A People's History of Scotland

by Chris Bambery

  CONCLUSION:

  Our Destiny Is In Our Hands

  The people of Scotland are no better or worse than the people of any other country. Like them, we have our share of villains and those who have committed wrong towards their fellow human beings. But Scotland has also contributed more than its fair share of rebels, those women and men who have championed the downtrodden, the victims of injustice and the oppressed. Today Scotland is scarred by a deep divide between those enjoying great wealth and those who live in fear of poverty, with many already struggling to feed their family or heat their home.

  Let us start with those who live not simply in comfort but who possess extraordinary wealth. As in every other country, the last three decades of unbridled free-market capitalism has led to a growing imbalance in society, with an explosion of wealth at the top. Far from that ‘trickling down’ to the great majority below, their lives have become more insecure.

  At the top ring of society, Scotland, proportionally, has the highest number of millionaires in the UK outside London and the southeast. Between 2008 and 2010 the number increased by 18 percent, from 34,000 to 40,000. This is predicted to grow by 38 percent by 2020, the second-fastest rate of any UK region.1 The number of Scots among Britain’s wealthiest people reached a ten-year high in 2013 with the Sunday Times Rich List finding that 78 people based in Scotland had joined its ranks.

  The number of Scottish billionaires has grown from two to six in two years, with Mahdi al-Tajir, head of the Highland Spring mineral water firm, named as Scotland’s richest person, worth £1.65 billion. The eighty-one-year-old former UAE ambassador to the UK has a 24,000-acre estate near Gleneagles, Perthshire, and splits his time between there and London. He is the forty-fourth-richest person in the UK and has interests in metal, oil and gas trading and a large property portfolio, as well as running Highland Spring.

  He is joined on the list by the Grant and Gordon whisky family, worth £1.4 billion; the oil tycoon Sir Ian Wood, £1.2 billion; the Thomson family, whose DC Thomson publishing company is valued at £1.1 billion; Alastair Salveson and his family, who have a £1.05 billion share of Aggreko, the Glasgow plant-hire firm; and the businessman Jim McColl, worth £1 billion. The combined wealth of Scotland’s 100 richest people amounts to a record £21.1 billion, almost double the level in 2004.2

  The country also has the distinction of having the highest proportion of Michelin-starred restaurants per millionaire, and this number is rising. Scotland has a luxury appetite, or at least some Scots have, together with the highest incidence of high-end car dealerships per millionaire and the second-highest in the UK of luxury retail stores.3 One in four children in Edinburgh attends a fee-paying school; in north-east Glasgow, 35 percent leave school with no qualifications.4

  Iain McWhirter notes: ‘You could scarcely think of a less socialist city than Edinburgh, where 25 percent of school children go to private schools and average house prices are ten times Scotland’s median wage.’5

  The vast majority of these wealthy people owe their position to inherited wealth and a privileged upbringing. Few began trading from a market barrow and climbed up the pole to found a multinational corporation. The Scottish upper class has always formed an integral part of the British ruling class – it is not the case that since 1707 we have been under English rule: they must take responsibility for the crimes of Empire and of British imperialism, and the crimes they committed against their own. Who better to hold them to account than the people of Scotland?

  In September 2014, the Scottish people will have a unique opportunity when they will be asked in a referendum to vote Yes or No in favour of Scottish independence. In the official debate on that choice, discussion centres on Scotland’s constitutional position, whether it will maintain sterling and so on. But let’s pose the question differently. The people of Scotland are being asked if they would like to create a new state, and that could be a very different place – one based in pursuing the interests of the many, not the few.

  Yes, Scotland is blighted by the growing extremes of wealth and poverty, but that has been exacerbated by our membership of the United Kingdom, the fourth most unequal nation in the developed world, and it’s getting worse. This has been true for the last thirty years. We pay the price in terms of child poverty, ill health, low educational achievement and much more. Back in 2008 the average income of the richest 10 percent of earners in the UK was almost twelve times that of the bottom 10 percent, up from eight times in 1985. The annual average income in the UK for the top 10 percent in 2008 was just under £55,000; the bottom 10 percent averaged £4,700.6

  Since the financial crash of 2008 and the recession that followed, matters have got worse because rather than blunting the neo-liberal offensive of the previous three decades, the crash has intensified it. Our pensions are under attack, privatisation continues, the numbers in insecure work grow, and there is a government drive to remove the disabled and the sick from benefits and much more.

  Since 2010, this has been taking place under a Westminster government, a coalition of the Tories and Liberal Democrats, that once more has no mandate in Scotland. The Labour opposition accuses them of implementing their austerity programme too fast, but accepts the need to cut welfare and public spending in order to pay off a budget deficit largely caused by using £1.3 billion to bail out the banks in 2008 – despite their responsibility for the implosion of the financial system. Prior to that, under Thatcher and then Tony Blair, British governments enjoyed a tragic love affair with the City of London and the financial services centred there.

