Brian Monteith: Scottish politicians need to focus on results to elicit real change

Published on Sunday 18 July 2010 13:22

IT HAS taken a long time but there is a serious political debate emerging in Scotland about how to grow the economy and improve the nation's public services.

What, you say, surely this debate goes on all the time; Holyrood politicians are regularly telling us how they are going to give us an existing service, such as crossing a bridge or collecting a drug prescription, for free.

Do they tell us how even more teachers, nurses and police constables are going to be recruited so we can beat our chests and say whae's like us? And, just to show they are business-friendly, they are going to build lots of apparently vital infrastructure projects that would not normally be justified in economic terms (or people would be offering to build them already) and they will cut small business's rates.

The problem is that in Scotland such debate takes place in a vacuum, it focuses on the inputs that politicians can make through spending more taxpayers' money or moving it from one pile to another and rarely looks at the outputs or the outcomes.

The result is that devolution - which was designed by Labour to simultaneously halt any future Thatcherite reforms at the Border and slay the SNP dragon - has at best been a huge disappointment to its adherents and for so many others a failure in areas such as literacy, cancer clear-up rates, crime reduction and cultural achievements.

It is for this reason that Tom Miers argued in last week's Scotsman and in his publication Devolution Distraction that devolution has been a failure, that its supporters are in denial and that those arguing for greater self-determination are peddling a red herring.

I agree with a great deal with what Tom Miers has identified as the problems facing Scotland but I have to part company with him when he argues that all we need is greater political action and not constitutional change.

During the first ten years of devolution when he was for the most part director of the Policy Institute, Tom Miers did a sterling job in publishing papers written by a wide selection of authors who would argue for radical change in education, health, the arts and our economy. Did the politicians in his audience take notice? Sadly not.

The reason for this was that the political culture in Scotland has no incentive to consider reform or change. Far worse, all the incentives are geared towards our elected representatives dishing out the pork barrel to their respective constituencies. Having been an MSP for eight years I remember the mentality well and I recall the astonishment when I had the temerity to vote against the Borders Railway - as well as other questionable schemes.

Even the Conservatives, vilified for Thatcher, did not wish to run with the Policy Institute's suggestions for fear of appearing too out of step with the prevailing social democratic political consensus characterised as social justice by Henry McLeish.

Where I part with Tom Miers is believing that simply calling for more action, greater exhortation, one last mightier heave, will bring a change in heart from our MSPs.

Still they hold to the belief that uneconomic schemes such as the Borders Railway must be continued. Still the Scottish Government clings to the belief that those such as myself who are willing to pay for my prescriptions should be given my tablets without charge and that the new bridge over the Forth should be built out of public funds and free to those who use it.

Even this most desperate economic recession and its accompanying record peacetime national debt that are delivering seriously deep public spending cuts are unlikely to bring about any love affair with public service reform Miers wishes to see. The standard unimaginative response is to find economies of scale by merging local councils or police boards when experience tells us that the result will be larger salaries and pensions for the chiefs that run them and poorer performance figures.

Alternatives that include greater devolution to headteachers or greater use of the private or charitable "third" sectors are strongly resisted because they remove the patronage of politicians, their ability to dole out grants here and initiatives there, and thus their very reason for existence.

To break this cycle of dependency on government intervention, Scotland needs to change its political culture so that its participants are connected to the costs of their actions and have a vested interest in improving the outputs and the outcomes. This means that MSPs need to feel the pain when they raise taxes and see the benefits when they reduce them.

Miers and others are wrong if they think Scotland enjoys a large degree of fiscal autonomy. The only tax that it has complete control over is business rates and it has been spectacularly timid in creating any competitive advantage to entrepreneurs that might attract greater investment in Scotland.

Similarly, the reason Holyrood's power to cut income tax is not used is obvious; any financial benefits in tax revenues that might come from the increased economic activity that such a reduction would encourage would flow not to Holyrood but to the Treasury in Whitehall.

The fact is that Labour's devolution was ill-conceived and remains unfinished; the powers that were given to the Holyrood parliament were intentionally designed to retain power at Westminster and in particular at the Treasury. The result has been that the political discourse in Scotland is always one-sided, discussing what subsidised sweeties can be handed out. Now that business leaders are arguing for greater fiscal responsibility, the debate is beginning at last to change.

I know Tom Miers wants to see radical change in Scotland's public services so that they deliver better results for the poorest and most disadvantaged in society. If he is to achieve that goal he needs to see the call for greater fiscal responsibility as a pre-requisite so that his reforms will become attractive. •Brian Monteith is Policy Director of ThinkScotland.org