Big Bad John Swinney

Everytime I see John Swinney stalking down a corridor or striding to a podium – which isn’t often these days – this song enters my head.  Purposeful, earnest, and taking no prisoners.  Big, bad John.

Oh I know he’s one of the nicest men in politics but underneath there is a hard core.  You cross him at his peril – as the Greens found out to their cost during the 2009 budget debacle.  His command of his brief – all of it – is impressive.  Nothing seems to daunt him, not even the worst financial settlement in devolution’s history.

So he occupied centre stage in the Scottish Parliament chamber on Wednesday to present the Spending Review, which details Scotland’s spending plans between now and March 2015.  And did so magisterially.  Afterwards, he positively glowered at his serried Opposition numbers, daring them to challenge his announcements and decisions.  When Gavin Brown did, he did not let it pass.  Corrected him, demanded an apology and sat down to glower again.  Big Bad John.

He reduced Richard Baker to vacuous phrases and pitiful cliches.  Brown tried to out-detail him on the detail – big mistake.  By the time it was his turn, Willie Rennie’s voice appeared to have risen an octave or two.  Who’d want to take on the Cabinet Secretary for Finance in the budget arena?  Not the burd that’s for sure.  “You don’t give no lip to Big John.”

Which is not to say he found today easy.  But better another pay freeze than job losses.  Better a removal of revenue to kickstart investment in infrastructure than to accept Westminster’s capital settlement and allow the economy to slip into reverse.  Better an Opportunity for All than a lost generation facing a bleak future.  Better a tax on the wealthy than to allow the population to stay unhealthy.

And actually some good news.  Not a single manifesto commitment broken, though it remains to be seen how long that can be sustained.  Public sector reform begins in earnest and still more efficiencies to be found, with the Scottish Government offloading some its property assets to free up hard cash.

Best of all, some real investment in the next three years in the holy grail of preventative spending to start the process that everybody’s been talking about for some years now.  We spend now and save later, with innovation and partnership working to be rewarded with real investment to develop ideas and evidence on what works.  One of the ways to encourage people to reform how they plan, design and deliver services is to reward them for doing so.  The prospect of funding will focus minds and barriers that have existed for years will melt away as people overcome obstacles and discover a can-do attitude.

There is no doubt that some of the decisions announced today will cause pain – no one likes a pay freeze after all, especially when inflation is rocketing but even RPI at 5% does not seem to reflect the real price increases for groceries, energy and fuel.  Couple that with increased pension contributions and a lot of people working in the public sector are going to find it tough.  Really tough.

But then they, like the rest of us, benefit from some of the freebies and freezes.  It’s crumbs of comfort but we are all in this together.  And a side benefit – perhaps – is that rather than increased funding for the NHS disappearing into doctors’ and consultants’ salaries – who can afford a pay freeze better than most – it should be invested in maintaining frontline services.  We’ll see.

Everything that Big Bad John delivered today was focused on keeping people in work, both in the public and private sectors.  Hence, the switch of revenue funding into capital to invest in house building, public transport improvements and yes, road upgrades too, but also new hospitals and schools, so that people can still see bang for their bucks all around them.  Proving that Scotland can still grow despite the limitations placed on her capacity.  It’s that competence thing again, and hinting at what Scotland could be, that runs like a thread through everything that this SNP Government says and does.

Local government will have it hardest, having to deliver more and better with less, but they should be up for the challenge.  They knew it was coming, there has been plenty of time to prepare, and enough of the skirting around reform.  It is not good enough for local authorities to greet poor-mooth about funding when all 32 of them reserve the right to have separate backroom office functions like payroll, HR, finance and property and all 32 of them continue to pay for in-house functions like communications, archtitecture, legal services and printing which could be done just as well, and perhaps more competitively delivered by other sectors, particularly in the central belt.

Councils must focus all their energy and resources on statutory functions and even then, create a hierarchy of need – a school cleaner or a flowerbed;  Christmas lights or child protection;  grass cutting or library books;  weekly bin collections or daily meals on wheels.  Tough times require tough decisions.  And Scotland will get to decide if its current crop of councillors is up to the job.

So, could this Spending Review spell the end of the line for Big John?  Definitely not.  Like a giant oak tree, he stands alone, the weight of the nation’s finances borne on his shoulders.  The strain could bury him but it won’t.  The Cabinet Secretary is made of sterner stuff, and he has positively thrived under the pressure of delivering in government.   There is no one to challenge him on the opposition benches and few on his own side who could realistically take his place.

