Bad Economics and journalistic responsibility

Bad Economics and journalistic accountability

Journalism is such an important bridge between experts, governments and citizens that it used to be called “the Fourth Estate” in recognition of its quasi-constitutional significance. The conduct of democracy required citizens to feel confident that what they read in newspapers had some resemblance to “the facts” – but postmodernity has eaten away at such faith. And more and more of us accept that journalism has become part of what Guy Debord called a gigantic industry of “spectacle”

But where does that leave accountability – and ethical responsibility?

I can hear my readers laugh at such naivety

But it is a serious question which I’ve tried to deal with in previous posts listed here

The question arose again this past week in the UK – with the publication of a report on how the BBC has dealt with economics issues in the past few decades. The BBC’s news summary of the report is here. And the full report, which was written by Michael Blastland and Sir Andrew Dilnot, is here. The Guardian eventually had an economist make a typical comment which failed to offer any solutions to the issue of journalistic economic ignorance which had been exposed

So let me repair this deficiency on the part of journalism and offer my list of books which could help the citizen and general reader understand the basics of economics.

And, as a bonus, a master class in how television interviewing should be done

Best written books about Economics for the general reader (chronological order)

Title, author and date	Comment
Almost Everyone’s Guide to Economics;JK Galbraith and N Salinger (1978)	One of the world’s best non-fiction writers and economists is quizzed by a Frenchwoman. Superb
Short Circuit – strengthening local economies in an unstable world” - Ronald Douthwaite (1996)	Very practical insight into local economic development by an Irishman – but also inspirational….24 years on, it hasn’t really been bettered.
Debunking Economics – the naked emperor dethroned; Steve Keen (2001 and 2011)	Written before the crash, it might be called the first alternative textbook (except it’s much greater fun to read!). By an Australian
Economics for Everyone – a short guide to the economics of capitalism”; Jim Stanford (2008)	a very user-friendly book commissioned by Canadian trade unions with excellent graphics and “further reading” list ….for full version see table 2 …..
Zombie Economics - how dead ideas still walk among us; by John Quiggin (2010)	is a great read – with a self-explanatory title. He is also an Australian
23 Things they didn’t tell you about capitalism; Ha Joon-Chang (2010)	superbly-written demolition job on the myths perpetrated on us by economists. By a Cambridge economist educated in South Korea
The Delusions of Economics - the Misguided Certainties of a Hazardous Science; Gilbert Rist (2010)	Be Warned – this is not a guide but rather a short critique which ridicules economics. More for light relief!
"The End of Progress - how modern economics has failed us"; Graham Maxton (2011)	a highly readable book by an ex-Director-General of the Club of Rome
Austerity – the history of a dangerous ides; Mark Blyth (2013)	written by a Scottish political scientist/political economist (now working at Brown Uni in US) , it shows how old theories still affect the contemporary world profoundly
Economics of the 1% - how mainstream economics serves the rich, obscures reality and distorts policy; John F Weeks (2014)	One of the best introductions to the subject - which can't be faulted for being over-diplomatic!  By a US economist who worked in London from the 2000s
Credo – economic beliefs in a world of crisis; Brian Davey (2015)	An alternative approach to economics which situates it in its cultural and historical context. It may be long (at 500 pages) but is definitely worth persevering with....
Economics Rules – the rights and wrongs of the dismal science; Dani Rodrik (2016)	Rodrik is from Turkey and is one of the few economists prepared to challenge the mainstream. This is a balanced rather than critical analysis
The Econocracy – the perils of leaving economics to the experts; Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins (2017)	This is a highly readable little book from those who took part in the protests about the irrelevance of economic teaching and set out the deficiencies they experienced. This is one of the few which is not freely downloadable
Vampire Capitalism – fractured societies and alternative futures; Paul Kennedy (2017)	A sociologist’s treatment which earns high points by stating in the very first sentence that it has “stood on the shoulders of so many giants that he is dizzy” and then proves the point by having an extensive bibliography with lots of hyperlinks…
Doughnut ;economics – 7 ways to think like a 21st century economist Kate Raworth (2017). google excerpts only	This Oxford economist’s book is advertised as a new perspective on the subject. These last four are not fully downloadable
Economics for the common good; Jean Tirole (2017) A French Nobel-prize winning economist	A useful review here
Economics in Two Lessons; John Quiggin (2019)	Quiggin wrote this book on his website, seeking feedback as he went
What’s wrong with economics – a primer for the perplexed; Robert Skidelsky (2020)	Skidelsky is a stylish writer – historian and biographer of Keynes – I’ve long admired. I’ve not had a chance to read the book yet – although Diana Coyle’s not impressed

