only one vote, irrespective of the amount of money they had put in.

This fund would buy parcels of land, normally in blocks of over 100 hectares, and would lease those parcels of land on long leases to further co-operatives ('management co-ops') which would manage and/or occupy that land (ideally, both).

There are two potential models for this:

1. The Co-op Land Fund could speculatively buy a parcel of land and invite proposals from people interested in forming management co-ops to manage/occupy it;

2. A nascent management co-op could approach the Co-op Land Fund and say 'there is this particular parcel of land which is now on the market, which we would like to manage/occupy, will you buy it and lease it to us.'

Obviously, the Co-op Land Fund could, and I hope would, operate both these models.

The idea here is that the management co-ops would either represent existing communities of place - a village would set up its own co-op to bid for land in its locality - or intentional communities which had the intention of becoming communities of place, by co-residing on the parcel of land which they leased.

Ideally, the management co-ops would hold the land more or less in perpetuity. They would pay a rental to the Co-op Land Fund, which could provide, in addition to finance for land, also finance for buildings and capital plant, and could also provide land management and ecological advice services.

Management co-ops should be essentially local, holding one parcel of land or at most a few parcels of land within easy cycling distance of one another. Everyone living on, or working on, the land held by a management co-op should be entitled to membership of that co-op.

In short, I view these management co-ops as being essentially something like Standingstone.

The Co-op Land Fund should set broad guidance for activities and developments which should be encouraged, should be discouraged, and should be disallowed, on these parcels of land; this guidance should generally be designed:

1. To maintain the land in good long-term ecological health;

2. As part of that, to sequester carbon;

3. To produce strategic goods including food, natural fibres, timber and electrical power;

4. To foster community and repopulation.

    
   

The virus, and independence

Nicola Sturgeon, giving a briefing on coronavirus

At least 750 - other people online have estimated more - folk in Scotland have died from COVID19 who would not have died if they had lived in any of our northern European neighbours of the same size.

In Denmark, there have been, as of 20th April, 61 deaths per million people. In Estonia, 30. The Faroe Islands, none at all. Finland, 16. Iceland, 26. Ireland, 123. Latvia, only 2. Lithuania, 13. And Norway, 28.

But Scotland has done worse, far worse. We've lost 166 people for every million.

That's the open and shut case for independence right there, isn't it?

If we had been independent, we could have saved 750 people who are now dead - and remember, we're less than half-way through this crisis. There are at least another 750 people living in Scotland today who will die unnecessarily unless we change course.

This is true.

But the key word in that sentence is 'could': because if we had been independent under this SNP government, we would not have lost any fewer. Every aspect of health policy and transport policy is devolved. The UK government's policy on coronavirus has obviously been slapdash, chaotic, incompetent and irresponsible, and that was already obvious as far back as January. But nothing in law required the Scottish government to follow that policy.

It's possible, as some SNP defenders have suggested, that the UK government have put severe pressure on the Scottish government to follow its lead; but if so the Scottish government needs to say so and to document it. It seems to me far more likely, given what we know of Nicola Sturgeon, that the choice has not been a consequence of pressure but of calculation. Sturgeon is risk averse, and inclined to delay big decisions. She will (rightly) have felt that if Scotland had fared even slightly worse through the crisis, it would be seen as an argument against independence. If this is what she thought, she was right, of course. By closely following UK policy, by making slight tweaks at the margin of it, she ensured that Scotland's outcome was at worst very similar to the UK's. But also, at best very similar.

There's a very strong smell here of "when you go out stay close to nurse, for fear of meeting something worse" - and that isn't a good argument for independence at all.

So what could Scotland have done differently?

We could have implemented track, trace and isolate from day one, and maintained it. Across the world, countries which have implemented track, trace and isolate have done far better than those that haven't. The scandal here is that the UK did track and trace the first few cases, and then abandoned the policy; and Scotland hasn't done it at all.

We could have required face covering in public places. Of course masks don't stop infection, but they do greatly reduce the spread of virus particles. It doesn't have to be a surgical mask. A scarf would do almost as well. And again, countries which have required face coverings have done far better.

We could have quarantined all arrivals for fourteen days. The Public Health etc. (Scotland) Act 2008, section 40, gives us this power. It would be clumsy: if an arriving passenger refused to be quarantined, it would require for a sheriff to make an individual order for that person. There's no provision for a class or general order. Thousands of people arrive in Scotland every day, and if they all refused to be quarantined we would not have enough sheriffs to issue the orders. But, again, we have passed emergency legislation for COVID19; it would have been easy to add a clause temporarily adding a general quarantine order.

We could have quarantined arrivals. There are plenty of hotels standing empty which could have been taken over as temporary quarantine centres. We chose not to.

Much of Scotland's imports, including of crucial things like food, arrive on trucks coming up from England, mainly by the M74. But we could have instituted a system of routing off arriving vehicles at Gretna into the parking area at the 'Outlet Village'. Articulated truck tractor units could be swapped over there, so that some tractor units (and their drivers) remained in Scotland, shuttling trailers to their destinations and back to Gretna, while those drivers arriving from the south remained in accommodation in Gretna until their trailer was returned, or went back to fetch another load from England to swap trailers at the border again.

All this would be complicated, it would be a nuisance, folk would complain; but it could be done.

This is made more complicated by the fact that there isn't, yet, a rapid, reliable test for coronavirus. In fact it's worse than that: the UK test, as OpenDemocracy revealed on Tuesday, is very unreliable indeed: it misses 25% of all cases. Of course, Scotland didn't have to use the UK test. There are commercially available tests from pharmaceutical firms such as Hoffmann-La Roche and Abbott Laboratories which are more reliable. We could - if we had acted early - have bought these. We didn't, and they're now in critically short supply.

Because we don't have effective tests, We would have to quarantine every single arriving person. We would have had to swap tractor units, or at least change drivers, of every single arriving load (and, frankly, since the virus remains viable on surfaces like, for example, steering wheels, for some time, just changing drivers without a pretty effective clean of the cab at the border doesn't seem to me adequate). Folk who commute across the border - there are quite a few - would just have to pick a side for the duration. It would be complicated. It would annoy folk. It would be expensive.

Well, yes it would. But what we're doing is expensive. Emergency medicine is expensive. The Louisa Jordan hospital is expensive. If we had far fewer cases, we wouldn't need the Louisa Jordan. We wouldn't be overburdening our hospitals. Spending money at the border and at airports, on quarantine, on changeover of tractor units; spending money on track, trace and isolate; spending money on better testing facilities - all these things would save money in hospitals. More importantly, it would save lives.

What's your old dad's life worth? Is it worth a thousand pounds? If it is, a politician could say, oh, well, we're only going to lose a few thousand people, that's a few million pounds, let it rip. That's what Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings wanted to say. If you see people's lives as fungible, as of essentially monetary value, then even if you priced lives at a million pounds each, there would be an economic case for letting the disease rip. But is that how we want our governments to value our lives? Is that something we want to see the government of Scotland do?

I'd argue that it is not.

Folk are saying that we don't have our own currency, we can't print money, we can't even borrow. All that is true. But what the UK is doing is also enormously expensive. Under the Barnett Formula, we're entitled to a pro-rata share of everything they spend. Taking a different tack on coronavirus would not make Kate Forbes already demanding job any easier, but it's the job of politicians to make tough decisions, to rise to the occasion in a crisis.

The Scottish government just isn't doing this. It has all the powers, and has choesn not to use them. It is true that the UK strategy has been complacent and irresponsible, and that the UK's delivery of that policy has been chaotic and incompetent. But what we have in Scotland is a competent, orderly implementation of Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings complacent, irresponsible policy, and there is no-one outside Scotland who can be blamed for that.

Growing up as a nation is about owning up when you get it wrong. Growing up as a nation is about not blaming others for your failings. Growing up as a nation is about learning to take your own risks, your own hard choices, your own responsibility for your own actions; and right at this moment, Scotland is failing to do any of this.