Year after year, his reputation and stature grows.  Our very own Big Bad John.

Does the SNP have the economic answers for tough times?

A mining tragedy reminds us, in an employment world increasingly office based and white collar, that some folk do still go out to work never to return.

Such tragedies also remind us to think carefully when shaping our own economy.  Underground Scotland is no doubt rich in minerals – we could have a highly successful and profitable mining industry if we wanted to invest in setting it up.  But it would involve destruction of large tracts of our overground environment and provide a fossil-faced future approach for industry, rather than one focused on harnessing new technologies and opportunities through renewables.  And it would involve accepting that danger and death are prices worth paying by some communities for our collective economic benefit.

We are fortunate that Scotland’s abundance enables us to make different choices.  Future generations will surely benefit, but recent unemployment figures suggest we are indeed at risk of creating a lost generation, with nearly one million young adults across the UK now out of work.  And while Scotland continues to buck the trend by reducing unemployment against rising joblessness for the whole of the UK, the number of young Scots out of work is at its highest for a decade – and rising.

The Scottish Government is not oblivious, thankfully.  Its economic strategy, published last week, includes the ambition to create Opportunities for All and ensure that every young person is in some form of education or training.  The election commitment to create 25,000 modern apprenticeships every year will help, as will other measures like the strategic priority to move to a low carbon economy, opening up new trades and career choices.  It is one reason why the restructuring of further and higher education is so necessary, for we are currently not teaching the sort of courses and skills that will be required in the future.  This is clearly a government capable of joined-up thinking.

Indeed, the strategy has a confident flourish symptomatic of a Cabinet Secretary in John Swinney at the top of his game:  he does not shift wholesale from priorities or objectives of the last four years but recalibrates the focus to take account of very different economic circumstances.  The fundamentals remain the same:  the Purpose is “to focus the Government and public services on creating a more successful country, with opportunities for all of Scotland to flourish, through increasing sustainable economic growth.”

Simples huh?  And therein lies the nagging doubt.  The strategy reads simply, there is an unerring faith in the linkability of its objectives and proposals.  If we do x and y, z will follow.  But I’m not so sure some of it is that simple.

For example, the strategy asserts that “by building a more dynamic and faster growing economy we will increase prosperity, be better placed to tackle Scotland’s health and social challenges, and establish a fairer and more equal society.”  Yet, history supports the contention that dynamic economic growth by itself cannot establish a fairer and more equal society.  Indeed, one only needs to look back on the last decade to see how Gordon Brown’s failed attempt to end boom and bust has resulted in greater levels of inequality than ever before.  The rich benefited from the boom more than the poor, yet are able to ride out the current storm much more successfully than those on low incomes.

Thus, behind the bold intentions of the Opportunities for All initiative, one hopes there is some real thinking going on, to ensure that young people leaving care, or who are living with third generation unemployment, who are young parents, whose schools breathed a sigh of relief when they left at sixteen, who have complex and/or multiple disabilities – all the groups most likely not to be in education, employment or training right now – are able to take up those opportunities and for them to lead to decent, well paid employment that mean they get a decent shot at life.  Providing the initiative is one thing, ensuring the support is there that allows it to succeed is quite another.  And I would not recommend the Labour and now Conservative methodology of paying private firms by results as the way to fix some of the issues in young people’s lives.

The strategy does suggest a different approach will be taken through its strategic priorities of effective government and equity.  Both focus on prevention, meaning shifting away from crisis intervention in services eg someone moving into a care home to early intervention eg the support someone needs to stay living at home, in their community.  Everyone accepts this has to happen:  we all understand the why but what is missing – still – is the how and the what.  The hard decisions, in fact, in terms of public sector reform which local government has failed to date to make.

Moreover, the section on equity is muddy, and I’m sure a sociologist could deconstruct it more effectively than me (I’m open to guest post offers!) There is a thoughtful, linear approach to what to tackle and how but phrases like equity, equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are not interchangeable.  I am not totally certain the Scottish Government gets that, though it certainly comprehends the need to shift approach in addressing poverty from one that insists the state can fix it, to building resilience and capacity in individuals and communities to guide them through life.   The adoption and championing on the community development model is to be welcomed.