Tom Nairn – a resource

Tom Nairn – A Resource

The 2 previous posts on Tom Nairn were https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/anthony-barnett-and-tom-nairn.html and https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/tom-nairn-curmudgeon-extraordinaire.html

This last post will simply try to summarise his significance and reference his key articles

• Tom was involved in the discussions in the late 1950s which led to the establishment of the New Left Review and a prolific author for them (see list of pieces below)

• He was of of one of the Hornsey Art School staff who sided with the students in 1968. He was fired and blacklisted and only got a tenured academic job when he was 70 – in Australia. He celebrated with Global Matrix – nationalism, globalism and state terrorism published with Paul James in 2005

• Apart from his discovery of Gramsci in Italy, another seminal period was his time in the early 1970s as a Fellow of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam which is well captured here -

The TNI, founded by the American radical Sam Reuben, was a left-wing think-tank which became a refuge and agora for a multitude of socialist intellectuals from all over Europe, including the so-called socialist countries in the Soviet bloc, and from the developing world. Most were independent Marxists of one shade or another. Nairn was a Fellow of the TNI between 1972 and 1976. He has said that

“once I was there, a lot of things changed completely as a result, including my relationship with home, and earlier versions of ideology and so on. I learned about different styles of Marxism, from a variety of points of view that the TNI made possible.”

At the Transnational Institute, he was encountering dissident Marxists from eastern Europe, who were finding their way to the TNI in Amsterdam by many routes. Nairn recalls those meetings as “a process of Europeanisation”, confirming another of his own original lines of reflection.

It’s only in the last few years that attempts have been made to summarise his work for a larger public - with Neil Davidson, Neal Ascherson, Gerry Hassan, Ben Jackson, Scott Hames and Rory Scothorne all publishing overviews in the past decade or so.

• In Perspective, Tom Nairn; Neil Davidson (1998) a detailed dissection of Nairn’s writings

• The Breakup of Tom Nairn? (2002) one of the few sustained critiques of his writings

• Gordon Brown – Bard of Britishness (2006) – a rather sarcastic essay of his with critical commentary from a range of opinions.

• Globalisation and Nationalism – the new Deal Tom Nairn (Open Democracy 2008)

• The Enchanted Nat; (2010) s critical piece which tries too hard to be clever

• A Global Scot of Ideas; Gerry Hassan (Scotsman 2012) Positive if not hagiography

• A Scottish Watershed? Neil Davidson (NLR 2014) more an analysis of the Scottish referendum

• Lucky Thinker – an interview with Tom Nairn by Scott Hames (Scottish Affairs 2016)

• Painting Nationalism Red? Neal Ascherson (2018) a quite excellent and sympathetic overview of of Nairn’s opus

• “From the Outer Edge” - Review of Asherson’s book; Rory Scothorne (LRB 2018)

• "The Case for Scottish Independence – a history of nationalist political thought in modern Scotland” Ben Jackson (2019) the most thorough exploration of this strand of thinking with detailed consideration of Tom Nairn’s contribution

• Tom Nairn – the prophet of post-Britain; Rory Scothorne (New Statesman article 2021) a sympathetic and overdue profile from the leftist London journal

• Tom Nairn – a guide through the ruins of Britain; Gerry Hassan (Scottish Review Jan 2023) A suitable tribute

• The New Statesman tribute is here

• Neal Asherson’s final tribute https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n04/neal-ascherson/on-tom-nairn is behind an LRB paywall

