THIS week’s economic “news” on the BBC has been an reminder of the importance of context. “UK unemployment rate falls to lowest since 1975” ran the BBC headline, at just over 4%. Implication? Westminster’s blinkered Tory dogma is working. Meanwhile BBC Scotland? “Scots unemployment rate down slightly to 4.2%”. Implication? Scotland’s economy is uniquely shoddy.

Fake news the lot of it – in truth this is all about context.

Unemployment may be down, but that figure is not being reduced by a rise in steady, well-paying jobs.

It’s being transferred into unsteady, insecure jobs which all too often don’t pay enough to get by on.

Westminster Conservative dogma is seeing unemployment replaced by a chronic mess of underemployment and low pay spreading across the whole economy.

1.8 million folk are stuck with zero-hours contracts, often leaving folk legally “employed” but with little or no actual hours of work.

At the start of 2017, nearly 6.2 million folk across the UK were earning less than the real Living Wage, the calculated level folks need to be earning to securely get by.

UK pensions are so low that 10.5% of folk over the age of 65 are still working.

The real value of our wages is stagnant too – for seven years after the 2008 crash, the value of wages plunged downwards well behind the rate of inflation. Now most analysts point to the fact that average wage growth and inflation are both simply stuck around 2.4%.

The results? The domestic market shrinks, the public purse grows tighter, and we all get worse off by varying degrees. Yet again.

Meanwhile, the politicians grow ever richer and the corporations declare record profits. Yet again.

We need to refocus our economy, not to serve the super-rich, but to work for all of us. With a real Living Wage, we could lift hundreds of thousands out of poverty, and leave millions better off too.

By improving and raising state pensions we could allow the very generations whose hard work this country’s prosperity was built on the security to retire with dignity.

These are the right things to do – and economic common sense.

Allowing folks to retire properly would not only free up additional jobs and shifts, but combined with the real Living Wage would put vast amounts of spending power back into the grassroots of the domestic market.

Forget the flimshaw fake news.

Those are the conditions we need to get small business, local agriculture and community enterprises flourishing again.

Those are the conditions to we need to let our whole country flourish.

Fundamentally, it’s a question of who runs this country.

Is Scotland to be run by billionaires like Richard Branson, Mike Ashley and Greg Creed? Right now these are the sorts of folk who set our wages, our rail fares, our rent, who decide whether we’ll still have an NHS in five years’ time.

Or do we want a Scotland for the people?

A country run by and for working folks like us.

A country where work pays, healthcare is a right, and a dignified and secure retirement is the reward for the decades we all spend working to make this country prosper.

These are the choices that independence is about.

That’s the case SSP activists will be making at the upcoming independence marches in Dundee and Edinburgh, and across the country the rest of the time!

I know which I’d choose.

Calum Martin
National Chair, Scottish Socialist Party