  The result is a massive economic imbalance within the United Kingdom. It can boast the greatest distance between rich and poor regions than any other state in Europe. Back in 1989, London produced just over 150 percent of the average for the UK economy. By 2009 that was up to 175 percent. In the autumn of 2013, it was revealed that after five years of austerity and cuts, London’s economy was doing even better than at the height of the boom which preceded the 2008 financial crash – in contrast, nearly every other part of the UK has seen its economy shrink. London and the south-east were racing away from the rest of the UK.7 During the boom from 1997 to 2006, the south-east was responsible for 37 percent of the UK’s growth in output. Since the crash of 2007, however, its share has rocketed to 48 percent.8 It should be added that the great majority of the people of London suffer from a shocking imbalance between rich and poor.

  In other words, the financiers and bankers based in London helped drive the global and UK economy to the wall, but rather than being punished they have continued to coin it in at our expense. Writing in the spring of 2012, the editor of Scottish Left Review, Robin MacAlpine, reminds us of the problems facing the UK economy, and Scotland’s as a consequence of our membership of that state:

  Low productivity, low pay, inequality, inherent economic instability, weak real exports, lack of investment in research and development and all the rest are much more to do with the structure of the labour market. We have pointlessly high wages at the top, unacceptably low wages at the bottom, nothing much in between and no link between economic growth and individual prosperity. Just to remind you, the last ten pre-crash years of economic growth in the UK lifted average wages by zero … The real failure of the UK economic policy is the failure to stimulate industrial production. Between 1990 and 2011, the following are the rates of change in industrial production: Austria 99 per cent, Canada 35 per cent, Finland 83 per cent, USA 50 per cent, Germany 32 per cent, Sweden 54 per cent, the UK –1.2 per cent. Could the UK’s economic failure be summed up more concisely?9

  Failure to invest has been one of the features of the UK economy since the close of the nineteenth century. British capitalists preferred investing abroad or in financial speculation than at home, while high levels of military spending meant low levels of spending on education, transport and the country’s infrastructure.

  In May 2013, the Guardian revealed that this problem has not gone away: ‘According to an analysis by
the House of Commons library, Britain invests a lower percentage of GDP than any other of the leading western industrial nations. The figures … show that while most G8 countries have increased investment as a proportion of national income since 2010, Britain suffered the biggest fall of any G8 country apart from Italy.’10

  On a wider front, membership of the United Kingdom means being trapped in a state that despite austerity is willing to spend billions earmarked to replace Trident in order to cling to its position as a world power. Maintaining that great-power status, despite the UK’s relentless economic decline, means clinging to the coat tails of the United States – the cost of which is that the UK is a country virtually permanently at war. Far from bringing any benefits, it means that across the globe millions of people who have been militarily occupied, subject to drone attacks and bombing or simply had a pro-Western dictatorship foisted on them hate the United Kingdom in second place to the United States.

  Where does Scotland stand today? For the vast majority of working people real poverty and economic distress were the reality for their grandparents or great-grandparents. It was only in the mid-1950s that living standards rose so that people could afford some of the comforts of life, that decent housing was made available and a welfare state came into existence that could offer a safety net for those forced out of work.

  The sad truth is that the two or three post-war decades, which coincided with the longest economic boom in capitalist history, were the exception in our history. Like many, I was assured by my parents in the 1960s that I would not have to live through what had blighted their youth – mass unemployment, fascism and war. I was the first in my family to go to university and the future seemed assured. But economic bad times returned in the mid-1970s, and have never been far away since. Today, the consensus among our rulers and across wider society is that far from things getting better for our children, future generations can expect a fall in living standards and less job security. If they go to university they will not get the sort of grant I received from the state, they will have to borrow money to live on and leave college with a debt. Few in current circumstances will be able to afford to buy a house, and unlike in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s there are few council homes available – precariousness in housing will be added to precariousness in work. Added to this, they are being told they will have to work into their late 60s and will have to pay more than their parents did if they want a half-decent pension.

  It’s not a cheery picture, but it’s one that’s common across Europe and North America. It is one of the fundamental reasons we have seen powerful movements challenge neo-liberalism and the free-market policies shared by governments whether of the centre right or centre left. Hopefully working people in Scotland will continue to resist as they did in huge numbers in 2003 over the invasion of Iraq, in 2005 over global poverty and more recently against austerity.

  And there are good reasons people should take to the streets and vote to exit austerity in September 2014. This is a snapshot of where Scotland stands in the autumn of 2013:

  • As the Westminster government proclaims an economic recovery, unemployment in Scotland is over 7 percent.11

  • Youth unemployment was over 22 percent in August 2013, with 96,000 16–24-year-olds jobless, a 27 percent increase since 2009.12

  • 160,000 children are living in poverty, 16 percent of our youth. That figure is widely expected to rise as a result of the Coalition government’s austerity measures.13

  • One third of Scottish families and 56 percent of pensioners are affected by fuel poverty, with gas and electricity prices increasing further, this in an energy-rich country; 28,000 people died of cold in the 2011–12 winter. The UK mortality rate from inadequate heating is one of the highest in Europe, and deaths in Scotland exceed those in England and Wales.14

  Aberdeen, because of oil wealth, is one of the wealthiest cities in the UK. Barry Douglas is the minister of Kings Community Church in the city’s Seaton district, where 29 percent of the local people live below the poverty line. He runs a food bank distributing food to those in need. He described one couple who’d turned up after the man had a heart attack and was forced to give up work. This man had never claimed benefits in his life and was trying to make ends meet as he waited for the paperwork to get sorted: ‘They’d worked all their lives and never once looked for or needed charity. But they came to us completely starving and at their wits’ end. It was heartbreaking. We ended up giving them five bags of food.’