• Tom Nairn – globalisation and the new middle class - George Kerevan’s Farewell (Conter Jan 2023) a fascinating piece from someone who followed him down the nationalist route. And a Conter podcast had this discussion with Kerevan

• even the Jacobin journal honoured him with this tribute

His “New Left Review” articles (as a subscriber, I’m able to view them in full but some of them will be behind a paywall)

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i17/articles/tom-nairn-crowds-and-critics 1962

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i23/articles/tom-nairn-the-british-political-elite?token=tQCkpxUTLCC6 1964

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i27/articles/tom-nairn-the-nature-of-the-labour-party-part-i 1964

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i28/articles/tom-nairn-the-nature-of-the-labour-party-part-ii.pdf 1964

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i49/articles/tom-nairn-the-three-dreams-of-scottish-nationalism.pdf 1968

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i75/articles/tom-nairn-the-left-against-europe-special-issue.pdf 1972

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i83/articles/tom-nairn-scotland-and-europe.pdf 1974

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i94/articles/tom-nairn-the-modern-janus.pdf 1975

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i130/articles/tom-nairn-the-crisis-of-the-british-state 1981

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i200/articles/tom-nairn-the-sole-survivor 1993

https://newleftreview.org/issues/i230/articles/tom-nairn-reflections-on-nationalist-disasters 1998

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii1/articles/tom-nairn-ukania-under-blair 2000

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii9/articles/tom-nairn-mario-and-the-magician 2001

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii7/articles/tom-nairn-farewell-britannia-break-up-or-new-union

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii23/articles/tom-nairn-a-myriad-byzantiums 2003

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii37/articles/tom-nairn-the-new-furies 2006 on Tariq Ali

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii43/articles/tom-nairn-union-on-the-rocks 2007

90th anniversary of Hitler's accession to power

Today is the 90^th anniversary of the appointment of Adolf Hitleras Germany’s ReichsKanzler but it was January 28-30 1923 when the Nazis held their first mass rally in Munich - as Tom Nairn reminded us in 1998 in one of his many contributions to the NLR, Reflections on Nationalist Disasters which contains a wonderful diagram (which I'm, unfortunately, not able to reproduce) of the various explanations which have been offered for the collapse into Nazism. These events were also recently discussed in a 3-part series of “The Rest is History” podcast which culminated on 26 January

I’ve recounted here several times my own interest in things German which I owe to my father and his links with the country as a Protestant Pastor who in the post-war period established “Versohnung-saustauschen” (reconciliation exchanges) with North German churches in the Detmold and Bad Meinberg areas. Last year I came across a fascinating account of the 10 weeks or so which led up to Hitler’s accession - The Gravediggers – the last winter of the Weimar Republic by R Barth and H Friedrichs (2019 eng tr). The German newspaper headlines of each day between 17 November and 30 January are used ro give a brief description of key events that day – giving a real sense of how finely balanced things were. This is also the sense conveyed by Was Hitler’s Seizure of Power inevitable? Published by Eberhard Kolb in 1997.

The post-war years saw a huge literature about Fascism and how it might have been stopped - but the recent discussions about the rise of the Right seems to take little account of that literature to which I drew attention recently. 

Geoff Eley is, with Richard Evans, someone who has looked deeply at the course of German history and wrote in 1983 a 30 page paper which tried to answer the question “What produces Fascism?” And in 1985 Richard Evans gave us a magisterial tour of the writing on the subject with “The Myth of Germany’s Missing Revolution”

Sociology in Germany by Stephen Moebius (2021) is one of these wonderful finds which suddenly open up a new world for you - how a European country as important as Germany understood such an important discipline as Sociology. I wonder what the French equivalent is? 

The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton (2004) also looks an important read.

