WAS it worth the wait? The Growth Commission has delivered a chunky read, a bit repetitious in places as official documents are apt to be but full of ideas and arguments that the indy movement can use.
Personally, I don’t find it as innovative or comprehensive as Common Weal’s new handbook, How to Start a Country, but then Andrew Wilson and his team had to keep within obvious diplomatic boundaries.
Let’s give his report A+ for effort. Alas, I have to award it B- for aspects of its content.
READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon on the Growth Report: 'It's visionary. It's unapologetically ambitious.'
READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon: new economic plan will be the 'foundation' of independence'
READ MORE: The National view: Indyref2 must now follow Growth Commission report
READ MORE: Key points from the Sustainable Growth Commission report
The report sticks to the very currency option that helped defeat the independence proposition back in 2014 – keeping sterling. Andrew recommends using the pound for the medium term (10 years plus). Even then, somebody unspecified – the Scottish finance minister, Holyrood, the electorate in a referendum? – must use six rather nebulous tests to decide if it’s safe to set out own interest rates and external exchange rate. Adding these new tests only compounds what was a disastrous policy during the last IndyRef. As does Andrew’s insistence we should adopt the current disastrous UK bank regulation system, that lets RBS destroy small businesses and close branches at will. The broader Yes movement – including most SNP members I would venture – will not knock on doors for sterling. Worse, Andrew Wilson is being dangerously naïve if he thinks that keeping the wobbly, post-Brexit pound will ensure the next indy debate can move on from ‘process’ to ‘substance’. Quite the reverse: accept sterlingisation and we will spend IndyRef2 covering the same sterile ground as the last time.
My second worry about the Commission findings is that (surprisingly) they concentrate on past problems rather than future challenges – especially the way artificial intelligence is going to cull jobs wholesale. The report spends an extraordinary amount of time justifying the need to open the doors of an independent Scotland to immigrant entrepreneurs and skilled workers, as a primary tool in boosting growth. I’m in favour of such an open doors policy. But I question the political logic of making immigration the key axis for growth when around one million existing Scottish jobs are under immediate threat over the next 15 years. I don’t understand why the report mentions the new Scottish National Investment Bank in only a couple of anodyne paragraphs in a 354-page tome when it is the SNIB that is the key tool at out disposal to boost investment and productivity.
READ MORE: Michael Fry: Why this is the most impressive economic paper since devolution
READ MORE: Maggie Chapman: One thing is clear ... the status quo is not an option
READ MORE: Craig Dalzell: It’s a mistake not to launch our own currency
The report provides excellent ammunition to prove independent small industrial nations outperform the lumbering bigger ones. However, by elevating three particular countries – New Zealand, Denmark and Finland – as role models, the Commission risks a hostage to fortune. New Zealand’s experiment with neo-liberalism has been an unmitigated social disaster, Denmark is facing a rising tide of anti-immigrant fascism; and Finland has had to invoke massive austerity policies because interest rates are set in Brussels. The task over the summer is for the independence movement to digest the Commission report critically but decide our own unique blueprint for Scotland.
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