Yes Scotland tax pledge in bid to win over trade unions
Claim UK split would lead to greater social justice
INDEPENDENCE would allow Scotland to deliver trade union demands for a more redistributive tax system and stronger employment rights, the head of Yes Scotland has claimed.
Blair Jenkins insisted union calls for greater social justice would “fall on more fertile ground” if Scotland left the UK.
The claims came as the proindependence campaign group launched a report aimed at winning support from the trade union movement.
It was given a guarded welcome by the STUC but leftwing union activists dismissed Yes Scotland’s case as “timid”.
The Yes Scotland report – entitled Yes to a Just Scotland – is a response to the STUC’s A Just Scot l a nd document published last year, which called on both campaigns to set out policies promoting greater equality and social justice.
It avoids making specific policy proposals but suggests an independent Scotland would be more sympathetic to STUC demands for higher taxes on the wealthy, a more generous welfare system and stronger employment rights.
Asked ahead of the report’s launch whether he believed independence would result in a more redistributive tax regime, Mr Jenkins replied: “Yes.”
He added: “We believe the trade union movement will be able to deliver more of its agenda through Yes than No.”
However, he declined to comment on the SNP Government’s six-year council tax freeze and multimillion-pound “small business bonus” tax discount, which have been criticised by the unions.
In his introduction to the report, he admitted: “We do not claim the trade union movement will get all it argues for in an independent Scotland.”
The report was launched in Glasgow by Mr Jenkins and actress Elaine C Smith in front of an audience of union members and charity representatives.
It asks the STUC to set out its own policies for an independent Scotland. It is understood that senior STUC figures urged the campaign group to tone down the highly political request during private discussions prior to the report’s publication but were ignored.
STUC general secretary Graeme Smith said: “The STUC believes that significant challenges r e main for both campaigns.
“Commitments in areas such as welfare continue to be made without the necessary related commitment to redistribution through increased taxation.
“Both campaigns lack any clear vision of how collective bargaining and a properly regulated labour market might be used to reduce income inequality.”
Pauline Bryan, of the Red Paper Collective of trade union activists, said Yes Scotland’s report was “timid”.
She added: “Given the policy constraints of using a shared currency and the EU as envisaged by the Yes campaign, the document asks almost nothing which could not be answered by greater powers to a Scottish Parliament or ideally a federal arrangement within the UK.”
Labour MSP Neil Findlay said: “To achieve social justice we need a progressive taxation policy to promote redistribution and the major player in the Yes campaign, the SNP, is opposed to this. On one hand the nationalists have tax exiles calling for tax cuts, and on the other they call for Scandinavian levels of public spending. Only last week John Swinney confirmed there would be no rises in personal taxation in an SNP-governed independent Scotland.” l The SNP has welcomed the launch of a new LGBT organisation, Out for Independence. The group is made up of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender SNP members and supporters and is due to stage its inaugural conference in Glasgow today with Nicola Sturgeon as the keynote speaker.
PROFESSOR John Kay, the eminent economist, spoke eloquently for more than an hour at Glasgow University on the economics of Scottish independence and at the end came to an unexpected but surely wise conclusion. It’s not really about economics at all. “This is much more of an emotional issue than an economic issue,” he said. “The economic issues are not that big a deal. Anyone who casts their vote on economic grounds exaggerates the importance of economics.”
The Edinburgh-born, LSE and Oxford academic, a former member of Alex Salmond’s council of economic advisers, used his lecture to address the intriguing finding in the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey a couple of years ago that suggested Scots would back independence by a healthy majority if they believed it would make them £500 better off and reject it out of hand if they thought they would end up £500 poorer.
He was canny enough at the outset to dampen his audience’s hopes of a getting a definitive answer on that.
The closest he came was to suggest that £500 either way was at the “outer limits” of what independence would mean for our pockets. In other words leaving the UK would, initially at least, not make much difference. Recalling the American revolutionaries’ cry of “Give me liberty or give me death!” he noted drily: “‘Give me liberty or give me £500!’ does not have the same appeal.”
Prof Kay’s analysis goes like this. An independent Scotland would face considerable economic challenges, though they would not be insurmountable and should not be over-played.
The most pressing would be the issue of the currency. His belief that an independent Scotland would most likely have to adopt a new currency, given the restrictive economic strings that would be attached to any deal with the UK Treasury to keep sterling, was widely reported this week. However, while a Scottish currency would present “difficulties and large costs” those issues, he stressed, “should not be exaggerated”.
In the longer term, creating an
Prof Kay seemed, however, very unimpressed with the current debate
economic environment conducive to business success on the world stage would be the biggest challenge for an independent Scotland. Prof Kay argued that Scotland has the potential to forge a competitive advantage in a range of sectors, including food and drink, finance, tourism, life sciences and energy services (though he is deeply sceptical about a renewables-fuelled bonanza). However, we’d need to develop a more entrepreneurial climate to take full advantage.
Prof Kay is impressively dispassionate. Having concluded that independence is primarily an emotional issue, he gave no clues about where his own feelings pulled him. He did, though, seem very unimpressed with the current debate.
Pro-independence campaigners, he said, need to “get beyond vague aspirational statements of a rather ludicrous kind”. Talking of the need for powers to tackle poverty was not the same as identifying specific policies that could tackle poverty, he warned. Issuing wish-lists and making promises while avoiding tough choices on tax, spending and debt placed people in “cloud cuckoo land”. His verdict? “The advantage (of independence) is less that it avoids hard choices but more that it forces one to make them.”
His lecture at the university’s grand Bute Hall on Thursday evening was well attended. Just not by the politicians and campaigners for whom it should have been required listening. Instead they were about 500 yards away, round the corner at the student union, paying too much attention to the final stages of a mock referendum with a pitifully low turn-out of 12%.
Student leaders have been praised for arranging the mock referendum. But for me a greater debt of thanks is due to Dr Phillips O’Brien who arranged for Mr Kay to speak as part of the ongoing Glasgow Global Security Network lecture series.