Overall, there is a sureness of touch at work here.  The strategy is bold, competent and entirely focused on Scotland’s strengths, weaknesses and circumstances:  an embodiment, then, of why people voted SNP in May.

And it is reassuring that the Scottish Government is prepared to lead from the front.  This is an SNP government which believes it has the answers: it knows where it wants to take Scotland and her people, and is sure it knows how to get there.  Let us hope, given the tough times we live in, and the tougher ones ahead, that it does.

Does Scotland have an economic plan B?

There’s an awful lot of scary news out there regarding the economy.

Apparently we missed a double dip recession by the skin of our teeth.  In the last few months of 2010, the country ground to a standstill – all that snow remember? – and the economy went into reverse.  The first three months of 2011 experienced willo’ the wisp growth, a paltry 0.1%, which lagged behind the UK as a whole which had (drumroll please) nearly half a per cent of growth to celebrate.

All those commentators (and politicians) gnashing their teeth about the SNP Government’s performance are conveniently ignoring the fact that for years now under devolution, Scottish economic growth has been less than the UK’s.  Yes, the SNP came to power in 2007 promising to address this but that was before the big crash and recession of 2008 and beyond.

Still, some growth has to be good news, particularly when set beside decent employment figures.  There have been fewer people losing their jobs than we expected and more people getting jobs.  Cue much head scratching, especially since economic wisdom suggests that unemployment is a lag indicator.  In other words, given the recession, the weakness of key economic sectors, higher prices and public service cuts, we should be experiencing jumps in unemployment.  Why are we surprised that a recession that was caused unconventionally is behaving unconventionally?

It may be that this good news is only partial, with many of the supposedly new jobs being part time ones (I suspect that many of them are actually full-time ones being converted into part-time, hence the lower unemployment and apparent jobs gains).

In this area, Scotland is definitely trumping the UK, and our unemployment rate has just fallen below the UK average for the first time in aeons.  But do GDP growth and employment tell the real story of what is going on?  While the wonks examine their spreadsheets, flowcharts and graphs for evidence, the economic state we are in can also be discerned by taking a real time look at real lives.

People – real people – are not going on holiday;  they’re staying put in the houses they have, nor are they buying stuff for their homes; they are not spending anything much in the shops, except on food, and even then they are skimping and cutting back.  Despite all this cutting back, their debts are growing, credit is hard to get or maxed out, wages are largely frozen, many are being squeezed by welfare and tax changes, and others are seeing their pensions and savings shrivel.  Women in particular seem to be suffering the worst consequences;  by default, that means children are too.

The figures can say what they like – folk are definitely telling us they are not feeling good about their current finances nor the future outlook.  Some of the current scrimping is a display of caution.  It might be bad now but we all know it’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.  Definitely a safety first approach being taken.

And as we limp along financially in the real world, in the political hothouse, the Scottish Government is growling impatiently at the UK Chancellor demanding to know where the plan B is.  As sceptical as the rest of us, that the ConDems plan A of sucking the financial blood out of everything using a leech-like approach  to individual well-being and public services, the Scottish Government would like a plan for growth that enables more capital investment and allows jobs and wealth to be created.

The SNP is right – or at least I think so, being Keynsian minded – to call for one.  So far, it has been single minded in its pursuit but their economic approach is also a bit one track.  Efficiency savings + no compulsory redundancies + public sector capital investment = growth (in a nutshell).   But what if the savings run out?  What if the only way to save money is by sacking people?  What if the UK Government does not hear the pleas for more money to invest in infrastructure?

In short, are there options and alternatives sitting in John Swinney’s in tray?  If the current Scottish Government plan doesn’t work, does he have an economic plan B for Scotland?

Yes, McPlan A is kind of working at the moment but it is pretty marginal.  If things are this tight and we are yet to be hit by the really big dips in Scottish budget allocation, then what hope for our economy when we hit rock bottom sometime about 2014?   The private sector can hardly be described as being in rude health – is it really going to be in a position to pick up the slack from the public and third sectors?

The Scottish Government’s plan is predicated on pretty common sense economic proposals but to work fully, it needs the UK Government’s help.  In short, the SNP’s McPlan A can only really work if the Tories do produce a plan B.  But if the UK Government insists on sticking to its plan A, surely it makes it imperative that the SNP prepares a McPlan B of its own.

Just in case.