Hey folks. It's been quite a while since I've posted anything up here because of "interesting times" in real life. I actually wrote a blog post about new perspectives that I have about the US health care system, but we're not quite ready to share that yet. I've been compiling a mental list of other things I'd like to write about, but I'm going to ignore all of those and talk a bit about my home country, Scotland.
Scotland, last autumn. Can't remember which loch this was. Sorry.
As most people are probably aware by now, Scotland is having a referendum on 18th September to decide whether or not we would like to re-join the world as an independent nation after our 307 year hiatus as part of the United Kingdom. I support Scotland becoming independent, and I want to spend a little bit of time explaining why. Scotland has been having this conversation for a couple of years and I think most people have made up their mind, so I'm not writing this with the aim of changing anyone's position on the referendum, but to share my thinking with my numerous English friends, many of whom I love dearly (in a non-weird kind of way).
At first glance, one would think that I've done rather well out of the Union between Scotland and England*: I grew up in fairly rough working class neighbourhoods on the west coast of Scotland, did my undergraduate degree for free (well, it would have been free if I didn't change my mind after 3 years and start again...) at Glasgow University and then did my doctorate at Oxford where I was generously supported by the Wellcome Trust, a UK-based medical research charity, in labs that were funded by the various British research councils. I met my wife in Oxford and even the postdoc I'm doing now was obtained through connections that I gained via UK institutions.
So, why independence? Contrary to the myths that some on the right in England like to peddle, it has nothing to do with Anglophobia. Apart from a brief couple of hours when I first watched Braveheart at the tender age of 14, I've never really hated the English. I think that the warm reception that the English team received at the opening of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow show that anti-English sentiment is limited to a few knuckle-dragging twats and not representative on Scotland as a whole (unless it's on the football pitch or rugby field). Some of my fondest memories involve sitting in a muddy field in Glastonbury, going to small country pubs around Oxfordshire where I spent quite a few formative years, watching Oxford vs Cambridge rugby at Twickenham and getting drunk on the banks of the Thames, all with our amazing English friends. No, the reason that I think it's time for Scotland to go her own way comes down to Britishness, and British values.
Although I was born in 1980, so spent the first 17 years of my life under Thatcherism, I was raised to believe in British values. The NHS meant that everyone, regardless of their means, received free health care, and either incredibly cheap or free vision care (um, is there a better word for this?) and dentistry. British values meant that everyone had the right to a decent home at a decent price, and that access to Higher Education should be based on an ability to learn, not an ability to pay. The Britain I grew up in believed in public ownership of essential utilities and services. These are the British values that I grew up with and, as an unapologetic socialist, I still believe in these values. Many in Scotland do. Unfortunately, it's becoming increasingly clear that England is losing its way and the last 34 years of Westminster governments have done much to dismantle the things that actually made Britain great (we'll ignore all the nasty imperial stuff as Scotland was equally culpable there).
The British values I believe in started to erode long before I was really aware of them: I remember poll tax only through the eyes of a child (but being raised to believe Thatcher was Satan incarnate), and was only vaguely aware that there was something happening involving coal and miners. Little did I know that much of our heavy industry was being dismantled through Thatcher's zeal to break the trade unions, squandering North Sea oil revenues to pay the massive hike in unemployment benefits caused by her war on industry. As a child, I also remember being confused in the 1990s when British Rail stopped existing and wondered why we suddenly had more than one telephone company.
Growing up in working class areas in the west of Scotland, it was assumed that once the 'evil Tories' were deposed and a Labour government elected, things would get better and swing back towards the left. In 1997, we got that Labour government and for the first time in my life, there wasn't a Tory in 10 Downing Street. Did things get better? Nope. Even then, it became clear that the Britain I knew was changing: that year, I decided to leave school a year early in 1997 to avoid paying the tuition fees for university education that were to be introduced the following year. This was the first time that I started to notice that perhaps Labour were not "for the people" and actually seemed not so different from the Conservatives after all. Let's skip through the next 13 years, nodding briefly at increasing university tuition fees, an illegal war in the middle east and the greatest financial meltdown in recent memory.
One of the good things that Labour did was to legislate for a Scottish parliament, which reconvened in 1999. This has allowed Scotland to go in a different direction from England, where university education is free in Scotland (instead of £9000 a year in England) and where the NHS is still in public hands, unlike that in England where the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 is allowing wholesale private provision of health care in England. You can read why this is a bad idea in this article in the Guardian or perhaps in the British Medical Journal, hardly a bastion of left-wing sentiment. This dismantling of the English NHS isn't just a Tory story with Labour laying the foundations for these changes.
As well as opening up the NHS to private provision, the latest iteration of right wing government has also done something that even Thatcher dared not to do: privatised the Royal Mail. This article explains much more eloquently than I can why privatisation is a bad thing but I can't see how selling off public assets to private providers can be seen as more efficient when you have to provide both a service and also profits to shareholders. The East Coast mainline is a telling example: this rail franchise failed horribly when it was in private hands and had to be brought back under state control. The net result? It has made £1bn in profit, going straight back to the taxpayer, since 2009. What did the Tories do? Put it back out to tender to private bidders. Britain has the highest rail prices in Europe and we also have insanely high costs for energy. Just think how much money the UK exchequer would be receiving if it hadn't sold off most of its shares in BP (2013 profit: $23.8bn). It's perhaps telling that many of the companies who own British utilities are actually the state-owned providers from different countries.
The Scottish parliament has helped Scotland avoid some of privatisation forced through from Westminster: we still have control of the NHS and the Scottish Finance Minister has resisted calls to privatise Scottish water. However, the Scottish parliament receives a block grant from Westminster and is responsible for raising very little of the revenue that it spends. This means that any cuts to the Westminster budget are also cut from Scotland's block grant via the Barnett formula. Consequently, in Scotland it's getting increasingly harder to preserve the British values of universal provision and equality that seem to have gone out of fashion in England. The only way forward that I can see is, reluctantly, to leave the United Kingdom.
Perhaps an independent Scotland can uphold these once-shared values and set an example to our neighbours to the south? Maybe we can build a better society, where we don't have to trample the poor to cover the losses of a poorly-regulated banking system. Maybe we can have a country that doesn't transfer public assets to private hands to pay for expensive vanity projects like nuclear weapons. I want a country that doesn't pretend to be a superpower and get dragged into foreign misadventures to please our 'special friend'. Independence is a leap into the unknown. But with much of the coalition cuts still to be applied, the rise of anti-immigration sentiment and UKIP, the coalition flogging off the rest of our silverware, the renewal of Trident and David Cameron's push to rip us out of the EU (our biggest trading partner after the rest of the UK), staying in the union has many knowns. And none of them look attractive to me.
So, to my English friends, sorry. I still love you all, but you keep giving us these terrible governments. You should be rioting in the street over the Health and Social Care Act or the Royal Mail. I think our best shot at a fair society is for Scotland to leave, and I hope you will see that there can be a better way. This doesn't have to be as good as it gets.
* this isn't a slur on Wales or Northern Ireland, but the UK state as we know it was created through the Acts of Union passed in the Scottish and English parliaments in 1707. Wales and Ireland, you guys are awesome too. Especially when you *cough* beat our
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