Over the course of this crisis, at least 1500 Scots will die in Scotland who would not have died if we had followed the policies of any of our similar-sized northern European neighbours. Is that an argument for independence? You bet it is. But they will have died not because of the UK government's failings, not because of its complacency and irresponsibility, but because of our own.

We need to own this. And, we need to lay the blame squarely on the government and on the ministers who made these choices. Is that an argument for voting for the SNP in its current form next year? Not without a dramatic change of direction.

World enough, and Time

Orrery of the Long Now clock

Last night I listened to an episode of the Politics Galore podcast which utterly depressed me: not because the content was depressing (although it was), but because the analysis was so shallow. It analysed Scotland's current dilemma solely in terms of the Westminster political game played by Westminster's first past the post rules. It suggested that the next independence referendum could be, and tactically should be, delayed until the late 2020s, as though nothing in the world would change in the meantime.

Human beings are programmed to believe that nothing much in the world, on a macro scale, will change very much from one year to the next. We call this inductive reasoning, and over the past million years it's served us pretty well. On the whole, tomorrow has been more or less like yesterday; on the whole, next year has been more or less like last. And for most of that time, what lay over the horizon was literally unknowable: oncoming crises, no matter how inevitable, could not be predicted or prepared for.

This is no longer the case. Multiple interlocking crises — the changing climate, the mass extinction of species, the concentration of wealth and power — are changing the world rapidly. We can now see over the horizon; we do now have the tools.

Consequently, you can't now discuss Scotland's politics in isolation from our geopolitical context. I'd identify several key factors:

1. There is a strong risk that the UK will diverge sharply from EU over the few months after December 2020;
2. There is a strong risk that climate change is running substantially faster than IPCC have allowed for, and that action to mitigate is lagging far behind;
3. The new digital propaganda tools by which well-funded actors can manipulate elections are rapidly maturing; and consequently
4. There is a strong risk that the English-speaking world is sliding towards something resembling real fascism or at least oligarchy.

Both Scotland and the UK are bit-players in all this; we don't move the tides of history, we have to ride them. The attack by Russia on electoral processes in the UK is not primarily aimed at the UK so much as at creating chaos and turmoil across the West. In that sense the UK's only geopolitical significance is as a keystone in the defences of the European area of stable peace against chaos, and it's a keystone which no longer has any structural integrity.

For clarity, in saying 'the attack by Russia' I'm not saying that the attack is made solely by Russia, nor that the attack is in the long term interests of the Russian people or state. Rather, it's an attack by an emerging oligarchy, which currently controls Russia. Nor is this oligarchy monolithic; rather, it's made up of a class of ultra-rich individuals who very largely do not see themselves as a collectivity and who very largely do not coordinate their actions, but nevertheless each act 'rationally' to protect and enhance their accummulated wealth and influence.

They include, but are not limited to, those who profited from the ill-managed privatisations in the collapse of the Soviet Union; absolute rulers of oil states in the Arabian peninsula and elsewhere; the hereditary aristocracy of Great Britain, including the House of Windsor; 'tech entrepreneurs' including Gates, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Brin, Page; the financial services elite; and the controllers of major organised crime cartels. These groups, of course, socialise, intermarry, interpenetrate, overlap; that is the nature of a collectivity.

Surrounding the oligarchs themselves — who may or may not be consciously malign — there's a penumbra or Oort cloud of actors who clearly are malign: people like Murdoch, Bannon, Yiannopoulos, Rees Mogg. They are, in a sense, the intellectuals or ideologues of the oligarchy, forging an ideology which allows the oligarchs themselves to 'rationally protect and enhance their wealth and influence', by undermining and destroying the democratic institutions which would otherwise allow mass action to erode those accummulations. But they're not oligarchs themselves, although they may aspire to be; they're hangers on.

One very worrying thought made powerfully by Umair Haque, when he says "climate change accords perfectly with the foundational fascist belief that only the strong should survive, and the weak — the dirty, the impure, the foul — should perish", is that the oligarchs (or their ideologues), rather than putting their shoulders to the wheel to resist climate change, may consciously be seeking to accelerate it.

To say 'but we can't resist these forces' is probably true, but that way leads simply to despair. If human life on earth is to continue, people (including Scotland as a bit-player) must resist these forces, now. It isn't sufficient to go on playing the Westminster game, and, in particular, there isn't time to think about the long game. As John Maynard Keynes said, but with particular force now, in the long run we're all dead.

Pulling focus back to Scotland, what worries me is that the SNP's analysis is as shallow as Politics Galore's. Like the podcast, they believe that the future will be much like the past; like the podcast, they ignore the turbulent geopolitical forces which mean it won't be.

Salmond was a risk-taker; Sturgeon is not. She will play it safe. As the tides of history tear our society and our economy apart, she will wait irresolute for a 'perfect moment' which will never come. The merit of Angus MacNeil's 'Plan B' was not primarily that it actually was a strategy (Sturgeon's wistful hope that she can somehow extract a Section 30 order from a triumphant English Tory government is not), but that it gave us a fresh bite at the cherry with each successive Westminster election.

But there (probably) isn't time. Measurements in Greenland and the Antarctic show that the Climate Emergency is moving much faster than predicted, and meantime the oligarchy and its ideologues are honing its anti-democratic toolkit.

Scotland alone cannot swing the UK back to a path of sanity. We're structurally weak, and, as Johnson gerrymanders the electoral system to lock in Tory majorities, we'll remain structurally weak. Our escape route is to bind ourselves to the European bloc (EFTA or EU), and then to work to strengthen — and radicalise — that bloc; but we cannot do that without independence.

We don't have, for reasons I've given above, much time. You would not have been wise, in 1935, to make any political plan for three electoral cycles hence: the tides of history would have washed it away. 2020 will be 1935 on steroids.

I still believe — and believe strongly — that an independent Scotland could be a positive actor on the world stage, both in seeking to build peace, justice and stability, and in seeking to resist climate change and slow the rate of extinctions. But time is short; the crises are urgent and rapidly becoming more so. If we cannot achieve independence within a very short time frame, it will be time to abandon indulgences like constitutional tinkering and seek to build alliances to defend our planet. Indeed, it may well be that time already.

An independent Scotland on a dead planet would be a very hollow victory.

Party Party

Let's start this essay with a confession that I may have been badly wrong. I have been saying for some time that I did not believe that Nicola Sturgeon would actually call a second independence referendum; rather, that she'd use Westminster's expected rejection of an Article 30 order to indefinitely postpone one. Well, possibly, I was wrong. I hope I was wrong. Both The National and the SNP now say that Sturgeon will announce a concrete date for IndyRef 2, in 2020, at a rally in Glasgow on Saturday 2nd November.

So, good. Sometimes, it's nice to be wrong.

However, then we move onto the campaign. I expect the Scottish Government to produce a white paper, as they did in 2014, setting out a prospectus for independence. And I expect that prospectus to be, as it was in 2014, broadly a steady as she goes, don't rock the boat prospectus: a prospectus for a broadly technocratic, social democratic Scotland, more closely aligned to the interests of Andrew Wilson's clients than to those of the broad majority of Scots.

I do not believe the white paper was the critical vote winner in 2014. I think the broad vibrancy of the Yes campaign, the thousand flowers that bloomed, and in particular (for me, anyway; but I think for many others) the Radical Independence Campaign's slogan 'Britain is for the rich; Scotland can be ours' were more influential. Be that as it may...

Supposing there is a referendum, supposing Yes wins, supposing the UK government honours the result. There's a Holyrood election on 6 May 2021, which will undoubtedly happen before negotiations - with the UK, with the EU, with EFTA - are completed, and whose results will strongly influence the outcome of those elections. 

