Ben Lunn, chair of the Scotland & Northern Ireland Region of the Musicians’ Union, addresses a rally outside the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh on Thursday 5 September called to demand an end to cuts in the arts budget. Photo Workers.
The departure from the political stage of many leading separatists, be it through illness, death, scandal or retreat, marks the end of an era for Scotland and a new opportunity in the quest for a united British nation…
The Scottish National Party, having lost their allies, the Scottish Greens, will attempt to struggle on until the next scheduled election for the Holyrood parliament on 7 May 2026. But in September SNP leader John Swinney began hinting that a snap election could be called in advance of that date.
The administration has been plagued by a sequence of troubles from a housing crisis, high rates of drug deaths, a botched attempt to set up a National Care Service, failures in essential life-line island shipping services, with essential ferries now six years overdue, and an industrial policy hampered by a zealous green agenda. In addition, public protests led to the withdrawal of the Gender Recognition Act and reversal of some of their planned cuts to arts budgets.
New governance?
Calling an election sooner rather than later may be an attempt to capitalise on the woes afflicting the new Labour government, ones that can be seen as creating an opening for the SNP once people in Scotland begin to feel the effects of Labour’s austerity measures.
However, London and Edinburgh seem to be finding solace in each other’s company. It was at the inaugural gathering of the newly formed Council of Nations and Regions in Edinburgh on 11 October that the two party leaders had a face to face meeting.
The concept for this new organisation (dubbed by some as “quasi intergovernmental”) was launched in former prime minister Gordon Brown’s report for the Labour Party on constitutional reform. It was titled A New Britain: Renewing our Democracy and Rebuilding our Economy, and at its 2024 annual party conference the Labour Party adopted its findings as policy. It contained proposals on “intergovernmental relations” and enhancing devolution as well as a proposal to form a Council of the UK.
The Council of Nations and Regions is the outcome. This is nothing more than a consolidation of the divisiveness of devolution, one more attempt to solve the decline of capitalism. Devolution has not made Britain a more democratic country: it is a recipe for balkanisation, a platform for further strife.
By contrast, the united struggles of trade unionists across Britain over the past two years proves that grassroots unity works.
Objections
Already objections have been levelled at this new body. City areas in Scotland protest that they have been ignored. The leader of Glasgow City Council, Susan Aitken, accused the prime minister of “shutting the door” on Scotland’s largest city, Edinburgh council leader Cammy Day said, “We are concerned that our absence from the summit could place Scotland and its cities at an explicit commercial disadvantage.”
The Council of Nations and Regions has 17 members, bringing the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the First Ministers of Scotland and Wales and the First and Deputy First Ministers of Northern Ireland together with the Mayor of London and the mayoralties of the 11 combined authorities in England.
The distribution of powers and governance employed by this new body is something to keep a sharp eye on. This is an important task because the separatists have been given a voice at the heart of British governance. The end of an era for the SNP? Why breathe life into a party that is mortally wounding itself? Is a federalist structure being created?
Industrial vandalism
We are one British people with common problems. We need a common response to them. Our industries and services require central control and direction. That is because regional and local units of government are inadequate to deal with the scale of the problems we face.
Courting the Scottish Greens is also a danger for Labour in Scotland. They may begin to heed the Greens’ demand that any plans to build new nuclear reactors be dropped. The SNP administration had banned any new developments using nuclear. The Greens had praised this saying, “the phasing out of nuclear energy has been a huge achievement of devolution.”
‘We are one British people with common problems. We need a common response to them…’
But raising fears over nuclear safety does not reflect the reality. A good example is France. It used nuclear power for 68 per cent of its electricity in 2021, as it has for decades. When has it had any accidents? As for the cost, France’s nuclear power results in one of the cheapest energy supplies in Europe.
Its waste is disposed of safely and affordably. Stored on site, it is eventually used as fuel for more advanced nuclear plants. Research from Stonehaven Global Consultancy points out that there has been a steady upturn in support for nuclear in Scotland, even among those who voted for the SNP and Scottish Greens.
Then there is the closure of the oil and gas terminal and production facility at Grangemouth on the River Forth. This has been described by many commentators as industrial vandalism. Protests against the closure have been well organised and vigorous (see article, page 14).
But the protests opposing the closure lack teeth – they are weakened by not demanding the retention of oil and gas. Those resources are continually needed by Britain and will be for years to come. The alternative is importing much more expensive and more polluting fuels from overseas.
Cuts in education
City councils in Edinburgh and Glasgow have announced probable cuts to education services. A report to Edinburgh council in early September laid out proposals for £40 million in savings over the next three years.
Jane Gow, Glasgow secretary for the teaching union EIS, responded, saying, “This causes real difficulties for schools where the roll has gone down and core staffing is being cut again. It takes no account of additional support required for pupils with and without recorded support needs. That impossible task is being left to headteachers, some of whom are at their wits’ end trying to provide anything like adequate support for their pupils, parents and staff.”
The proposed cuts would further reduce the quality of education in Scotland. In the year 2000 Scotland was near the top of the OECD’s ranking for English, maths and literacy. By 2016 it had fallen below the average. The bi-annual Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy, set up by the SNP government, showed a fall from 2012 to 2014 and another fall from 2014 to 2016. The SNP government response was simply to close the survey.
A measure of a society’s economic potential is the educational status of its children. The PISA report from the OECD group of economically advanced nations showed that Scotland’s educational outcomes worsened significantly between 2018 and 2022 compared with the British average and with most OECD countries.
Scotland’s biggest fall was in mathematics, from 6 per cent above the OECD average to 5 per cent below. This decline must be obvious to the authorities. Yet they continue to cut and damage our children’s education.
A firm response to the ongoing cuts to culture budgets across Scotland has come in the form of public protests and petitions by those working in the arts, as well as by audiences.