  He also related how the church stepped in when a young mum had her money stopped because she was a few minutes late for her benefits’ appointment: ‘She was very vulnerable and very frightened. She was a couple of minutes late and they stopped her benefits. She did not have a single penny to buy food for herself or her children.’15

  Life expectancy in Scotland for both women and men is poor compared to the rest of the United Kingdom, standing at 75.8 years for males and 80.3 years for females. This was the lowest among the UK countries. The figures for the UK were 78.1 for men and 82.1 for women.16 Elsewhere in northern and western Europe, it’s between three and five years lower than in Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Finland and Ireland.17

  Huge differences remain between the death rates of the richest and poorest people living in Scotland. Scottish Public Health Observatory (ScotPHO) figures revealed that in 2011 there were 424 deaths per 100,000 people from the most affluent 10 percent of the population. But this rate more than doubled to 1,014 per 100,000 in the least-well-off group.18

  In Glasgow, male life expectancy in Dalmarnock, Calton, Kinning Park and Townhead is below sixty: Britain, as a country, passed this mark during World War II. While poverty is concentrated in the East End of Glasgow, inequality exists across Scotland. The difference in life expectancy between the best and worst postcode areas is twenty-two years in Edinburgh, seventeen years in Paisley, fifteen years in Perthshire and nine years in the Highlands.19

  A child born in Calton, in the East End of Glasgow, is three times as likely to suffer heart disease, four times as likely to be hospitalised and ten times more likely to grow up in a workless household than a child in the city’s prosperous western suburbs.

  In contrast, Scotland’s top neighbourhoods (in the west of Scotland, Bearsden, Milngavie, Lenzie, Clarkston and Kilmacolm) offer an outstanding quality of life, with high salaries, reasonable house prices and a life expectancy longer than the average for any country in the developed world. This is the reality of life in one of the world’s richest countries, a country with enormous resources of oil, renewable energy and water. If those resources were used for the benefit of the many, all of these ills could be reversed. But that cannot happen within the United Kingdom. We saw how successive Westminster governments frittered away the revenues from North Sea oil, and lied about the possible benefits they could bring a Scotland in charge of its own finances. Today we do not even control the sea bed around our land, and cannot ensure that the benefits of wind and tidal farms are not spent on war, nuclear missiles and tax breaks for the rich. It is not revolutionary to demand, for example, a programme of job creation, aimed at creating real skills.

  The message from the Tories, Labour and Liberal Democrats at Westminster is that we have to accept austerity for the foreseeable future. But we are not ‘all in it together’ as David Cameron claims. We are picking up the bill while those at the top party on.

  An independent Scotland should refuse to foot the bill for bailing out the global financial system – in solidarity with the people of Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland whose lives have been dealt a body blow by even harsher austerity programmes imposed on them undemocratically by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. As for two of the biggest recipients of bail-out largesse, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and HBoS – the largest elements of Scottish big business – they could and should be taken entirely into public hands and run democratically in the public interest.

  The objection to independence is tha
t this is far from the vision of Scotland being offered by the SNP government. The First Minister, Alex Salmond, was quite willing to condemn the ‘casino capitalism’ of the City of London but would not say a word against his former employers at RBS, undoubtedly among the most foul and disreputable elements of British capitalism.20 The SNP government’s vision for Scotland is one complete with the Queen, NATO, the pound and neo-liberalism – which makes it imperative that there has to be a radical vision of what Scotland could be.

  The forecast for what’s on offer from Westminster is more austerity, more war and more free-market measures. Westminster is addicted to war and in love with the City of London. Over three decades that’s beggared the lives of millions of us. It’s time for change, surely? Further, it trails behind the USA in any war or human rights violation in a desperate effort to maintain the supposed ‘special relationship’.

  If the vote in September 2014 is about the creation of a new state then it should be one that benefits the people of Scotland. One that is more democratic than the UK state, more equal and committed to the needs and welfare of its people.

  Surely the road to that better Scotland would be less rocky in an independent country, and possibly make it that bit easier to deal with our supposed rulers. Scotland is a class-divided country no better or worse than any other but we have a chance to take control of our destiny. There’s nothing guaranteed, but surely we can deal with our own rapacious ruling class and move on to a better society than this.

  The United Kingdom is an obstacle to radical change for all its inhabitants, in thrall to its own past – witness the endless royal and state occasions growing as the economic situation worsens for the vast bulk of us.

  The Scottish people have a chance to escape. Some of our sisters and brothers in Liverpool, Newcastle and Doncaster say ‘Don’t leave us in Tory hands!’ But if you were offered the chance for your prison wing to escape you would not insist on staying to suffer alongside the rest. You’d hope your example would inspire them, and organise to help them from the outside.