A Rare insight into the creative process that produced Tom Nairn’s “The Break-up of Britain”

 Anthony Barnett is one of Britain’s finest contemporary essayists – a genre which no longer seems fashionable. With Twitter shortening our attention spans, essays which stray beyond the 5,000 word mark get designated “Long Read”. Apart from the "New Left Review", about the only journal which will, occasionally, publish such lengthy pieces is the London Review of Books – eg the series journalist James Meek ran on privatisation in Britain and Perry Anderson’s on the European Union. But 20 years ago Barnett helped set up the Open Democracy site which offers critical global analyses and he was kind enough to send me yesterday a typical (10,000 word) essay of his - “Deciding Britain’s Future:Tom Nairn, Gordon Brown, Marxism and Nationalism” - which throws a fascinating light on the debate about nationalism which was waging particularly in left circles in the early 1970s. The essay was published a year ago so I must have seen it (an article of Barnett's is always an event) but didn't give it the attention it warranted and now needs in the light of Nairn’s death last weekend

Young English readers may not be aware of Nairn’s standing in these arguments, now coming back to life. A recent survey records his impact within Scotland and therefore Britain: John Lloyd’s ‘Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot: The Great Mistake Of Scottish Independence’. A long-time reporter for the Financial Times, Lloyd’s purpose is to preserve Britain by inquiring into the threat posed by Scottish independence. In a chapter on the growth of a self-conscious Scottish political culture, he says of Tom Nairn,

“This one Scots writer has been more influential in the nationalist cause than any other: one who has achieved what many intellectuals desire; that is, to have a marked influence on a movement or a period… He is the one who has laid down the battle lines of attack, on the Union and on England”.

What is it that makes for Nairn’s success when, since Tom Paine and Percy Shelley hurled themselves fruitlessly against the monstrosities of British power, generation upon generation of radicals have until now failed to make any lasting impression, with the sole exception of the suffragettes and despite the success of the anticolonial movements? I set out my initial answer to this question in my introduction to the new Verso edition of ‘The Break-up of Britain’. Briefly, the answer is four-fold.

• First: commitment. Nairn demands a new politics of democratic, national independence from the Union state. Lloyd is right to see his argument as a call to battle against the incubus of Whitehall, Westminster and Windsor. But not against England. On the contrary, Nairn is positively in favour of England. His arguments are a starting point for English liberation.

• Second: real-time analysis. Nairn’s commitment is not underwritten by dogmatism but by an ongoing, open-minded and self-reflective engagement. The book itself gathers essays published across a seven-year period, and the new edition includes reassessments from 1981 and 2003. In 1999, ‘Break-Up’ was reworked in ‘After Britain’. In 2002, he set out his contempt for Tony Blair’s pseudo-modernisation in ‘Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom’. Nairn’s motivation is always to work out how to move forward in a profoundly changing world. This is the beating heart of his method. He expressed it strongly in 1972 in ‘The Left Against Europe?’, a dissection of the futility of left-wing opposition to EU membership. Integral to it is a moral quality perhaps best described as determined modesty – a recognition that we do not know what this reality will deliver. You can hear it for yourself in an interview he gave in 2020, to open Democracy editor Adam Ramsay.

• Third: a theory of nationalism. At the centre of Nairn’s originality is his insistence on nationalism as an inescapable necessity that has a dual-nature – captured in his image of it as a two-faced Janus, the Roman god of doorways, that looks towards both past and future. It is a conception that repudiates the idea that there are intrinsically progressive or ‘good’ nationalisms. Nationalism, Nairn argues, is always both good and bad. …..Rory Scothorne put it succinctly in a recent New Statesman profile. Nairn seeks a nationalism that is a “transforming… ongoing self-determination… that opens up collective identity to the creative involvement of as many participants and experiences as possible”.

• The fourth reason for Nairn’s continued relevance is his role in the emergence of modern Scotland. For nearly half a century, two towering political intellectuals have wrestled over and shaped the Left’s view of the United Kingdom, while one of them had directly shaped the Kingdom itself. The joint story of Tom Nairn and Gordon Brown has never been told as such. It starts with their 1975 collaboration in Edinburgh on ‘"The Red Paper on Scotland’, which Brown edited and in which Nairn was the lead contributor. Today, both have retired to their Scottish homeland having failed to save it from the insurgency of Anglo-British reaction. Yet the difference between them remains the defining one for those living in the archipelago of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales. For the vortex of reaction currently sucking us all into the jaws of Brexit will eventually consume itself. After which, and however long it takes, a left-of-centre government will emerge in Westminster to shape all the four nations of the Kingdom with a framework that will be either Brownite or Nairnite. An account of the contested birth of Nairn’s arguments may help illuminate the still unresolved issues now posed anew in this ongoing contest.

