The Baltic News: 6
Starmer's message to Yes and Leave voters; Scots support Brown's reform agenda; Sunak's plan for a more innovative nation
The title of this blog refers to our Our Scottish Future’s office at the Baltic Exchange in Glasgow. If you want to learn more about the work of Our Scottish Future, sign up here and get our reports, polling and articles straight to your email:
A better conversation
SIR Keir Starmer’s New Year’s speech, in which he announced he would be adopting Vote Leave’s successful “Take Back Control” slogan, shows the Labour leader knows his way around a headline.
But the content of his speech also signals a notable upscaling in Labour’s efforts to win over both Leave voters around the UK and Yes voters in Scotland, an approach advocated by Gordon Brown’s Commission for the Future of the UK, published in December.
A key section of relevance to Scotland in Starmer’s speech came after he criticised what he called the UK Government’s tendency towards “sticking plaster solutions”. The Westminster system of command and control, he declared, “doesn’t work”. More decisions, he argued, should be taken by “local people with skin in the game”. “A huge power shift out of Westminster can transform our economy, our politics and our democracy.”
“I go back to Brexit,” he continued.
“Yes, a whole host of issues were on that ballot paper. But as I went around the country, campaigning for Remain, I couldn’t disagree with the basic case so many Leave voters made to me. People who wanted public services they could rely on. High streets they could be proud of. Opportunities for the next generation. And all of this in their town or city.
“It was the same in the Scottish referendum in 2014 – many of those who voted ‘yes’ did so for similar reasons. And it’s not an unreasonable demand. It’s not unreasonable for us to recognise the desire for communities to stand on their own feet. It’s what “take back control” meant. The control people want is control over their lives and their community.”
Starmer is setting out here the case for spreading more control and power out of London - so that Britain really does take back control. I think two other notable things are being said.
Firstly, Starmer is connecting the underlying motivations behind both the Leave and Independence campaigns and arguing they are largely the same. That’s not to say that the campaigns for Brexit and Sottish independence were the same, nor that the consequences of Britain leaving the UK and the Scotland leaving the UK are the same either. Obviously that isn’t the case, and the Leave and Yes campaigns were very different beasts. What Starmer is arguing, I think rightly, is that the support behind both campaigns arose from a similar sense of frustration with the way the UK operates, and by a desire for greater agency, control and empowerment.
Brown’s Commission on the Future of the UK was of a like mind. It published polling which showed how voters across the UK – Leave, Remain, Yes, No – all had similar values and ambitions for their communities, but also had a similar lack of faith and trust in the centre of power. As it concluded: “In Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, there is a united voice across communities demanding change – one that is aimed squarely at realising Britain’s untapped potential and giving everybody a fair and equal voice in our politics.”
So that’s the first thing: contrary to SNP claims that Scotland and England are inevitably moving apart from one another, the argument is that there is actually a broadly united voice across the UK nations for change and while that voice may find expression in different end points (getting out of the EU, getting out of Britain) it shares many common roots and causes. The second takeaway from the passage is that Starmer is acknowledging that this demand for change is justified (or at least, not unreasonable). The message is clear: Yes voters are right in wanting something better for Scotland, just as Leave voters were right to want greater control for their communities too.
These two insights – that across the UK we broadly share similar frustrations with the way the country operates and that these grievances are justified – are welcome developments as they open up the prospect of a more productive conversation than the one we’ve been having for the last decade or so both in Scotland and around the UK. It challenges the SNP’s claim that Scotland and the rest of the UK are inexorably moving apart from one another: to be clear, they’re not. It also challenges those tin-earned people in the No/Remain camps whose own frequent failure to listen to people of a different mindset over the last few years has allowed our politics to become so polarised. Simply by acknowledging our opponents are right to believe the UK should be offering something better than the status quo, politicians can begin a far more constructive debate that focusses on the core issues that divide us. It might also potentially start winning votes.
Whether these questions can be answered adequately in one bill in a Queen’s Speech, as Starmer floated on Thursday, is a reasonable point. But at least his approach suggests we’re moving towards a deeper and more interesting debate about the future of the UK, one which seeks to ensure both sides of the Union debate, and both sides of the Brexit debate, are rightly heard.
Scotland supports change
Not to keep banging on about the Brown Commission but it turns out the proposals are actually quite popular. A poll in the Scotsman over the Christmas period found that the flagship proposal to replace the House of Lords is supported by 60% of Scots, with just one in ten in opposition. And crucially, the poll found they are most popular with those SNP voters whose support Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems need if they are ever to make real progress in Scottish seats. Perhaps this popularity explains why Nicola Sturgeon and her team have gone out of their way to try and ignore the Commission as much as they possibly can.
More work is needed here but the polling does reinforce one of the assumptions behind the Commission’s thinking – that while you don’t need to offer a version of watered down independence to appeal to soft SNP voters, you do need to set out a vision of a changed-up Union.
The SNP’s ‘ignore-it-and-hope-it-goes-away’ approach does seem to have worked however: the poll also concluded that even more people in Scotland – 62% - weren’t aware of the plans at all.
Innovation Nation
There was, of course, another speech this week: Rishi Sunak’s own New Year opener a day before Starmer’s. And while the overnight briefing about compulsory Maths for all dominated the media coverage, the Prime Minister’s speech covered plenty of other ground: innovation, stronger communities, education, NHS reform, and the role of the family in society.
On the need for a more innovative economy, Sunak was particularly keen to force home the need for a gear shift:
“Some people think innovation is about gadgets and geekery – a nice to have, peripheral to growth compared to the traditional levers of tax and spend. That’s exactly the mindset we need to change….
“Over the last 50 years, it was responsible for around half of the UK’s productivity increase. New jobs are created by innovation. People’s wages increased by innovation. The cost of goods and services reduced by innovation. And major challenges like energy security and net zero will be solved by innovation. The more we innovate, the more we grow.”
Hence the fact that the UK Government is increasing R+D public funding to £20bn to support five key growth sectors: AI, life sciences, quantum, fintech and green technology.
He’s clearly right to focus on this agenda. Coincidentally, innovation is an area we’re also examining here in Scotland, and Our Scottish Future will publish a new report on this issue in the coming days. In short, we find that while Scotland has all the ingredients to become an innovative economy (great Universities, lots of R+D spending, lots of STEM graduates) the Scottish Government is failing to put together a decent recipe.
The last few days has been a good case in point: it would have been nice to see Nicola Sturgeon start the new year alongside Messers Sunak and Starmer by setting out her own long-term ideas on how to grow the Scottish economy and make us a more innovative country – but unfortunately that hasn’t happened (instead the Scottish Parliament will debate the question of a referendum this coming Tuesday). Indeed it’s hard to know whether the SNP Government has a long-term economic vision for a devolved Scotland at all (apart from the obvious one). We should be aware this has a cost: as one senior Scottish business figure commented to me over the Christmas break: “The dilemma of outstanding University R+D not translating into businesses can be tackled but it requires a much bolder top of the agenda approach. We need a seismic shift (from government) but we are falling behind.”
ENDS