If, as the SNP assumes - the SNP is elected to govern, especially if it is elected to govern with a majority - we will see an independent Scotland built in the image of that white paper: which is to say, not very different from the United Kingdom we are leaving.

The Queen will, almost certainly, be the head of state. Lords will still lord it over us. The land will still belong to the rich. Our system of democratic governance will remain highly centralised, with enormous, profesionalised 'local government' units administering territories each larger than one sixth of all independent countries in the world. The capitalist system will remain entrenched, owning most of the nation's industry and infrastructure. We'll even keep the pound - for the time being, at any rate - and that will prevent us rejoining the EU.

I don't believe that's the Scotland Scotland wants to be. I don't believe it's even the Scotland most members of the SNP want to see. Independence which changes nothing is worth nothing.

So what do we do about it?

Lesley Riddoch, at a fringe event of the SNP conference, suggested she'd start a new party to challenge the SNP from the decentralist left. She slightly rowed back from that in her column later that week, but the idea is a sound one. In order to challenge the SNP's corporatist, technocratic vision at the 2021 election, we will need a new party. 

If it's a brand new party, of course, it's ridiculous to suppose that it can sweep to power in one bound. But that is not the point, as Lesley has said: the point is that the SNP is vulnerable from the left, and it knows it. The party has triangulated right so far and so fast in the past six years that it's left most of its members, let alone its supporters, behind.

A clear challenge from the left will push the SNP leftward. A strong challenge from localism should cause the SNP to at least reconsider its centralist bias.

The Holyrood electoral system - which I'm assuming we'll still use in 2021, since there is no current strong pressure to change it, and there isn't much time - gives space for small with broad support across Scotland. That 2021 government will be critical to the shape of Scotland for a generation at least, since it will supervise the process of agreeing a constitution. It is critically important to have influence in it.

A government of all the talents in which Lesley joined Andy Wightman, John Finnie, Maggie Chapman from the Greens, Tommy Sheppard, Alison Thewlis, Mhari Black, Mairi Gougeon, Jeanne Freeman and Mike Russell from the SNP would build a far more interesting Scotland than our current SNP cabinet.

And if we're to have such a party in place - if a new party is, indeed, needed, because it may be that what we should do is join the Greens - we can't wait, as Lesley suggested, until after independence. We need to start putting a platform together now. Yes, we can lift a great deal from work already done by Lesley herself, by Common Weal, Radical Independence and others, but we would need a clear, coherent platform, and that would need to be constructed.

I think it's time to party.

Eagles, and governance

Young eagle flying with trap clamped to its leg

Here is the text of my letter to the First Minister regarding the wildlife persecution on grouse moors crisis. I strongly suggest you write to her too, but please write your own letter - copy/pasted letters tend to get ignored.

Dear First Minister

The SNP's craven inability to face down landed interests has always disappointed and puzzled me, but the developing crisis over the behaviour of grouse moor managers and the failure of your government to intervene in it is reaching the stage where it risks undermining the whole independence project.

You will (I hope) be aware of the illegal slaughter of Scotland's iconic wildlife on the grouse moors, from eagles to wildcats. You will (I hope) be aware that there is today a young eagle flying in Aberdeenshire with an illegal trap clamped to its leg.

Now, we have a petition, addressed to the Westminster parliament, asking it to intervene in a devolved matter. which in less than one day has gathered more than 16,000 signatures, and which is highly likely to gather several hundred thousand. You will see from the map that a very large proportion of these signatures have come from remote rural Scotland - where you cannot afford to lose votes.

In these febrile times, do you really want Westminster holding a debate on the failure of your goverment? Do you want grandstanding Tory ministers - the fragrant Alister Jack - having a popular excuse to take powers back from Holyrood because of Holyrood's failure to legislate effectively?

We have left an open goal, and in the run up to the next trial of strength on independence we do not want the Unionists to be able to say, "well, we trusted them to care for their own woldlife but they wouldn't do it; why should they be trusted with independence?"

It's a good question, and one which will be hard to deal with on the doorsteps.

Please act now, by enacting a bill which places a duty of care on estate owners to prevent wildlife crime on their land, with penal sentences on the beneficial owner if they fail to do so.

Yours sincerely

We'll not go

Ships leaving the Broomielaw

We’ll not go; we’ll not send back nae letters fae onywhaur -
The ships of migration can ruist on the Clyde.
We’ll not go, we will ficht here, we’ll staun or be buried here,
Lik the floors o the forest on the Broomielaw’s side

Enclosure nae mair,
Eviction nae mair,
Clearance nae mair,
Lairdship nae mair

Dunbar nae mair,
Flodden nae mair,
Pinkie nae mair,
Culloden nae mair.

We’ll not go; we’ll not send back nae letters fae onywhaur -
The time for acceptance has left on the tide
Tak a luik doon the lang road
Fae Caithness tae Gallowa’

Last nicht I lay restless, whiles I wis speirin oan
Whit th Proclaimers hae sang o oor grief an oor pain
For the savour o strawberries that hae grown in thon saut sea
O the tears we hae gret, we hae let faa lik rain.

We’ll not go; we’ll not send back nae letters fae onywhaur -
These times are passed noo, but noo we sall rise
We’ll not go; we sall scrieve here a Claim o Richt for ilkane -
There’s a nacion tae big here, an here we sall bide.

Mundell nae mair,
Carmichael nae mair,
Murray nay mair,
May nae mair.

Province nae mair,
Region nae mair,
Devolution nae mair,
Union nae mair.

Dunbar nae mair,
Flodden nae mair,
Pinkie nae mair,
Culloden nae mair.

Enclosure nae mair,
Eviction nae mair,
Clearance nae mair,
Lairdship nae mair

We’ll not go, we sall bide here, at hame here wi freedom
Whaur the roses an geans noo aa gailie blume
In this yird we will welcome the bairns o auld Adam
Tae aa dance a reel tae a bonnie new tune.

Flodden Field, revisited

Nicola Sturgeon

Scotland has history of meddling in English affairs in the interests of continental friends. It doesn't end well.

In 1513, James IV, quite possibly the best governor Scotland has ever had, tried by diplomacy to persuade England's Henry VIII to make peace with France; and failed. So he sent his navy to France in support of the French, and invaded the north of Northumberland, taking three castles but not much land.

On 4th September, at a council of war with the much larger English army closing and a field of battle agreed, the Earl of Angus - yet another Archibald Douglas - argued that Scotland had done enough for France, it wasn't our fight, and the army should come home. James, annoyed, sent Archie home, with quite a portion of the army. But he then, sensibly, moved the remainder of his army to a very strong position on Flodden Edge, from where the powerful and modern Scottish artillery would have devastating fire over the battlefield.

On the 7th of September the English general, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, wrote to James saying this wisnae fair - in the words of his letter, the Scots position was a fortress. His message was 'come down and fight on the flat, like decent chaps', while carefully preventing the Scots from getting sight of the size of his own army.

So what did James do? He moved his whole army, including those precious guns, to a much weaker position on Branxton Hill; and on Friday the 9th, the English closed. As they did so they brought their own artillery and much of their army in over the Twizell Bridge, within range of the Scottish guns. The Scots did not open fire; chroniclers say that this was because James ordered them not to.

Twizell Bridge, photo By Kirsty Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0

And if you look at the site and it just screams at you. The bridge is still there. It's a single span bridge, extremely vulnerable to heavy artillery, which the Scots army had in position. If the bridge had been destroyed with the English army half across, it would have made a huge difference to the outcome. The Scots would probably have won.

They did not open fire.

Instead, James marched his army down from their position on the hill to meet the English in a marsh; and in that marsh the Scots were butchered.

There were so few Scots survivors from that battle that we do not have good accounts from the Scottish side. James himself, of course, was killed. But we know from the instructions sent to the Scots ambassador in Denmark that the surviving government in Edinburgh saw James' inexperience and folly, rather than any great generalship on the part of the English, as the cause of the disaster, and from what records we have, it's hard to disagree.

