Social Democracy alive and well?

I don’t talk enough here about my homeland – so I am glad to devote this post to an important policy issue in devolved Scotland. Melissa Benn is a name to conjure with in UK educational circles – her mother, Caroline Benn, was the most ardent campaigner for some 5 decades for good education for all; her father is the tireless socialist Tony Benn; and she carries on the family tradition in her role as a radical educational journalist. She had a platform at this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival and has posted a thoughtful piece which points up some Scottish successes in the educational field which she considers are not getting the attention they deserve in England.  

The most immediate thing to strike a visitor from the English educational field is how very different the atmosphere and assumptions are on this subject north of the border. With its proud tradition of the "democratic intellect", long history of compulsory education and world-renowned universities, the Scots seem genuinely to value their school system.
Here one finds very little teacher-bashing and scant reference to market solutions to social problems. At the Edinburgh event, the overriding concern was how to improve access by poorer students to higher and further learning and keep universities free, despite considerable pressure from an unholy alliance of English newspapers and Scottish conservatives. There is a heartening and robust belief in publicly funded, publicly accountable high-quality education.
Is this perhaps the very reason we in England hear so little about Scotland's education system, bar some envious carping at its avoidance of tuition fees? While every fashionable free-schooler or educational conservative has rushed to bash underfunded Wales as proof of comprehensive failure, or bemoaned attempts in Northern Ireland to eliminate its outmoded selective system, there is little discussion of the evident strengths of the Scottish comprehensive system.
In fact, Scotland has deliberately rejected what (their Education Minister) Russell accurately labels the Germ (Global Education Reform Movement) approach so beloved of the coalition, with its commitment to privatisation, competition and deregulation.
He is rightly scathing of the "three initiatives before breakfast" policy-hyperactivity of the current English government. At the Edinburgh session he declared himself "stunned" at recently announced English plans to allow unqualified teachers into classrooms. Rigorous teacher training is at the heart of the Scottish approach, and there are plans, modelled upon the Finnish example, to require every teacher to possess a master's in addition to a first degree.
Scotland publishes no official league tables, although individual schools release their results. (Even Wales now publishes the results of secondary schools grouped into one of five bands.) The Scottish government is moving towards greater school self-evaluation and has, over the past decade, slowly rolled out a progressive "curriculum for excellence", in stark contrast to our own government's speedily devised, overly prescriptive and increasingly contested programmes for learning.
And it seems to be working. Results for Scottish highers, a formal examination taken between 16 and 19, have slowly climbed over the years and are up again in 2012, with no serious claims of grade inflation. From this year, pilot schemes will be rolled out, with the ultimate aim of each child learning two languages in addition to their own. And only last year, the Royal Society praised the high numbers of Scottish students – 49.7% – who study science to the higher levels, and suggested that the rest of the UK should emulate Scotland in this regard

Scotland managed to keep its separate educational system even after the Treaty of Union with England of 1707 - so we have generally been spared the more mad of the English initiatives. However the development of the comprehensive school was something which took place in both parts of the kingdom.
The reestablishment in 1999 of the Scottish Parliament and Government has, however, given the distinctive nature of the Scottish directions in social policy a stronger legitimacy.
I am not a Scottish nationalist. The issue of Scottish independence was a live one at my school in the 1950s and, when I became active in local and Regional government in the 1970s and 1980s, the Scottish Nationalist party was always an electoral consideration. As, however, Conservative MPs were wiped out in Scotland in the 1980s, the legitimacy of the Thatcher regime was called in question by us all in Scotland (including the churches and professions) and a long (and consensual) constitutional process produced a Scottish Parliament and devolved powers for a Scottish Executive in 1999. 
New Labour’s policies attracted little respect in Scotland – despite the electoral support we gave to Bliar and Brown. 
And the crude neo-liberalism of the 2010 Lib-Con Coalition has increased the support for the apparently social-democratic core of the Scottish nationalist leadership. 
Hence the astonishing ease with which the Scottish Nationalist Party took power (despite the proportionate voting system) in 2011.  Just look at the lecture delivered in London earlier this year (at the Hugo Young Lecture) by the Government’s First Minister (Alex Salmond)

