“RIGHT-of-centre” economic plans laid out in the Growth Commission Report won’t win working-class support, according to the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP).
Party co-spokesperson Colin Fox said there wasn’t “a hope in hell” that the report would gain majority support in Scotland today.
Yesterday the report’s author Andrew Wilson defended the commission’s policies ahead of the SNP conference later this month (see story below).
However Fox said while it was true the Yes movement had spent too little time reflecting on why the 2014 referendum had been lost, it was also true the conclusions drawn by the commission would never have galvanised the broad coalition of support that was marshalled behind the Yes Scotland banner and secured 45% support.
“I can assure Andrew Wilson the Scottish Socialist Party, one of the three parties in Scotland who support independence and a co-founder of ‘Yes Scotland’, the Radical Independence Campaign, nor the others on the left/centre left of the Yes movement would have backed his right-of-centre economic plans,” said Fox.
“Andrew claims his commission seeks ‘to challenge orthodoxy’ and yet it reaches conclusions which have at their heart the neoliberal free market which is falling apart worldwide.
“The SGC Report is not ‘challenging orthodoxy’ in any sense, rather it parcels up the same economic dogma, doubtless learned from his many RBS policy forums, and presents them as the freshest of fresh thinking.”
Fox criticised the report for failing to propose progressive tax policies such as those employed in the Scandinavian countries and ignoring the lessons of New Zealand “where low taxes, low wages and the influx of Chinese capital has crippled the Auckland housing and labour market”.
“And he recommends Scotland’s public spending levels are cut when our hospitals, schools and railways are already failing, not least under the weight of PFI schemes including the SNP’s Scottish Futures’ Trust.”
Fox said the report was “straight out of Tony Blair’s New Labour playbook”.
“It posits mythical productivity improvements that cannot be achieved without massive investment in training and new technology,” he said. “It is based on recruiting skilled workers from abroad at cheap labour rates to work below a just level of remuneration.
“It proposes savage cuts in public services already unable to adequately serve the interests of our most vulnerable citizens.”
Fox added: “There is not a hope in hell that this report could command majority support in Scotland today. It may be what Edinburgh financiers, Aberdeen oil men, Glasgow businessmen and big Galloway farmers are looking for, although I doubt even that.
“But I can assure him it will repel Scotland’s working class majority who continue to be the bedrock of support for independence in this country. They remain the majority we did not win in 2014. And that is the most important lesson yet to be learned by Andrew and his colleagues at the SNP Conference in Edinburgh later this month.”
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