The Smith Commission is looking for feedback from civic Scotland, including business groups, as it draws up plans for which powers should be devolved to the Scottish Parliament from Westminster. Business for Scotland will be handing in its official submission in the next few weeks and this will be published, in full, on our website. However, as a member owned co-operative we are always looking to our members for their opinions and ideas. Our thirteen local groups contain a wide range of businesses from diverse backgrounds, sole traders all the way to companies with over a thousand employees. It would be remiss then if we did not encourage our members and the local groups they are part of, to submit their own proposals to the Smith Commission. As part of this process, BfS in Perth have produced the following document to be considered. If you have any feedback on how they can improve their submission, please contact [email protected] or let us know in the comments below. A more powerful Scottish Parliament A more powerful Scottish Parliament More Powers for the Scottish Parliament Principles The recent referendum produced a result whereby 45% of the Scottish voting population agreed that 100% of powers should reside with the people of Scotland and a good proportion of the remaining voters voted no because of the promise of delivery of significant new powers to the Scottish Parliament. Gordon Brown, and Danny Alexander both talked about “home rule” and in the so-called “Vow” of 16 September, the Prime Minister, the leader of the opposition in Westminster, and the Deputy Prime Minister said “the Scottish Parliament is permanent and extensive new powers for the Scottish parliament will be delivered”. To meet the desires of a majority of the people of Scotland, therefore, the underlying principle needs to be that the Scottish Parliament should be wholly responsible for all matters affecting Scotland other than Defence and Foreign affairs and that Defence & Foreign affairs be funded by a grant from the Scottish parliament to Westminster. The reasons why this is necessary are manifold, but primarily: • to ensure that authority and responsibility are appropriately matched. One without the other leads to poor decision-making and lack of accountability. • to ensure that Scotland’s specific needs are addressed by those best placed to understand the problem and produce a solution. • to provide the Scottish Parliament with the powers necessary to focus and fund policy on job creation in Scotland first and foremost • to facilitate better management of the critical oil industry in Scotland and establish an oil fund for the benefit of the people of Scotland in future • to provide the Scottish Parliament with powers to offset the democratic deficit evident in current constitutional structures. Current situation There can be no question that there is an overriding mandate from the people of Scotland for significant change. As the Prime Minister himself stated towards the end of the referendum campaign, “Business as usual is not on the ballot paper. The status quo is gone. This campaign has swept it away. There is no going back to the way things were. A vote for no means real change.” The three main Westminster parties also published a joint declaration setting out the steps they would take jointly after a No vote agreeing to an accelerated timetable proposed by Gordon Brown. So far proposals published by the main UK parties fall dramatically short of this proposition. Labour’s proposal provides the Scottish Parliament with responsibility for only 20% of taxes raised in Scotland and the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats only 30%. And proposals to devolve control of welfare are restricted and only represent 13% of the welfare budget. Clearly, these are so far from the promises made to the people of Scotland that, if this were all that was delivered, there would be a justifiable outcry of betrayal. Members of this group have run both large and small companies across the world. It is clear to us that businesses with decentralised operations, with local management fully empowered to take decisions that affect their own P&L and balance sheet, with the resources to invest and build those businesses, do much better than centralised, ivory tower operations. The early success of General Motors under Alfred Sloan, for example, was founded on this principle. Government is no different in this respect. The advantages of decentralisation are simply that local decision-makers have more knowledge about and empathy with the local customer or the people they represent. Furthermore, in a situation where for every one of the past 33 years Scotland has paid more tax per head than the UK, where there has been clear mismanagement of oil resources by the UK government when one compares the U.K.’s performance with countries like Norway and every other country in the world that has established an oil fund, and where Scotland has regularly received a smaller share of Westminster spending than the share of tax it has contributed, it is clear that the current situation is simply not fair to the people of Scotland and has exacerbated inequality in the UK. The Scottish Parliament with full control over all taxation and domestic policy would not be spending £5 billion on grandiose projects like a high-speed train that only runs in England. It would not sanction a bedroom tax that penalises the disadvantaged, taking no account of the local situation whereby the smaller homes to which people are apparently expected to move simply do not exist. It would not limit immigration to satisfy English concerns when it is needed to complement and support Scotland’s growing technology industry . It would be able to support growing businesses in areas where Scotland has a competitive advantage such as digital games technology, spin-off oil industry technologies and services, exploiting Scotland’s green energy potential and so on. We are firmly of the opinion that centralised “one size fits all” policies and a ‘first past the post’ political system entrenches unbalanced and poor decision-making. It certainly exacerbates the inequalities in the UK as noted in the Guardian, “the UK is the only G7 country to record rising wealth inequality in 2000-14. Wealth inequality has risen four times faster in the seven years after the crash compared with the seven years before. The rich in the UK are becoming richer faster than ever. Wealth inequality rose under Labour; it rose faster under the coalition”. This need not be a zero sum game. The devolution of full power to Scotland could well be mirrored elsewhere in the United Kingdom to the advantage of regions outside the south-east that have suffered for many years. We only need to look across the channel to countries like Germany where a more balanced economy across the country has led to more social cohesion and better economic performance. Indeed, reducing centralized powers and the self-serving bureaucracy and cost that fuels this situation must be in the interests of all the people of these isles. Lord Smith of Kelvin Lord Smith of Kelvin Practical or legal or financial barriers or difficulties to implementing the proposal Of course there will be legal barriers and difficulties in changing the situation. But we cannot believe that if there is a will to change it cannot and will not be implemented, and implemented in a way that the return on the investment is repaid many times over. It has been estimated that the cost of refurbishing the House of Commons and House of Lords will amount to more than £3 billion and Scotland’s share of this would be more than £300 million. If politicians are prepared to consider spending this sort of money on their own surroundings, it is simply not acceptable that an investment of probably much less than this should not be made, particularly as the return in jobs, productivity, exports, reduction of inequality, and improved social justice are likely to be incalculable. One of our members recalls the ‘Y2K’ panic and a banking dinner in San Francisco, sitting next to a manager of a consulting practice with 1,000 people working on this “millennium bug” situation. She was predicting cataclysmic disaster on 1 January 2000 because companies were not ready. His comment then was that she was wildly overstating the problem because managers are there to manage. If problems arose because they were not prepared well enough, they would find a workaround until they could resolve the problem. That’s what managers do. In the event, he was right and she was wrong. This situation is no different. Summary The community of the realm of Scotland has its basis in 1000 years of history. The sovereignty of the Scottish people needs to be recognised in the constitutional structure of the United Kingdom and this should be embedded in statute and in a Scottish constitution. The principle of government should be that the people of Scotland are governed by the people that they elect to their Parliament. As part of the United Kingdom, the only powers that should be reserved to a federal government at Westminster should be those of defence and foreign affairs with adequate representation from each of the regions of the United Kingdom in making such policy.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 07:58:58 +0000
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