The Scottish Government's policies attempt to protect many values which would be dear to any post-war social democrat in these isles. For example, we have promoted what we call a living wage - £7.20 an hour. And we have made a conscious decision to provide certain core universal services, rights or benefits, some of which are no longer prioritised by political leaders elsewhere – such as free university tuition, free prescriptions, free personal care for the elderly and a guarantee of no compulsory redundancies across the public sector
And looking at the problems of health reform now, I thank the heavens that Westminster's writ no longer runs in Scotland on health issues. But the looming issues of welfare reform exemplify why Scotland needs the powers to make our own policies to meet our own needs and values.
We do this because we believe that such services benefit the common weal. They provide a sense of security, well-being and equity within communities. Such a sense of security is essential to a sense of confidence – and as we have seen over the last three years, confidence is essential to economic growth.And the social wage also sets out our offer for people who want to live in Scotland, regardless of their background. We will provide a secure, stable and inclusive society. And by doing so we will encourage their talent and ambition. Scotland will be a place where people want to visit, invest, work and live.
An independent Scotland could be a beacon for progressive opinion south of the border and further afield – addressing policy challenges in ways which reflect the universal values of fairness – and are capable of being considered, adapted and implemented according to the specific circumstances and wishes within the other jurisdictions of these islands and beyond.
That, I believe, is a far more positive and practical Scottish contribution to progressive policy than sending a tribute of Labour MPs to Westminster to have the occasional turn at the Westminster tiller – particularly in the circumstances of the Labour opposition's policy increasingly converging with that of the coalition on the key issues of the economy and public spending.

Social democracy, then, seems to be alive and well.......

Those wanting to know more about the Scottish devolution experience of the past 13 years can read a good objective treatment here
And those wanting to get a sense of the sort of discussion which is going on about the future of the country - read here

Trouble in small countries

Many people (including myself) see small countries as hopes for civilisation. One of my blogs summarised the powerful arguments of Leopold Kohr more than 60 years ago on this theme. 20 years ago there was talk of Europe of the Regions. The new conventional wisdom, however, is that the global financial crisis has shown the incapacity of small countries like Iceland. A referendum on whether the Scots people wanted complete independence which the (devolved) nationalist government of Scotland was supposed to hold this year has disappeared from the agenda. Belgium, in the meantime, is tearing itself apart - and showing little sign of the solidarity which is supposed to be one of the EU values.
A new pamphlet by centre-right think tank Policy Exchange, The Devolution Distraction, by Tom Miers savages most of the assumptions and emotional supports of the last 10 years of devolved government which Scotland has enjoyed. The Miers thesis is that Scottish devolution has been ‘a spectacular failure’ on the economy and public services, driven by an obsession with constitutional change. This reflects that ‘Scotland has a political problem, not a constitutional one’.
Gerry Hassan (about whose pamphlets I have written recently) has a good blog on this today.

Miers apparently makes the case with five key points: that the Scottish economy has grown much slower than the rest of the UK since devolution, entrepreneurship is low, health and education underperform in comparison with the rest of the UK and are increasingly losing ground, and public spending higher than UK levels per head (2). The first two are long-term historic trends; the last complex; but the latter two have an uncomfortable truth which needs serious debate.
The conventional devolution class response to the failure Miers argues are two fold. The first is ‘to deny failure altogether’ – the politics and mindset of self-denial. The second is to invoke from failure and lack of results that the answer can be found in the argument that ‘Scotland needs more self-determination’.
Miers writes in ‘The Scotsman’ on this: The history of democracy is full of examples of political elites that do not respond to evidence of decline, however obvious. So what is it with our own political class? What makes Scottish politics so deeply conservative, so hostile to the notion of reform, so defensive about the performance of Scottish institutions
Just before the Scottish Parliament was established in 1999, I wrote a Fabian Society pamphlet, ‘The New Scotland’ which explored the potential and limits of devolution. Its argument can be summarised in five points:
1. Labour were driven onto the devolution agenda with the intent of a politics of maintenance and conservation; one of the central paradoxes of devolution was that the party which introduced it would have its one party old state politics slowly undermined;
2. Devolution for all its hopes and rhetoric was always fundamentally about a politics of reinforcing the internal status quo in Scottish society: one characterized by inertia, lack of dynamism and absence of policy innovation;
3. The forces for devolution were marked despite their radical language by a profound sense of conservatism; this combination of radical hope and conservative reality concealed the limited prospects for change under devolution;
4. Democracy has been late coming to Scotland and the main forces of progress: the Liberals in the 19th century and Labour in the 20th century have colluded with and used the professional elites and castes which dominate and disfigure Scottish society; Thatcherism disrupted part of this, but devolution was never intended to fundamentally shift this;
5. Scottish civil society – shorn of all its illusion and romance about itself – has been characterised by a lack of diversity, pluralism and ideas. This raises the question where were and are the original, challenging ideas for devolution going to come from? All of the above coalesced in the mainstream version of pre-devolution which stated that the Parliament was going to be the vehicle of Scottish radical opinion and a body born from the flowering of civil society and thus likely to be a bold, imaginative institution giving expression to progressive imagination. Instead, I argued that this very idea – of the Parliament as the creation of civil society (or even worse, ‘civic Scotland’: the well-mannered, middle class chatterers of institutional opinion) – made it inevitable that the Parliament would be the voice of closed, complacent Scotland. And so it has turned out to be.