But that's not what I came to talk about. I came to talk about the People's Vote.

In March 2017, Nicola Sturgeon, certainly the best governor Scotland has had in modern times, tried by diplomacy to persuade England's Theresa May not to drag Scotland out of the EU against Scotland's will. Like James Stewart before her, she was rebuffed. She had a strong position; Scotland had voted overwhelmingly to remain, she held 56 of the 59 Scottish Westminster seats, she had a clear mandate for an independence referendum.

But Theresa May, like Thomas Howard before her, said it wisnae fair. "Now," she said, "is not the time." And instead she held a general election. The SNP's powerful and modern electoral machine was in a strong position; by standing on an 'Independence Now' manifesto it would have won a majority of Scottish seats and achieved independence while Scotland was still entirely within the EU Aquis Communautaire, making our accession to full membership a formailty.

She did not write that manifesto.

Instead, Nicola marched down off the heights and engaged the Conservatives on their own ground, seeking to keep the entire United Kingdom within the Single Market. As Archibald Douglas said, Scotland had already done our part, by voting remain. England's position in the Single Market or out of it is not our fight.

All Under One Banner, Edinburgh, 6th October.

Of course, she still won a majority of Scottish Westminster seats, but from the position of strength she started from she was bound to; the subsequent eighteen months have shown us how little that majority is worth, without decisive leadership from the top.

Nevertheless, there was still time for an independence referendum before Brexit. Of coourse we couldn't expect a Section 30 letter from Westminster, but that is a technicallity which we could have dealt with in the campaign. The Yes movement was all pepped up and ready to go, the SNP membership was at an all time high.

But no. No, you may not open fire on that exposed bridge, while the English are engaged in complex manouvres. No, we shall meet the English on their own chosen ground, by campaigning on a people's vote.

What is this nonsense? It isn't Scotland's fight! Scotland has voted. It has voted to remain in the EU, and it has voted three solid times in three years to give Nicola Sturgeon the mandate to call a referendum on independence.

Say there's a people's vote. Say Remain wins. How does that help us win independence? It does the opposite. It gives the No campaign the chance to argue once again that the quickest way to lose European citizenship is to vote Yes. So winning this 'people's vote' does not help us.

But that if, as is virtually certain to happen, Scotland again votes Remain, and England again votes Leave? Why, then, we get a reinvigorated right wing government in London ready to repeat the mantra "now is not the time" ad nauseam, and we are at their mercy as they do trade deals with America which will devastate our agriculture, our food and drink industry, our environmental standards and our health service.

Those who will not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. Just as James Stewart marched down off the hill to the total destruction of his army, his hopes, his nation, over a fight that was never Scotland's to fight, so Nicola Sturgeon is doing once again. The first time is tragedy, agreed, but the second time is too dark to truly be considered farce.

Scotland needs to be better than this. Scotland needs to grow up. Scotland needs to acknowledge that England is different from us, has different needs and priorities to us. Scotland has to learn that we cannot - and should not try to - impose our ways on our bigger neighbour. We have to fight our own battles for our own national interests. And that means, being independent in Europe.

Roads to independence

All Under One Banner - Edinburgh

With the Brexit process nearing its decisive point, I've been reading good analyses of the potential future paths by Chris Grey and Jon Worth - for the UK as a whole. I haven't seen an analysis of the future paths for Scotland which seem as good to me, although the Politics Scotland blog has had a go. I'm not saying my analysis is better or is better informed, but for what it's worth here it is.

No-deal Brexit is probable

Under the European Union (Withdrawal) Act, the UK leaves the EU at 23:00 UTC on 29th March 2019, whether we have agreed deal or not. That is less than four months away now, but it's four months which includes the Christmas and New Year holidays, so in practice it is more like three.

There is no majority in Westminster for the negotiated deal. There is a theory that, having failed in the vote on Wednesday 12th December, May could return to Brussels, negotiate some trivial face-saving tweeks, bring essentially the same document back to parliament and have it pass; I don't believe that is likely.

I think it much more likely that the vote on the 12th will fail, probably heavily; and that in the wrangling and chaos which results, the clock will run out. To me, just now, a no-deal Brexit looks virtually inevitable.

A 'snap election' won't happen

Under the Fixed Term Parliament Act, an early election requires two thirds of MPs to vote for it. Almost half of all MPs are Tories, who know they would be very heavily defeated in an election held now. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas.

A second EU referendum is irrelevant

There's a lot of folk arguing for a second EU referendum. I don't think that will  happen, but it could. For it to happen, all of the following would be required:

Theresa May would have to be replaced as Prime Minister. I don't believe she'll resign. She is under a very great deal of strain, and might have a health breakdown; more probably, there could be a vote of no confidence in her or her government.

A Vote of no confidence in May by Conservatives would require that 48 letters of no confidence from Tory MPs are sent to the Chair of the 1922 committee. The European Research Group have been trying hard to achieve this total, and have clearly failed; however, losing the vote on the 12th could change that.

But if the total were achieved, a Tory leadership election would take time, and, given that the membership of the Tory party are much more extreme Brexiters than the population as a whole, such an election is very unlikely to produce a leader who would support a second EU referendum.

A vote of no confidence in the government by parliament would require all of the opposition parties (including the DUP) to vote together. It's unlikely that all Labour members would vote against the government, but a few Conservatives might, so it's possible that this would pass. What happens next is tricky. Corbyn would have an opportunity to form a government, which would require all the parties other than the Tories to form a coalition.

Tories would need to cross the floor. Corbyn himself doesn't want a referendum; the DUP definitely don't; so such a government would be unlikely to support a referendum. The only possibility there is if some Tory MPs (possibly Sarah Wollaston, although it's hard to think of many others) crossed the floor to join 'a government of national unity', which would not include the DUP.

The EU would have to agree to an extension of Article 50, even if a government prepared to hold a referendum could be formed. The new government could not be in place before January at earliest; a referendum campaign takes considerable time; if an extension is not agreed, then the clock will run out.

The second referendum probably wouldn't change things. Polling on a second referendum indicates that the UK as a whole is still split about 50/50 within the margin of error. There has not been a decisive swing from leave to remain. Furthermore, we have not effectively addressed the problem of dark money; hostile actors, including foreign actors, would continue to successfully funnel money into the leave campaign. I think we would again see Scotland, Northern Ireland and London voting to remain, England and Wales voting to leave.

A second independence referendum has grave problems

I have been working since September 2014 for a second independence referendum. I now think

1. It's unlikely to happen;
2. It's unlikely to be seen as legitimate;
3. We're unlikely to win it.

It's unlikely to happen because the SNP are too timid to even call it unless independence is well ahead in the polls, but, without a focussed campaign, we won't get there. No one but the Scottish government can effectively call one, and it will take decades to build up a new pro-independence party to the point that it can force the SNP to move out of the way.

Even if it happens, it's unlikely to be seen as legitimate. Although Keith Brown argues (and I agree) that Holyrood alone has the authority and the mandate to hold an independence referendum, a section 30 order is almost certain to be refused. The unionist parties - the Tories, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats - will use this to claim that the referendum is illegitimate, and will very probably campaign for a boycott. If the No campaign effectively boycott a referendum, the result would only be seen as legitimate if substantially more than 50% of the entire electorate voted Yes - because, in the media, all those who didn't vote would be assumed to support 'No'.

An independence referendum only succeeds if the rest of the world sees it as legitimate. If other governments - especially those in the EU - don't recognise the government of Scotland as sovereign, we've failed.

But in any case we'd be unlikely to win it. We are no longer holding the referendum from within the EU. From within the EU, while the whole aquis of European law held in Scotland, the negotiation would have been relatively easy (except fishing); and it would be preserving a large proportion of the status quo, which would give cautious voters confidence. By contrast, a second independence referendum could now happen only in the chaos of disentangling the UK from the EU, or after the Brexit dust has largely settled.

