I CAN’T recall exactly when Scottish ministers began to use superlatives to garland their aspirations. They like to reach for the Moon when all that the rest of us want is to be a little better. In Scotland’s Future and Scotland’s Health, a 2014 government report, we were told that an independent Scotland “will continue to provide world-leading health and social care to the Scottish people”.
In 2019 it was announced that Scotland would be “the best place in the world to grow up”. This was when John Swinney was revealing that the UN rights for children would be enshrined in Scots law. How about just a decent place to grow up?
The downside of such sunny predictions is that they rather make you a hostage to those nippy reports by independent bodies that pop up now and then.
One of them, issued by the National Records of Scotland, came along yesterday. It revealed that the death rate in Scotland’s most deprived neighbourhoods is almost twice that of the most affluent areas. In each of the adverse health categories – Covid, alcohol, drugs and suicide – our poorest citizens are at considerably higher risk than their more affluent neighbours. In 2020, the mortality rate for our most-deprived areas was only slightly less than twice that of the least deprived areas.
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Deaths from drug abuse were 18.4 times higher in the poorest areas and 4.3 times higher for alcohol-related deaths. Meanwhile, we’ve known from the beginning of the pandemic that while coronavirus is no respecter of social status and affluence, poorer communities were destined to be hit harder.
The NRS research confirmed this, reporting that our most-deprived communities were 2.4 times more likely to die from Covid-19.
Among the most devastating of the report’s conclusions was this one: “There is a huge gap in healthy life expectancy for people in the most and least deprived areas.”
Of itself, this doesn’t suggest Scotland is any worse than many other countries of a similar size and social demographic, but it does suggest no progress has been made in those major areas of government that are devolved to Scotland: health, education, housing and policing. This seems especially galling when you consider that in the entirety of the devolved era Scotland has been governed by left-of-centre parties.
Certainly, as Finance Secretary Kate Forbes (above) pointed out last month, if Scotland was in control of all levers of taxation and had greater borrowing powers we could seek to mitigate many of the iniquities of the UK Government’s austerity programme. And nor can you accuse the Scottish Government of a lack of commitment to the NHS. We already spend more than one-third of the entire Scottish Budget on healthcare, with Nicola Sturgeon last week pledging a further £1 billion.
Yet, something is seriously wrong. The NRS figures suggest that when the next Index of Multiple Deprivation is due to be published in 2023 the districts that have featured at the top of each of the previous ones will feature once more.
I’ll stick my neck out and make a prediction here. There won’t ever be any significant change in these statistics unless there is a fundamentally significant paradigm shift in how we choose to govern this country.
In this, of course, I may be out of step with the vast majority of Scots. Perhaps most of us are willing to accept an upper limit of poor people in Scotland. Perhaps the key to winning sufficient support for independence is in managing inequality rather than eradicating it and risk scaring the middle classes along the way.
This is encapsulated in some views expressed yesterday by my esteemed fellow National columnist Michael Fry. His argument was that as Scotland has a majority of people who could be considered either comfortable or very comfortable that we should seek to govern and make choices only on their behalf.
MICHAEL (below) accused the Scottish Government of trying “to rule a rich country with policies for the poor”. This, he says, is “a waste of everybody’s time”. Though presumably not for Scotland’s poor, of whom, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, there are more than one million.
Michael’s a smart cookie, so presumably he doesn’t need me to tell him that the cost of caring for the health and welfare needs of these people affects the wider economic health of the nation. And that if this “rich country” could redistribute its wealth more evenly – by a more enlightened tax system, perhaps – that it would reduce the NHS bill.
Unless, of course, he thinks that the NHS, which is disproportionately used by the poor, is “a waste of everybody’s time” too.
This line of thinking is of a piece with that of two of Scotland’s richest and most successful businessmen, Willie Haughey and Sir Tom Hunter, both of whom believe that having more billionaires is the answer to our economic needs.
We’ll overlook for the present that the labour of many people is required to make a billion pounds for one individual and that most of them are thus being stiffed in the process. And that if they weren’t being stiffed the extra money they earn would flow down and into their local communities. More troublingly, these two, among other very rich people, get to influence the economic decisions of our two largest left-wing parties.
As well as progressive tax reforms, a Scottish government truly seeking to reduce inequality might also consider restoring the half of Scotland that belongs to 500 individuals to the millions who are kept out. Short of taking all means of production into public ownership we might at least consider forcing those companies who feast on our wealth to pay the real Living Wage and to commit to being here for the long-term.
This might include the house-builders and the banks who collude to ensure that the million who are officially poor in this rich country (and many more besides) have a chance to live in properly affordable homes. And that property owners charging exorbitant rents be forced to reduce them and be forbidden to evict those who can’t pay.
That should be enough to keep our shiny, new, progressive coalition occupied. Perhaps they could devote as much time to this as they do to hate crime legislation and gender reform. These may be, of themselves, worthy and noble pursuits but they won’t make the slightest dent in the 20-year mortality gap that exists between the haves and the million or so have-nots in this “rich country”. Don’t mention it, Nicola, you can thank me another time.
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