What Barnett’s essay then does is offer a rare insight into the creative process which occurred almost 50 years ago as Nairn worked out his ideas about nationalism – initially with a full-length text which was subjected to critiques from the likes of Barnett, Perry Anderson, EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm (the latter in particular being hostile to its arguments). The result was that the text never saw the light of day – its thinking being absorbed into Nairn’s “The Break-up of Britain” (1977), the opening chapter of which was published in 1975 in NLR as “The Modern Janus”. Hobsbawm was not impressed with the book – as he demonstrated in a subsequent article in NLR.

There is lots more to say about Tom Nairn – but tomorrow sees the 90^th anniversary of Hitler’s accession to power in Germany and requires a special post

Tom Nairn - Curmudgeon extraordinaire

A Scottish intellectual giant passed from us at the weekend, aged 90,

Upon his passing, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon called Tom Nairn “one of the greatest thinkers, political theorists and intellectuals that Scotland has ever produced” while Alex Salmond credited him with “providing the intellectual base which turned Scottish nationalism from a romantic notion to a powerful left wing challenge to the British state”. Gordon Brown, for whose “The Red Paper on Scotland” Nairn wrote in 1975 an influential essay, wrote: “He disagreed with me on many things but his books and scholarship will long be remembered.”

The best way to honour such people is to go back and read what they have written (and also what others have said about them!) – an enormous task in Nairn’s case since he wrote so much. He was, with Perry Anderson, an early editor of New Left Review (NLR) – bringing to it the understanding he gained in Italy of Gramsci – and he was one of the companions on my own political journey from 1960-1990. In late 1964, my tutor at the LSE was Ralph Miliband whose Parliamentary Socialism (1961) had set the left alight and Tom Nairn produced his major critique of the Labour party in the columns of NLR (all 58 pages) in precisely the months I was at the LSE. Along the way, he managed to lose his Marxism and became increasingly fascinated with nationalism. When, in 1967, the Scottish Nationalists won their famous victory in Hamilton, Nairn duly responded with a typically caustic article in New Left Review entitled “The Three Dreams of Scottish Nationalism” (1968). But a few years later he was singing to a different tune in a longer piece ("Scotland and Europ") in that same journal. In 1972, just before the successful negotiations for UK entry into Europe, NLR published his powerful critique of the UK Left’s position on Europe – running to 116 pages

The closest he and I came to meeting was in the pages of the famous “Red Paper on Scotland” of 1975 when his was the lead chapter (on “Old Nationalism and New Nationalism” as I recall) and mine, after a chapter on “Devolution and Democracy”, followed - on “What Sort of Over-government?”

Neil Davidson was a Scottish academic who retained his Marxism and died at the tragically early age of 60. In 1998 he produced In Perspective, Tom Nairn which remains probably the most sustained critique of the course Tom Nairn has taken -

The extent to which Nairn has abandoned not only Marxism, but socialism itself, has been missed by both his critics and his supporters. Such misunderstandings should not be allowed to continue. What Nairn advances is nothing less than a theoretical justification for the endless subdivision of the world into competing capitalist nation states.

A more considered and recent treatment of Nairn’s thinking can be found in the quite excellent The Case for Scottish independence – a history of nationalist political thought in modern Scotland by Ben Jackson 2019. This is a terrific and very balanced analysis which I would strongly recommend to anyone interested in the Scottish experience.

For a taste of Tom Nairn’s writing, I would suggest readers have a look at the little book which contains a typical attack he wrote on Gordon Brown just before the latter became PM Gordon Brown – Bard of Britishness (2006) – with commentary from a range of opinions. And, for a more critical sense of the writer, The Breakup of Tom Nairn? (2002) will give a sense of his role as provocateur.

