Opinion jimsillars@holyrood.com


“The British state’s strength-sapping decline was hidden for a long time”


Cutting through the rhetoric Jim Sillars


“Te difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.” (John Maynard Keynes)


Listening to the fiery rhetoric of speakers at the TUC annual meeting, reading the arguments from this and that organisation for continued funding from the public purse, and Labour’s repeated mantra that the cuts proposed by the Government are not necessary, one thing is quite clear – they just don’t get the truth. Ed Balls is a good example. On radio, asked whether he agreed that


cuts, if not the government ones were necessary, his throat froze at the word ‘cuts’ for which he then substituted the word ‘restraint’ as being what was required. What is the truth they are all missing? It is that the United Kingdom is skint, not only skint, but is a country that has been a lot poorer than people thought, and will continue to be a poorer country than the one we have all become used to over the past 50 years. We are witness to a normal phenomenon in human history – the


final shedding of power and the experience of decline by a previously imperial state. It happens to them all: Greece of ancient times, Persia, Rome, both western and eastern empires, Spain, Portugal, and now the British one. Te British state’s strength-sapping decline was hidden for a long


time. True, it conceded first place to the US from 1945 onward, but nevertheless held fast to its ‘world power’ status; in the words of Churchill, playing the Greeks to America’s new Rome. It wields a veto at the United Nations, is a nuclear power, a member of the G7, an important state within the European Union, it was the biggest military component allied to the US in the Iraq invasion and the intervention in Afghanistan. All these factors, combined with massive borrowing to make up for the fact that its tax take has not, for a long time, matched its expenditure, has led to the existence of a mental map based on the past, that guides people’s view of their country. In short, people, trade union leaders, business, politicians, are unable to see the truth of a UK today that is poor and will remain so by comparison with the past. Given the grip of that mental map, it


is little wonder that Labour’s narrative of “restraint” in public spending is more acceptable to people than any argument that deep cuts in public spending are required. Tat is particularly the case in Wales, Northern Ireland, the North East of England, and here in Scotland.


By now, if that mental map did not continue to dominate the Scottish mind, the SNP would have no bother in dismissing with contempt the Unionist eternal cry that poor wee Scotland needs the strength of the great big powerful UK around it. Looked at objectively, outside that mental map, the Unionist case is absurd. Scotland is trapped inside a state in serious permanent decline, one that is broke, one that has no alternative, bar to cut its public cloth to suit its empty national purse partly filled, as it is, by borrowing. Te facts are tumbling out day and daily. Te Royal Navy is an example. A maritime state that relies heavily on merchant navy sea transport for its exports and imports has had to mothball half its military fleet. Te issue of the aircraft carriers, whether to build or not, and Trident, whether to have only three and not four submarines, are examples of a state that is struggling with the reality between its desire to continue projecting power beyond its shore, and its lack of economic strength to do so. One aspect of the aircraft-carrier issue that has had little public exposure is that even if built, there will not be enough money for one of them to carry aircraft. Te army presents another case of inability to project power. Te UK could not, ever again, fight a war of the Falklands scale, nor can it put a full fighting division in Afghanistan. Take the police. Law and order, the framework within which the


state provides its citizens with personal security, depends upon having an adequate police force. A state that cuts its police numbers is in dire straits. Or take higher education. Universities are key to the intellectual


strength and ultimately, to the wealth-creating capabilities of a country. Tat is why, in the rising powers of Asia, there is an incredible expansion of university places; why much of that expansion is in sciences and mathematics. In the US, President Obama has allocated additional funding for those subjects. Here, in the UK, university funding is being cut, substantially, not because policymakers have become morons, or are blind to what is happening elsewhere, but because the purse is empty. Before Scotland can advance to


“A state that cuts its police numbers is in dire straits”


independence, the grip of that old mental map has to be loosened to allow reality to take its place. My quarrel with the SNP leadership is that they have wasted three precious years fiddling with devolution, neglected to analyse and recognise what is the true condition of the UK, and so failed to engage the Scots with new truths that can alter that mental map of the past, and thus open their minds to the potential for our nation to break free from failure with independence.


20 September 2010 Holyrood 73


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