After the Brexit dust has settled, in a much poorer nation with a very recent memory of years of painful disruption, I think it would be hard to motivate any electorate to vote for major constitutional change again. Certainly it would be very easy to run a No campaign on the slogan 'no more chaos'. Also, after the dust has settled, new trade deals with the US will rapidly lead to a selloff of key state assets to American companies, and I do not see how we could protect the Scottish NHS from that. I don't believe we can afford to wait for the dust to settle.

But while Brexit is in progress, the unionists will still be able to paint a picture of the coming 'global Britain', and the 'sunny uplands' of new trade deals which will at that stage still be in fantasy land and thus capable of being painted in glowing colours. That will of necessity push the Yes campaign into a 'project fear' position, where we will have to be continually pointing out the risks - of losing the NHS, of losing our GM-free status, of losing our health, employment and environmental protections, of competing on labour rates against developing economies. Negative campaigns can win, of course, but I don't think that's a style of campaigning we'd be comfortable with.

'Business as usual' may not contine 

Human beings are programmed to believe that tomorrow will be very much like today, next year very much like this year (damn, I hope not!). We assume business as usual will continue. But if we have a no deal Brexit - which, I reiterate, I think almost inevitable - it won't. Our supply chain is very fragile. Supermarkets keep stocks of only a few days' food and groceries. Much of our food comes from Europe. Chaos at the ports will very rapidly lead to shortages, which would lead to panic buying, which would lead to empty shelves.

The British are not used to going hungry. Social order would rapidly break down. There are already plans to deploy the army on the streets.

If a State of Emergency was declared, elections would almost certainly be suspended. It's quite likely that Holyrood would also be suspended, especially if there was a significant push for independence. As senior MSPs are unlikely to consent to Holyrood being suspended, it's likely that many would be interned; it's likely that influential Yes movement figures would also be interned.

In this scenario, independence would be literally impossible without civil war, and that is not a road I want to go down. So let's assume (for now) (and devoutly pray) that this dark fantasy of mine does not happen, and go onto more optimistic options.

An 'Independence Now' manifesto would work

As Margaret Thatcher repeatedly pointed out, and as the Irish precedent shows, all that is required under the British constitution to achieve Scottish independence is for pro-independence parties to win the majority of Scottish seats at Westminster - as, actually, the SNP did at each of the last two Westminster elections and almost certainly will at the next.

Of course, at the last two election, the SNP did not stand on an 'Independence Now' manifesto. If they did, they could make every Westminster election until independence a de facto independence referendum. Of course, it's likely that the unionist parties would join forces to put up just one candidate against the SNP, but that actually plays in the Yes movement's favour - because such candidates would inevitably either be Tories or be in explicit alliance with Tories.

There are three possible outcomes:

1. We don't win a majority of seats, in which case nothing is lost and we can try again next time;
2. We win a majority of seats and a majority of votes, in which case we have a clear mandate to immediately negotiate independence;
3. We win a majority of seats but not a majority of votes, in which case we'd be well advised to negotiate for maximal devolution but could still try again next time.

Consequently, I think the 'Independence Now' manifesto is now the best strategy for the movement. Obviously it would be best if the SNP were to stand on this Manifesto. But if they won't, I think that the Yes movement should think very seriously about putting 'Independence Now' candidates up against the SNP in all Scotland's constituencies.

Response to the consultation on the Register of Persons Holding a Controlled Interest in Land

My croft

Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee

Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016 (Register of Persons Holding a Controlled Interest in Land) (Scotland) Regulations 2021 - Call for Views

SUBMISSION FROM Simon Brooke

Preamble

Much land in Scotland is held by extremely wealthy individuals who chose to use opaque ownership structures to avoid taxes or other civil duties. There is no reasonable justification for an honest person to use opaque ownership structures or secrecy jurisdictions. Such people have the ability to hire extremely ingeniuous lawyers to work around the intention of legislation, as we saw with Agricultural Holdings (Scotland) Act 2003.

Consequently, legislation aimed at cutting through this veil of secrecy must be simple, clear, and free of weasel-words like ‘reasonably’. Further, because of the degree of wealth (and the penchant for secrecy) of some of these individuals, fines are unlikely to be effective deterrents.

Failure of undisclosed controllers of land to register

Consequently, there’s not a lot of purpose in being able to fine persons with a controlling interest in land where the ownership structure is opaque and held offshore in a jurisdiction in which the writ of the Scottish Government does not run, and the persons choose not to disclose their interest.

Instead, the Government should establish a Public Factor, who should take over the management of lands where the the controlling interest cannot satisfactorily be established, and manage that land in the public interest, retaining any and all profits, until the natural persons with a controlling interest choose to identify themselves and register their interest to the satisfaction of the registrar.

Non-natural persons

Non-natural persons should not be deemed ‘controlling interests’ for the purpose of this legislation. Behind every non-natural person are natural persons who control them. We need to disintermediate this, radically. Non-natural persons, having a controlling interest in land, should be required to register those natural persons which ultimately have controlling interests in themselves; otherwise, the value of the register is negligible.

Redactions and elisions

While I understand the force of the points made in para 71 of the Draft Explanatory Document, the power of the registrar to make redactions or elisions from the public register should be sharply circumscribed, and should in my view be limited to those cases where the personal safety of natural persons can be shown to be at risk.

The Growth Corruption

Andrew Wilson with Nicola Sturgeon, 

Andrew Wilson is managing partner of a lobbying firm, Charlotte Street Partners. There's no secret about that. The business of Charlotte Street Partners is to lobby the Scottish government in the interests of commercial companies. There's no secret about that. When Nicola Sturgeon appointed Andrew Wilson as chair of the growth commission, she knew this; there's no question about that.

What is secret is who the clients of Charlotte Street Partners are: who actually pays this piper. We don't know. We don't know whether Nicola Sturgeon knows.

Among the members of the Growth Commission were a number of business people; there's no secret about that. Nor is there anything inherently corrupt about that - any commission looking into the economy needs to take cognisance of the interests of business. For the record, they were:

1. Dan McDonald, businessman and founder of N56 group
2. Marie Macklin CBE, Founder and Chief Executive of the Klin Group and Macklin Enterprise Partnership
3. Mark Shaw, Chief Executive, Hazeldene Group
4. Petra Wetzel, founder and Managing Director WEST Brewery

Again: there is nothing inherently wrong with businesspeople taking part in this commission, and their taking part does not say anything against them. But we don't know whether any of these people is a client of Charlotte Street Partners.

The commission met with 22 trade bodies, and, again, there's nothing wrong with that; you'd expect them to. Full disclosure, the Chief Executive of ScotlandIS, one of those 22 trade bodies, is my sister.

At each meeting with a trade body, some members of that trade body participated; the minimum number was three, the maximum was twenty. It's entirely proper that when the commission met with a trade body, some members of that body should be present, and should put their views.

The commission report notes in section 1.15 that these meetings were held 'under Chatham House Rules'. What does this mean? It means this:

"When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed."

Again, there's nothing inherently wrong about this. Chatham House rules are used to allow people to speak frankly, and frank speaking is what a commission such as this needs.

But something stinks, and it is this: we don't know which companies spoke with the commission at these twenty-two meetings, we don't know what was said, and we don't know which of them were clients of Andrew Wilson's firm. What we do know is that the growth commission came up with a set of recommendations which were extraordinarily favourable to the interests of the rich.

I think there are questions for two people to answer here. One is Nicola Sturgeon. She needs to explain why she chose a corporate lobbyist to lead this very important commission. Yes, I acknowledge that Andrew Wilson is a member of the SNP, I acknowledge he is a member of the Scottish Great and Good, and I acknowledge he is an economist. But, actually, the SNP is not short of members who are well regarded, economists, and not corporate shills. So why Andrew Wilson?