It;s too early to get definitive assessments of Tom Nairn – but I liked what Gerry Hassan said about Nairn more than a decade ago and Jonathan Shafi’s tribute this week.

Our Fate is not in our hands

Why do I keep banging on about Strathclyde Region’s social strategy? Basically because I got a decade to ensure that it was firmly embedded – which is 5 times longer than any other strategy I handled. To be fair, I’ve been responsible for only 4 strategies in my time – in Scotland, Azerbaijan, Krgyzystan and Bulgaria

I did start what was to be a 4 year project in 2010 in China but resigned after only a few weeks because I couldn’t cope with life in Beijing – expressed in this (short) paper Lost in Beijing – the loneliness of a long-distance consultant which, in offering the various reasons for my departure, also argued the importance of fitting people properly to context.

Most of us like to think that we are, at least, partially responsible for our “lucky breaks” although I have increasing respect for the view of my fellow-blogger, Dave Pollard who has, in recent years, taken to the argument that denies there is any such thing as Free Will. In a recent post he explained

Caitlin Johnstone got to the heart of why we continue to tolerate the massive dysfunction, corruption and inequality of wealth and power that characterizes our political, economic and social systems. She wrote:

People say “I’m free because where I live I can say, do and experience anything I want!” But that’s not true; you can’t. You can only say, do and experience what you’ve been conditioned to want to say, do and experience by the mass-scale psychological manipulation you’ve been marinating in since birth. You can do what you want, but they control what it is that you want.

It appears that we can, on the one hand, appreciate that we have no free will — that everything we believe and do is strictly the result of our biological and cultural conditioning, given the circumstances of the moment — and, on the other hand, rail against stupidity, greed, incompetence and the thousand other sins that, somehow, ‘shouldn’t’ be allowed, or ‘shouldn’t’ be. As if we had some choice in the matter. So the questions that Caitlin’s remarkable paragraph raises for me are:

1. She says we are conditioned by “psychological manipulation”. By whom? Just the rich and powerful control freaks? Or everyone we meet, read, and otherwise interact with?

2. She says they control what we want. I might agree, but that depends on who they are. Again, just the rich and powerful they? Or everyone?

3. Presumably they control what we want through persuasion, manipulation, propaganda, censorship, advertising, PR, misinformation, and otherwise feeding into our conditioned beliefs and desires. Don’t family, friends, co-workers, writers, artists, scientists, philosophers, neighbours, acquaintances, community-members and just about everyone else we interact with basically do the same things? And don’t they often have more influence than the miscreants Caitlin principally seems to want to blame?

4. Where exactly do the miscreants and other influencers who condition us get the ideas, beliefs etc that they try to push on us? Aren’t they just conditioned the same as we are?

A few years ago, another writer made the same point - Raoul Martinez’s Creating Freedom – the lottery of birth, the illusion of consent and the fight for our future (2016)

British artist and documentarian Martinez makes his literary debut writing on a theme taken up recently by writers such as economists Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz, journalist Bob Herbert, and activist Ralph Nader: inequality, injustice, greed, and entrenched power have undermined democracy and threaten the common good and the future of our planet. Because the forces that shape identity act so insidiously, individuals may feel they have freedom of choice; however, as the author insists, freedom is a delusion. 

In reality, we are manipulated by capitalism, which indoctrinates us to be consumers; the media, controlled by wealthy owners who make sure their own self-serving views are promoted; an electoral system hijacked by big donors and lobbyists; and an economy that benefits the wealthy with access to better education and resources. Our idea of freedom, Martinez argues, has been “expertly moulded to suit the interests of those with the power to shape it.” He devotes a third of the book to examining limits on “innate freedom,” which include the economic and social conditions into which a child is born, early nurturing and education, and “variations in genes and experience.” 

