THERE are arguments for and against the appointment of Lord Macpherson of Earl’s Court, the former permanent head of the UK Treasury, as a key member of the SNP government’s new economic advisory council. Macpherson famously broke with traditional civil service neutrality during the 2014 referendum to use the weight of the Treasury to rubbish claims that independence was viable. In particular, he mounted a major attack on the notion that indy Scotland could keep using the pound sterling – the issue that lost us the referendum.

Since the 2016 Brexit vote, the newly ennobled Macpherson has taken a slightly different tack. He has not exactly come out fighting for Scottish self-determination, but – like other uber liberal members of the British Establishment – he has implied that an indy Scotland could have a future inside the EU. One can read that as something of a conversion. Or see it as a swipe at the Brexiteers. Macpherson has stated that he thinks the post-Brexit rise of English nationalism is the key threat to the Union.

He tweeted earlier this year that the UK Government must take urgent steps to “reform” the constitution if the Union is to survive, by which I surmise he means grant more devolved powers to Holyrood. Or like Gordon Brown – under whom he worked – move to a fully bodied federal state. I suspect the latter is where Macpherson is headed intellectually.

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Nicholas Macpherson has the perfect Establishment pedigree. He went to Eton and Oxford University before being ushered into the civil service, initially as private gofer to Tory chancellor Ken Clarke. After leaving the civil service, Macpherson followed the usual route into the City. He was appointed chair of C. Hoare & Co., Britain’s oldest private bank, in October 2016. He is also a director of the Scottish American Investment Trust, which is headquartered in Edinburgh and whose portfolio is managed by Baillie Gifford, the ruthless investment house that made a mint out of soaring Tesla shares and owns chunks of Amazon, Zoom and Ocado. Which puts our Nick at the very heart of Scottish finance capital. None of this appeared in the press release announcing his appointment as a ScotGov adviser.

What does Lord Macpherson’s voting in the Lords – where he sits as a neutral crossbencher – tell us about the sort of advice he is likely to render the Scottish Government? As one might suspect, he has a pretty liberal record, voting to water down the infamous Internal Market Bill and supporting the introduction of abortion rights in Northern Ireland. But then, Machpherson’s allegiance to the liberal Establishment has never been in doubt. Which is why his appointment as a councillor in the inter sanctum of the Scottish Government is so dangerous.

Macpherson was boss of the Treasury from 2005 to 2016, under chancellors Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and George Osborne. Which puts him in the driving seat during the fateful austerity years that followed the banking crisis of 2008. In June 2019, the respected Institute for Public Policy Research think tank published a damning report on the effects of that austerity. The report revealed there were over 130,000 deaths in the UK since 2012 which could have been prevented if improvements in public health policy had not stalled as a result of austerity.

The indictment stands that the Establishment figure of Lord Macpherson of Earl’s Court was the very civil service technocrat who framed and implemented the austerity programme that condemned millions to poverty and worse. Figures published by the Social Mobility Commission, a government agency which advises the Department of Education in England, show that there was a rise of more than 500,000 in the number of working adults living in poverty, between 2011 and 2016 (when Macpherson retired). And there were an extra 600,000 children living in poverty over the same period. The primary cause of that rise in poverty was the cap placed on welfare benefits – a cap that then SNP MPs went into a lonely “no” lobby to oppose.

It is Lord Macpherson’s career as the supreme architect of austerity that makes him unsuitable to be a central adviser to the Scottish Government … on anything. This is the unelected Lord who legislates over Scotland and who is a paid servant of banking and investment interests – the same greedy bankers who caused the economic crisis of 2008. But it was the common people who paid the price for that greed through savage cuts. Of course, there is a counter argument. Some will say that having Macpherson “inside the tent” will neutralise his ability to oppose or speak out against independence, should there ever be another referendum. But the opposite also holds true. I can foresee the Mail or Express headline: “SNP economic adviser says Scotland can’t afford independence”. Or more likely: “Gordon Brown’s top Treasury mandarin comes out in favour of a federal UK”.

Macpherson has been recruited as an adviser to produce (by this autumn) a plan to reboot the Scottish economy after Covid and to steer a path to a net-zero future over the next 10 years. Again, I can see the argument for having someone like Lord Macpherson involved, as a way of reassuring the business community and adding weight to the subsequent economic plan.

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For starters, the very idea of having a non-elected Star Chamber of the elite decide on an economic plan for Scotland is desperately undemocratic. Worse, Macpherson and his ilk are supporters of a neoliberal economics that has done irreparable harm to the world. In an article he wrote just after the Brexit referendum, Macpherson wrote that an independent Scotland inside the EU “will be competing with Ireland” so it needs “a tax system that is equally competitive. That points to low corporate taxes … it may also point to a smaller, more efficient state”. That’s as pithy a definition of neoliberalism as I’ve heard.

Incidentally, in May, Macpherson argued: “The strongest argument for Brexit is affordable food. Time to ditch the latter day corn laws and stop protecting farmers.” Is this the advice we want given in secret to Kate Forbes by this ermine-clad, Eton-educated, bank chairman?

I understand the argument for creating a broad front to win independence. But I reject the idea that you can first win indy by bringing into the camp the likes of Macpherson, and then be free to build a socially just Scotland. Ends and means are inseparable. The sort of Scotland Lord Macpherson wants is not the one I have been fighting for all

my life. His backroom advice, if heeded, will drive more people away from independence than it will recruit from the Unionist establishment.

To win a second referendum means persuading hundreds of thousands of sceptical Scottish voters – in the housing schemes, in single parent families, amongst the unemployed and low paid – that their lives will change for the better after independence. There is already polling data that shows support for indy in this key group is wavering. Private banker Lord Macpherson will win over no votes in this demographic. On the contrary, his economic advice will privilege those who seek a Scotland where the Establishment still holds sway.