For Andrew Wilson there are more questions. Has any member of the commission ever been a client of Charlotte Street Partners, and if so, whom? Has anyone the commission had meetings with been a client of Charlotte Street Partners, and if so, whom? Did any client of Charlotte Street Partners have early sight of the Growth Commission report, and if so, whom? Did any comment on it, and if so did any such comment result in changes to the text? If so, whom, and what changes?

In a small nation there is a short step from cronyism to outright corruption. Andrew Wilson's business - the representation, for money, of undisclosed interests in undisclosed meetings with undisclosed senior members of government - is also a very short step away from from outright corruption. So, I say again: we need, very clearly, to know which of Andrew Wilson's clients were given the opportunity to influence the growth commission report.

Limits to Growth

Wealth.

A lot of folk have commented excellently on the Scottish Growth Commission report. A lot of folk on the left have been critical. George Kerevan, in particular, has lambasted the SNP for promoting a regressive, over-cautious, Morningside-friendly version of Independence Lite, writing:

"Working-class folk, especially those who are unemployed, unskilled and dependent on benefits, are the most likely to vote SNP. They provided the bedrock of support in 2014 that nearly won us independence. The Rowntree report argues forcibly that unless the SNP directly address the needs and aspirations of this core demographic, they will lose support to Labour and the Tories."

George is right, of course. I agree with him, of course. But actually, although I have many criticisms myself, I'm not too worried by this. From the point of view of an independence referendum, it doesn't matter. The SNP can wave their Growth Commission report in the faces of the 'soft no' voters in Morningside and Bearsden, Cramond and Newton Mearns. They may swing a few voters, and if they do, that's excellent.

But in the meantime, the left - Radical Independence, the SSP, RISE, even the Greens - can be presenting a far more radical, adventurous, egalitarian, internationalist vision of independence to working (and not-working) Scotland, and that's where the referendum will be won.

But that's also where the Growth Commission threatens to lose it for us. A report written to tempt the comfortable middle class does not go down well everywhere. Darren "Loki" McGarvie writes:

"the party I once voted into power, believing they could deliver an imaginative, “trouble-making” form of independence, have produced an economic prospectus so demoralisingly timid... if the big idea is simply to rebrand the fundamentals of the UK economy, so that independence becomes more attractive to those whose entrenched advantages are threatened by a radical alternative, well, that’s a very different proposition, isn’t it?"

Loki usually irritates me, but he represents a large section of 'soft yes' opinion; and in this piece he's only saying what I have said myself many times: independence which changes nothing is worth nothing. The very document which may win us a few 'soft no' voters threatens to lose us a lot more 'soft yes'.

My analysis of the Labour party has been for years that while its core vote was working class, its parliamentarians - and particularly its front bench - are drawn largely from an Oxbridge-educated elite. Their parliamentarians don't socialise with their electorate; they don't understand them. Consequently they have to send out ethnographers to do focus groups to discover (often imperfectly) what their electorate thinks.

The Growth Commission report emphasises that the SNP have fallen into the same trap. Their electors, too, are largely working class - and largely urban working class. Yet their parliamentarians are bankers, lawyers, journalists; suit-wearers. The Growth Commission report speaks to Morningsiders because SNP politicians are themselves Morningsiders. It doesn't speak to Easterhouse or Castlemilk because SNP politicians don't socialise with Easterhouse or Castlemilk.

This is the root of SNP timidity. They think the time is not right for a referendum because, in the circles in which they move, the time is not right for a referendum. They think caution, fiscal prudence, independence-lite will swing the vote because for the people with whom they socialise that is what would swing the vote.

Of course, if the SNP do dawdle, dally, and delay the referendum until after the next Holyrood election, George is right and I am wrong. The SNP have over the past decade run Scotland considerably better than any of their predecessors, but they have also made mistakes, and there are several policy areas on which they are now looking a little tired.

If they delay until 2021, if they don't radically change direction to appeal to working Scotland, then there really will be no independence referendum for a generation, because there aren't enough 'soft no' voters in Morningside to balance a 'soft yes' that sees no benefit in an independence which changes nothing.

But to get down to detail of Growth Commission report, and to my own criticisms.

The report says:

"3.88 Maximising frictionless trade and market access with the rest of the UK and with Europe is of critical importance to the performance of the Scottish economy in the short and long term."

This is almost certainly not possible, and absolutely certainly not in our gift. England and Wales (hereinafter EW - and note that I'm rather assuming we'll see a united Ireland before an independent Scotland) seem destined for a very hard crash out of the EU. Given that that is so, there will be a hard border between EW and any country which is in either the EU or EFTA. Scotland will have to choose which side of that border to be on. Do we choose the UK side, which makes independence virtually meaningless, or the EU side, which puts us into a community of 27 other nations many of a similar size to our own?

This decision is made harder by the fact that England sits squarely across our main trade route. Trade war with EW is precisely what undermined the Scottish economy before the 1706 union; it is a major risk. Scotland urgently needs its own Brexit Buster, like Ireland's. That means not just ships, but new port infrastructure (and transport links to it) at Grangemouth, Rosyth, possibly Aberdeen.

The Growth Commission report covers port facilities only in paragraphs A183 and A190; it doesn't mention the risk of trade friction in using EW as our main trade conduit - friction which could arise out of hostility but is equally likely to be simply a consequence of incompetence and dislocation of an economy collapsing under the weight of Brexit. For the commission not to have acknowledged this and allowed for it seems to me pretty remiss.

Related is the matter of currency. The report urges the idea of continuing to use Sterling for what seems to me a remarkably long period (10 years).

As Kirsty Hughes persuasively argues, using Sterling prevents us rejoining the EU during that period. If she's right (and I believe she is), shouldn't the Growth Commission have considered this? But even if she were wrong about EU membership, for a country which wishes to remain part of the European family to hitch itself to a currency set to diverge rapidly from it doesn't seem like a good plan.

I'm also bothered by the 'Annual Solidarity Payment'. It looks a lot like tribute; or like paying off a blackmailer. We shouldn't do this.

Article 38 of the Vienna Convention on Succession of States in respect of
State Property, Archives and Debts reads:

"1.When the successor State is a newly independent State, no State debt of the predecessor State shall pass to the newly independent State, unless an agreement between them provides otherwise..." 

So Scotland is not obliged to, and cannot be obliged to, pay a share of the UK debt. This doesn't mean we should not, but it does mean we cannot be forced to. The risk that concerns me is that EW will assume it is entitled to payments from Scotland, and will behave badly - for example, by holding up Scottish exports - in order to try to screw more money out of us.

The Growth Commission report compounds this problem by suggesting that we should continue to 'buy services' from EW as part of the 'Solidarity Payment', specifically including military services. For me, making a break from the UK's military traditions of bombast, adventurism, gunboat diplomacy is one of the most important reasons for independence. I don't think I'm alone. Again, UK foreign aid is increasingly being used to pursue the UK's geopolitical and commercial ambitions. Scotland should not be supporting UK foreign aid programmes (para B2.3).

But there's a more fundamental issue about the Growth Commission report: growth. Sustainable growth is physically possible only if you assign artificial financial values to intangible things. We currently do do this, but we shouldn't assume it's beneficial.

Does the Scottish economy need to grow at all? I'd argue it doesn't. According to 'Wealth and Assets in Scotland, 2006-2014', the total household wealth of Scotland is £865.6 BILLION - almost a trillion pounds.

I own ten acres of land, a car with 130k miles on it, a 55 year old tractor, five cattle, a little sailing boat, several computers, a lot of books, several bicycles, a home-built house you would call a hut, and some tools; total value £70,000 if I'm lucky. Yet, apart from mental health, I have an extraordinarily good life. I work about ten days a month. I eat well. I'm secure. There's nothing I need I don't have. Of course, I don't have a partner or children, but if I did have, it would not take three times my current wealth to provide all of us with a very comfortable life.