In Part 2, “The Illusion of Consent,” Martinez examines limits on political freedom from government institutions and policies, economic theories that endorse capitalism, and media that have spun “webs of deceit and secrecy” throughout society. To the author, “free market” is an oxymoron. His final section proposes ways “to change the game.” The arts, he says, can help us imagine a better future; equally important are individual “acts of courage, generosity and compassion.” Drawing on a wide range of sources, including political theory, philosophy, and the social sciences, Martinez argues earnestly and densely for an alternative to our “impoverished vision of humanity.” The choir to which he preaches, though, is likely to want more than a well-intentioned manifesto of familiar ideas; it will also want concrete suggestions for change.

Scottish Aspirations

The first post in this series started with the 1973 report “Born to Fail?” and referred to Jules Feiffer’s little cartoon character’s comment that

I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. They told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary.

The little guy’s vocabulary since has improved by leaps and bounds – with the language changing in 2000 to that of “social justice” and “social inclusion”. 1999 had seen the inauguration of a Scottish Parliament “dissolved in 1707 and reconvened” almost 3 centuries later with devolved powers in what was initially called “The Scottish Executive” and now known simply as the Scottish Government. Its parliament had learned lessons from the bear-baiting of Westminster and was designed to ensure, with a proportional electoral system, coalition governments

But, in the meantime, the rates of child poverty has at least doubled while the austerity programme of successive Conservative governments since 2010 have placed the Scottish government under considerable pressure. One article, just a decade into devolution, put it like this -

National state policy is one of the most significant factors that affects poverty; taxation, employment policy and social security – and these are, in the UK at least, highly centralised. But, as with the rest of Europe, the last two decades have witnessed a trend towards decentralisation and devolution in a number of social policy fields eg in student fees and the care of both children and the elderly

John Smith must bear some responsibility for the new linguistic trends with his Commission on Social Justice published in 1994. The new Scottish Executive wasted no time in producing Social Justice – a Scotland where everyone matters in its first year in office in 2000 – with introductory remarks from the 2 leaders of what had been designed, with its proportional electoral system, to be a Coalition system of government (Lib-Lab). What has followed is nothing less than a bewildering number of reports. In 2007, despite the best intentions of the designers, the SNP gained sufficient number of seats to be able to form a Minority government and has been in power for the past 12 years. But the issue of poverty and inequality continues to dog them.

It’s now more than 40 years since we issued Strathclyde Regions’ Social Strategy for the 80s. We might be forgiven for noticing a certain formulistic air in the rhetoric about the subject. There is a danger that people hear about it so often that they begin to belive that “the poor shall always be with us” and act accordingly. The amazing thing in 1982 when we published “SS for the 80s” is that we found no resistance to our message. People clearly felt so guilty, there was absolutely no push-back

Scottish reports on poverty and inequality since 2000

Title of Report	Background and summary of argument
Social Justice – a Scotland where everyone matters (Scottish Executive 2000)	This was based on a wide consultation process led By Lord Sewell of the Scottish Office before the Scottish Parliament convened in 1999
Monitoring poverty and social exclusion in scotland (Joseph Rowntree Found 2002)	Useful 130 page report
Achieving our Potential – a framework to tackle poverty and inequality in Scotland (Sco Gov 2008)	A 26-page report
Taking forward the government economic strategy – a discussion paper on poverty, inequality and deprivation in Scotland (Sco Gov 2008)	A 37-page report
Health Inequalities in Scotland (NHS 2015)	A merciful short report (8pp)
A Social Justice strategy for Scotland (SCVO 2015)	Part, presumably, of the consultation process about a Fairer Scotland
Toward a Fairer Scotland – report of a consultation (2016?) A curious doc	In October 2015, the Scottish Government launched a plan to bring about a fairer, more socially just country by 2030. Scotland faces a range of challenges related to poverty and inequality, and this plan set out 50 actions to tackle these issues. This is one example of what resulted
Deliver a Fairer Scotland (2017)	A rather fuller report from something called the Open Government Partnership
A Route Map to a Fair, Independent Scotland – executive summary (Commission on Social Justice and Fairness SNP 2021)	After more than a decade in power, The Scot Nats felt able to go their own way with this report. A more inclusive approach would have given the report greater legitimacy
The Poverty-related Attainment Gap (The Poverty Alliance 2021)	Scottish educationalists have come lately to this feast
How to Survive the Winter; Gordon Brown (2022)	An ex-Prime Minister of the UK (and editor of the 1975 “Red Paper on Scotland”) gives 36 pages of practical advice on survival - as a sign of how serious the cost of living has become