Where Miers is on less secure ground is when he comes to solutions. Here he ventures onto predictable ground as he outlines in his conclusion, ‘a new approach’ which entails:
1. The constitution: a generational truce; advocating that we need to stop seeing the solution to Scotland’s problems in some inevitable slippery slope to more powers for the Parliament; instead we should implement Calman and then call a halt for a generation or so;
2. Measurement: a new honesty; challenging our ‘state owned national monopolies’ to stop changing and fiddling figures of measurement;
3. Reform: a new radicalism: declaring that ‘all the parties should seek to recast their policy positions from a foundation of recognition of the problems faced and genuine intellectual curiosity’.

Miers outlines in his conclusion:
The combination of economic and social decline, conservative policy making and endless constitutional debate in Scotland cries out for a new approach. Those who first articulate it persuasively will set the agenda for many years to come.
This is broadly correct as a general description, and also in the opportunity it offers to whichever political force can seize the radical agenda. Where he is wrong is that his ‘new approach’ and radicalism is centred on old solutions: of free market ideas, fragmentation, marketisation and deregulation. It is a view of the world which isn’t ‘evidence based’ as it claims – addressing Scottish failures in comparison to England, but ignoring English problems and pitfalls. It is as if the last few years haven’t happened or the fallout from New Labour approaches.

Following on from my ‘New Scotland’ thesis of over a decade ago here are six points for beginning to explore a more far-reaching, radical, new agenda:

1. Labour’s old style hegemony is as predicted slowly eroding – leaving the party rudderless, directionless and without any sense of anchor – beyond maintaining the rump remnants of its patronage state and its oppositional, opportunist detesting of the Nationalists;

2. Labour, SNP and civic Scotland ideas on economic, social, cultural and political change have shown their commitment to the forces of conservatism and inertia; none of these bodies really has any radical notion of how to deliver change in Scottish society, rather than just presiding over the internal status quo;

3. The forces of the new conservatism – which have critiqued the entire first decade of devolution from beginning to end – advocating a ‘reform’ and ‘modernisation’ strategy – need to be scrutinised and challenged;

4. Equally problematic is the typical centre-left and nationalist response to calls for change – invoking a defensive politics of resistance and public sector institutional conservatism;

5. Mapping a path between these two cul-de-sacs involves embracing the politics of self-determination. Not the constitutional version, but at a societal level, shifting power and challenging elites – both in the public and private sector in Scotland;

6. This self-determination should inform and influence a genuine politics of self-government which can be summarised as post-nationalist Scotland – comfortable with the fuzzy ambiguities and fluidities of shared sovereignty in an interdependent age.

‘The Devolution Distraction’ has done us the service of setting out an analysis of some of the key complacencies and failures of the last decade. It would be wrong to dismiss it out of hand, just because some of it is unpalatable and a little uncomfortable to the gatekeepers and influencers of devo Scotland. Yet at the same time, its message for action is part of the groupthink and orthodoxy which has captured governments, corporates and think-tanks across the West, and in particular the UK and US.
The new conservatism has to be taken on and defeated – not by the forces of old conservatism – which it rightly critiques but the emergence of new voices, ideas and thinking in Scotland. And that requires new spaces and institutions which so far Scottish institutional opinion has shown no interest in supporting and nurturing

. The pamphlet in question can be accessed here.