The average household wealth in Scotland - the arithmetic mean - is £360,666.67. You don't have that much? I'm not surprised. The problem isn't that Scotland is poor, the problem is that Scotland is unequal. Worse, Scotland is still steadily getting more unequal.

Chart of household wealth per decile over time, showing increasing inequality.

Yet more than half of all households have no or negligible net financial wealth.

 

40% of all households have no or negligible property wealth (and you can bet those are mostly the same folk as have no net financial wealth).

In fact, overall, this is how badly wealth in Scotland is distributed. Iif we shared Scotland's household wealth equally, 88% of households would benefit. Only 12% of households would lose. And that is before you count wealth held in tax havens and secrecy regimes.

So, going back to that average figure, £360,666.67. Suppose your household had that much wealth. Would you be able to live an extremely comfortable life?

I would think so.

If you couldn't, what is wrong with you?

Inequality is the elephant in the room of independence. A plan for independence which does not radically address inequality will not attract a majority of Scotland's voters. Any major constitutional change is a risk - as we are seeing with Brexit. People - perhaps Scots especially - are wary of risk. People take risks only when the potential benefit is considerable, and independence which changes nothing offers no benefits. We have to have an independence plan which offers the prospect of a radically fairer Scotland.

We can do that. It really isn't hard.

And if the overwhelming majority of us could live very comfortably indeed on a fair share of Scotland's wealth, why does Scotland's economy need to grow? Why is it seen as a political desideratum?

We cannot grow by resource consumption without destroying the future of the planet for our children. We cannot extract all the oil from under the North Sea without far exceeding the planet's ability to cope. We need to use the resources we do extract more thoughtfully. We need to waste less. We need use less. All this can be done without hurting anyone's standard of living.

In summary, if we made our political objective to make people's quality of life better, rather than to grow the economy, we have adequate wealth and would have, with independence, adequate tools to do that.

The question is, have we the will?

Yet another bid to centralise power

A bunch of unbelievable dunderheids calling themselves the 'Constitutional Reform Group' are proposing a new Act of Union. You can read it here. The group are remarkably coy about their membership, but rumour has it that they are, at least primarily, members of the House of Lords - which comes as no surprise to me (indeed, I'd hazard I could correctly guess the names of several members).

Long time readers of my blog will recall that I've written on the UK constitution, rather often:

1. The West Lothian question, take two
2. Parliamentary Questions
3. Submission to the Smith Commission
4. Scottish devolution, and socialism in one nation
5. A breakfast any self-respecting dog would reject

Fortunately the committee have provided a feedback form through which you can give your opinion of their turgid bucket of foetid dingoes' kidneys, here. I strongly commend the idea you do so. For inspiration, my own contribution is below; do not copy it, as that is bad form, but feel free to riff melodically on some of these points.

I have very rarely read a more foolish or more incendiary document - this ranks surely alongside Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal for offensiveness, but lacks the wit.

It is not possible to have a federal state in which one confederate can always outvote all others. If the United Kingdom is to become a federal state, then either England must be split into at least five separate units (Wessex, Sussex, Essex, Mercia, Northumbria, perhaps) or Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, put together, must be able to outvote England. Otherwise it isn't a confederation, it's an empire (which, under your committee's proposal, of course, it is).

It is not possible to have a democracy with appointed legislators. Not any appointed legislators at all. The United Kingdom, of course, never has been a democracy, but it is about time it became one.

It is not tolerable that a broad range of taxes be retained by the federal administration. The centre can have few functions and therefore has little expenditure; the overwhelming majority of revenue must be generated where it is needed - in the nations. It would be better to put all taxation powers with the nations and fund the federal government with subventions from them.

It is not possible to have a UK wide court system, because there is not a UK wide system of law. Nor is it desirable that there should be, unless, of course, England wishes to submit to the jurisdiction of Scots law. No? Didn't thinks so. Similarly, a UK wide civil service makes no sense.

If you want to cause civil war in these islands, I commend your proposed bill as a most excellent way to proceed. Otherwise, I suggest you bury it in the deepest cesspit you can find, and pray it never resurfaces.

Response to consultation on a new enterprise agency for the South of Scotland

1 Do you agree with our ambition outlined?

Yes

2 What would you like to see for the South of Scotland?

Locally owned businesses, rather than inward investment. The current problems at Pinney's just reprise the history of firms like Stelrads; investors from outside the region are attracted in with generous grants, stay for the good times, and pull out suddenly when times are tough. That isn't what we need.

What we need is to develop and grow a vibrant entrepreneurial culture locally. That means training in entrepreneurship, mentoring networks, and, ideally, if they can be found, local angels. It also means facilitating local business and tech meetups.

I'd personally like to see more high skill high wage businesses, like software and engineering, and less emphasis on low wage, insecure businesses like hospitality and tourism. As agriculture adapts to a low carbon economy, there are huge opportunities for disruptive new engineering products.

3 What are your ambitions for the future economic success of the South of Scotland?

Innovative engineering, especially around reducing fossil fuel use in agriculture and forestry.

A broad entrepreneurial culture, with school leavers and university graduates equipped with the skills and confidence to start their own businesses; supported by

1. a mentoring network.
2. A local angels/venture capital network, and a local business focussed bank after the German model.
3. The ability to develop businesses where people want them, not where it's convenient to central planning.

In particular we need employment in villages, and employment flexible enough for people supplementing reduced agricultural incomes.

4 What are the strengths you would like to see the Agency build on?

As outlined, we're a dispersed region with significant opportunities in renewable energy, a highly educated workforce, and, in places, considerable self reliance.We also have land, although it is concentrated in few hands. Land-based businesses over the 20th century became heavily dependent on fossil fuels and that now has to change rapidly. That's a challenge, but it's also an opportunity. Southern Scotland has a history of agricultural innovation - for example, the milking machine was invented in Castle Douglas. We can respond to this challenge.

We lack confidence, finance, and entrepreneurial skills. We need to make up these deficits, and that's something an agency would be well placed to do. We also, relative to urban areas, lack informal opportunities for entrepreneurs to network, and that also needs to be addressed,

A local business bank would be a great asset, either as a strictly commercial business or as a mutual.

5 What are the economic challenges you would like to see the Agency address?

1. Infrastructure, especially communications.
2. Finance.
3. Entrepreneurship training and mentoring.Research and development support.
4. Networking, meetups, matchmaking.
5. There is a problem with affordable housing for young people. If people are borrowed up to the hilt for housing, or paying a burdensome rent, the amount of risk they can afford to take on in business is sharply limited.
6. Universal Basic Income would considerably de-risk business startup.

6 What currently works well in the South of Scotland?

Not a lot.

7 What would you add or take away from the potential activities that the Agency could carry out across the three areas:
a) drive forward the economy?:

While opportunities are great, we need to be aware of risks and challenges. Scottish agriculture is not equipped to compete at world market prices, and Brexit will mean widespread farm bankruptcies across the region with consequential bankruptcies among farm supply businesses and more widely.

The challenge for the rural economy over the next decade is to maintain people in their homes in the face of rapid change and stress. Challenges are opportunities, and there are considerable opportunities in the current situation. But we need to be clear that the requirement, before seeking to drive the economy forward, is to prevent its utter collapse.

b) sustain communities?:

The costs and models of rural transport are going to change considerably over the next decade, and the prospects are not easy to predict. Because the rural economy is relatively depressed and electric vehicles are new and expensive, it's unlikely that they will naturally propagate into the rural economy first; rather, they're likely to be in the towns.

There's a related issue that most remote rural areas have great opportunities for renewable electricity generation, but lack the grid connections to carry that power away. If it could be used locally to power transport and farm machinery, that's a triple benefit to the rural economy.

If we expand electric vehicle use rapidly and early in remote rural areas, that will cut the costs of rural transport very substantially, leading to much more sustainable communities; driverless, on demand electric taxis following the Google/Waymo model could have a very positive impact.