Commentary

The Modern SNP – from protest to power; ed G Hassan (2009) chapter 10, p120 has left-wing Stephen Maxwell explain that poverty rated then only the 4^th most important issue for Scotnats

NeoLiberal Scotland – class and society in a stateless Nation; Neil Davidson et al (2010) A leftwing Scottish sociologist lets rip on the subject

From Tartan Tories to Scottish social democrats? (2018) a short US thesis gives a useful overview of the left-wing 79 group’s role in the development of the Scotnats

Poverty Safari – understanding the anger of Britain’s Underclass Darren McGarvey (2017) A rare voice from the streets

McGarvey does not believe that either of the main political parties are able to deal with deprivation – he believes that an enormous effort is required, engaging the entire society, both left and right. This means that it is necessary to eschew leftist conceptions of class struggle and class war, in favour of a much more subtle and multifaceted approach. One that accepts that the poor can be their own worst enemies, as they strive to cope with the emotional, psychological, and economic distress of lives disfigured by neglect, addiction, and abuse. Poverty Safari is articulate about the way poor people are displaced – displaced by representations and plans designed for them and their blighted neighbourhoods – which take little or no account of how the people wrestling with the difficulties of deprivation might think about anything. The solutions so often come from the well-heeled whose very externality deprives them of real or comprehensive understanding of what needs to be done.

Previous posts in the series

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/born-to-fail.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/bliss-was-it-in-that-dawn-to-be-alive.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/turning-crisis-into-opportunity.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-ever-growing-irrelevance-of.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/performance-v-results-as-measure-of.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/strategy-whats-in-name.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/01/a-statement-from-scottish-poverty.html

A Statement from the Scottish Poverty Alliance

I’m sad to see that this series on a fairly successful Scottish strategy is attracting minimal interest – with only a handful of clicks. So I’ll wrap it up in my next post with some reflections on how the issue of poverty and inequality has fared in Scotland since 1990. But first an earlier post has to be clarified – the one which draws the contrast between the success of a strategy and its “performance” – which begged the question of what sort of impact Strathclyde Region’s “Social Strategy for the Eighties” had made on the conditions exposed in the 1973 Born to Fail?” report. The Strategy may have emphasised the long—term nature of the task in which it was engaged but was there anything to show for the two decades of work before the Region was abolished in 1997?. The most recent figures from the Scottish Poverty Alliance suggests not

Around one-fifth of Scotland’s people – more than a million of us – live in poverty, and that figure has hardly changed in the last 20 years. Around 10% of people were in persistent poverty in 2020 – the same figure as in 2010. Around 24% of children in Scotland are in poverty. Nearly seven in 10 of them live in working households and 38% of children in lone parent families are in poverty. Scotland has legal targets to eradicate child poverty, but research has found that without significant policy change – the number of children in poverty will increase in recent years.

A review we carried out found evidence that the poverty-attainment gap in education – already identified by the Scottish Government as a key priority – shows signs of increasing, and risks being further compounded by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. The review revealed that:

• Infants living in deprived areas, aged 27-30 months, are 16% more likely to display development concerns

• Just over 2 in 5 young people living in the most deprived areas achieve one or more Higher when leaving school (43.5%) compared to almost 4 in 5 young people living in the least deprived areas (79.3%)

• Inequalities continue into post-16 education and work pathways with one in ten school leavers living in the most deprived areas in Scotland unemployed nine months after the end of the school year, compared to 2.6% of young people in the least deprived areas.

Poverty has a huge impact on people’s life chances. Mortality rates are about twice as high in the most deprived areas of Scotland compared with the least deprived  But for some specific causes of death, we see much larger inequalities. For example, people in the most deprived areas of Scotland are more than 15 times as likely to die from drug misuse as those in the least deprived areas.