But without government intervention and considerable subsidy, neither will happen. The richer, urban economy will soak up these new products first, and remote rurals will get them only when that market becomes saturated. Instead it's likely that private rural transport will tend to depend largely on second hand diesel vehicles, because they're cheap to buy and reliable; but they will increasingly be more expensive to run. This further disadvantages rural areas with respect to urban.

Without affordable transport and access to affordable housing and land, the pattern of a populated landscape and vibrant village communities will be very hard to sustain.

c) capitalise on people and resources?:

We don't educate nearly enough in entrepreneurship or in civics. Young people leave education expecting to get a job, not start a business. They lack the skills and they lack the mentoring network.

A related problem is that most of our young people go away to distant universities, and, because of the cost of housing and the few opportunities for employment, few come back. Of those of my generation from Auchencairn who went to university and did not inherit farms, only two - myself and one other - came back.

Full disclosure, I started my first business in Auchencairn at the age of 21; it was a steep learning curve, but was supported by good mentoring from Scottish Enterprise for which I'm still grateful.

So: we need better education in entrepreneurship at all levels, a wide network of good, easily accessible mentoring, and affordable housing and business premises. The second and third of these are things the new agency can contribute greatly to.

With regard to resources, our primary resource after people is land and landscape. Landscape, as a marketable asset, derives from cultural aesthetics which are inevitably somewhat backward looking; people like to see (and to live in) a settled, patchwork landscape of mixed farming, woodlands and hills. They like to see in that landscape a broad diversity of wild flowers, birds, and other wildlife.

This is not from an agricultural point of the most efficient landscape. As pressure grows on farmers, we will see less employment, less varied agriculture, a less settled and less diverse landscape. Beef, lamb and cereal production will cease to be economic as we open up to world markets, increasing the reliance on dairy, and, probably, on cows kept indoors and fed silage.

If we are to protect a settled landscape, we need ways to subsidise small farms. I believe that moving from a per-hectare model of agricultural subsidy to a welfare model - preferably a universal basic income model - together with opportunities for part-time employment, would encourage a settled, more diverse landscape, which would in turn bring benefits to tourism.

8 What would you prioritise as the key areas of activity for the Agency?

1. Building mentoring networks.Facilitating meetups/informal business networking.
2. Encouraging entrepreneurship education, including on-going education for existing business owners.
3. Providing/gatekeeping access to local angels.
4. Encouraging the establishment of a regional business-oriented bank.

Politicians like inward investment because it provides sudden, relatively large job creation which they can take credit for. This is a snare and a delusion. As the south of Scotland has seen repeatedly over the past century, inward investors become outward divestors at the first sign of trouble. The agency should NOT support inward investment.

9 What specific things could the Agency do to help you, your business, your sector or your community?

1. My business? Better broadband; business networking.
2. My sector? Better broadband; business networking.
3. My community? Affordable housing. The average income is about £21,000, the minimum house price is about £200,000, the two don't meet.

10 What could the Agency do outwith its boundaries working with other local authorities or with agencies like Highlands and Islands Enterprise to support specific projects which benefit the South of Scotland and with national agencies?

East to west travel across southern Scotland is not facilitated by either the road or rail network, and consequently there is not much communication between Dumfries and Galloway in the west, and the Borders in the east; rather, Galloway tends to face Ayrshire and Glasgow, where the Borders tend to face the Lothians and Edinburgh. It does not therefore seem to me that, despite the similar challenges, it will be easy for one agency to service all these regions.

In particular an agency headquartered in the Borders will find it hard to service Galloway, while one based in Dumfries will find it hard to service Berwickshire; sadly, one based in Langholm would find it hard to service anywhere at all.

In Scotland we over-centralise everything; Dumfries and Galloway, considered as a unit, is larger both in area and in population than one sixth of the independent nations of the world. On average across Europe, local government units are one twentieth the size they are in Scotland. I do not believe this can continue; I believe the democratic deficit must mean that we will soon see the break up of these monstrous local government divisions.

Nevertheless, there is a clear geographic divide running to the east of Moffat and Langholm, Without major new roads infrastructure, despite the similarities in economic challenge, it is not useful to see the whole of southern Scotland as one unit. While I think Dumfries and Galloway council is an oversized and anti-democratic anachronism, an economic development agency for the south-west would make sense.

11 Which option, either from the list above or your own suggestion, do you think offers the best way to ensure the Agency is accessible to all across the South of Scotland?

Of the options listed I would go with the first: 'the Agency could have minimal physical presence with its services delivered digitally across the area', supplemented by local, probably part time, networking and mentoring staff dispersed across the region.

There is no location which could reasonably serve as a 'headquarters' for the whole of southern Scotland, because there is effectively no transport infrastructure between east and west.

12 Which criteria should be used in reaching a decision about the location of the Agency?

Don't locate it. That is a snare and a delusion. A centre in Dumfries could service the southwest, but not the Borders. One in the Selkirk/Melrose area could service the Borders, but not the southwest.

Obviously in my personal interest it would be better in Dumfries than in Melrose, but that's exactly the point; getting bogged down in squabbles about location doesn't help, and whichever location were chosen, unless the Scottish Government is prepared to invest in a Stranraer to Melrose motorway, the side of the country not chosen will feel discriminated against.

Board meetings and other central functions should rotate across the whole area, rather than being centrally located; staff should be dispersed.

13 If you were to use the services of this Agency, what factors are important to you in terms of reaching it?

Digital delivery is still problematic across much of rural Scotland: broadband speeds are laughably poor - I'm currently seeing 0.9 Mbits/sec download and 0.3 upload, and I run an Internet business!

Without better broadband performance digital delivery alone will not service remote rural areas.
So until we have the broadband we've been promised for the past twenty years, the agency would need to work on an 'account manager' model, with dispersed, locally based, probably part-time account managers regularly visiting their client businesses, probably as part of a mentoring/support scheme.

14 What sort of people should be on the Board of the Agency and what sorts of skills and expertise should they have?

A board widely drawn from experienced local business people - not politicians nor career public servants.

15 We know that young people are less likely to stay in or move to the South of Scotland than they are other parts of the country. Do you have any comments on things the Agency could do to meet the interests of children and young people?

We need homes for them to come back to after university, and opportunities to create their own employment in the form of flexible, low-commitment business premises. Ideally we need either universal basic income or an enhanced enterprise allowance to de-risk at least the initial three years.

We need opportunities for part time employment so that people not able to make a sufficient income from a nascent business can supplement it.

But most of all we need housing. And the housing we need has to be affordable in perpetuity, so either we need sufficient council housing of sufficient quality to be both available and attractive to potential entrepreneurs, or else we need to make the Rural Housing Burden actually work.

19 Do you have any other thoughts on powers that the Agency will need?

There will be a great deal of pressure for the agency to intervene in situations like Pinney's. Pinney's is a tragedy, but it's one that is an inevitable consequence of businesses being owned from outwith the region, and of Brexit. We will see more instances of this over the coming years, and they could easily soak up all the resources of the proposed agency for years to come.

Furthermore, paying bribes to businesses based furth of Scotland to keep open businesses in Scotland, even if it preserves employment in Scotland, is poor use of Scottish government money.

The agency needs to have the independence to be able to resist political pressure to intervene in saving failing businesses. This isn't to say that the agency might not back a management buy-out, or some other scheme which brought ownership of a facility back into the region, provided that the facility was viable as a business or could reasonably be expected to be brought into a condition in which it was.

I don't think the agency should have the power to invest directly in businesses; I think that it should seek to encourage and support a network of angels, or a local venture capital group, and a regional commercial bank.

20 Is there anything else you wish to say about the operation of the Agency?

Keep it lightweight, keep it dispersed, don't spend money on fancy headquarters of large central staff.