Scottish Co-operative Party Lecture
19 June 2009 at the Winter Gardens, The People’s Palace, Glasgow

Thank you. I am pleased and honoured to be with you this evening.

Ten years ago, almost to the day I had the privilege of being one of the 129 members of the new Scottish Parliament. It was a moment that whatever happens - and a fair bit has happened in the intervening ten years - no-one can take from those of us who were there.

It was a remarkable moment of constitutional change: without a shot being fired, without riots in the street, without any dissidents locked up – the UK constitution unlocked after hundreds of years.

The argument for Scotland to have a greater degree of self government, within the United Kingdom, a political thread which ran from Keir Hardie through JP Macintosh to Donald Dewar, was won. It was won with civic Scotland, with intellectual Scotland and with the community leaders of Scotland. But most of all it was won with the people of Scotland. They it was who said yes to the idea of devolution, and then yes again to its enactment.

For ten years now our young parliament has striven to find its identity and place, testing its powers and limitations, searching for its place and purpose in Scottish society and beyond.

2009 is the tenth birthday year of our Scottish Parliament. Tonight I want us to reflect on the achievements of those first ten years but also to look ahead to the ambitions we in the Labour Party have for the next ten years of devolution and beyond.

It is easy to take what we have already achieved for granted. It is easy to forget how far we have come in ten years. It is easy to let the memory of that day grow dim.

In 1999, mobile phones are the size of small bricks. The internet is the subject of induction courses for new students at university to tell them what it is and how to use it. Google has just turned itself from research project into a company.

Even Steve Jobs doesn’t know what an iPod is yet.

World Leaders are Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, Nelson Mandela. No one here has really heard of George W Bush.

In London, the Millenium Dome is yet to open – and fear of the Millenium bug is growing.

Politically, it is only two years after Labour’s historic landslide victory. The country is still on a high – WE are on a high and the work is underway with gusto to redress the damage and neglect of the Tory years.

Speaking here tonight at this event of the Co-op party, I know that I am among comrades. Our parties have shared a vision, of a society for the many, not the few, for many years. And we together watched in dismay the damage and the destruction of the Tory years. For Thatcherism is an ideology, a belief system, a values structure in complete conflict with the ideology, beliefs and values that unite the Labour and the Co-operative Parties.

Where we believed in the principles of trades unionism – they used the 80s to attack it. Where we believed in co-operatives and mutualisation – they worked to dismantle it - systematically driving to demutualise the building societies into banks. Where we think “together”, they think “me, me, me”.

But it was 1999, and we felt like the battle was over and we had won the day. Here in Scotland it was two years since the historic Yes-Yes referendum and we were embarking upon the first elections to our Scottish Parliament.

I am in no doubt as to the purpose of that Parliament. Labour created it and delivered it to be a powerful instrument of social progress.

And so it has been.

Symbolically, one of the great achievements of our first four years was to launch an assault on the systems of ownership of the land we love itself. The abolition of 1,000 years of the yoke of feudal tenure. The right of communities to buy and manage the land on which they live and work. The right to roam across this land which is a commonwealth for all.

In only ten years the patterns of land ownership have begun to shift away from wealth and privilege and absenteeism towards community ownership and mutualism.

Labour created our Parliament to bring politics closer to the people it governed.

And so it has.

I remember ten years ago a conference took place of over sixty charities and other groups. I recall seeing in reports a young woman telling a harrowing story. Her husband, a young man, had been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers. He had become incapable of taking decisions about the family’s finances with her. And so the bank had frozen their joint bank account. Not only was she having to deal with the care of her husband in the face of this most tragic of diseases. But she could get no access to any of the families resources.

All this because the laws governing such incapacity in Scotland were at that time 400 years old.

Even worse, the new law required had been drafted fifteen years previously. It was ready. It was waiting. But never enacted, because it was Scotland only legislation. There had never been Parliamentary time at Westminster.

Our parliament gave us the capacity to say, this will be the first full-scale legislation we will pass. Jim Wallace and I took the adults with Incapacity Act through the Parliament. And Scotland went from having the most obsolete incapacity legislation to having the most modern incapacity legislation anywhere in Europe.

This is a law used by around 100,000 Scots every year – so pretty well every family in the country has benefited.

Closeness is more than just responsiveness in legislation though. The public gallery in the Scottish parliament is never empty, and surprisingly often it is full. I recall as deputy health minister responding to a debate on the shortage of British sign language trainers, and hence of signers. I turned up to find 320 users of BSL from all over Scotland who had come to watch the debate.

A watched parliament may still boil sometimes. But at the very least it has to treat the people’s issues seriously while they look on.

I have experienced this devolution decade from many sides – as an MSP and Scottish Minister, in four different briefs, as an advisor to the secretary of state for Scotland working devolution from the Whitehall end, and now as an MSP again and Leader of the Opposition.

I am proud to lead the Party that promised the parliament in its 1997 manifesto, delivered it in 1999 and led a progressive coalition through its first eight years.

I am saddened then to see it used now as a platform for posture and the most partisan of politics.

The SNP chose to form a minority administration, and many would argue that was itself evidence of the Holyrood’s new politics.

But a government in the minority must engage with the Parliament to succeed, must convince the chamber and win the arguments day by day. Instead we have seen policy made through executive action and directive. Parliamentary votes are ignored, debates are held on general themes rather than specific proposals. And any issue which does ignite disagreement with the SNP is quickly elevated to the status of a confidence motion with threats of resignation, chaos and retribution hurled around.

Perhaps this is an inevitable result of SNP’s condescension for Scotland’s parliament. They were dragged to it grudgingly, refusing to take part in the Constitutional convention. They have tried to ignore Calman – a nationalist party who are reluctant to discuss more powers for their country’s parliament. Like UKIP members of the European parliament they cannot wholeheartedly work for its success because their core purpose must see it fail. It is though a tragedy not played out in other European contexts, or even indeed Wales where a nationalist party takes a far more pragmatic, and constructive approach.

So devolution has demonstrated that it can carry visionary, and historic legislation, it can serve the people’s interests and it can drive change in Scotland.

But knowing devolution CAN do these things, is not the same as making it happen.

Too often our headlines reveal a Scotland at the bottom of the heap, lagging behind, not living up to our potential.

Once world leaders in education, the same can be said no longer. In P5 maths and science we are 20th and 22nd respectively in a league table of 36 countries, and falling down the list. In terms of health, we are still the sick man of Europe – getting healthier yes, but more slowly than comparable countries. We are the fourth worst country in Europe for stillbirths and have more than double the number of drug-related deaths per head than any other European country. International reports show us ‘the most violent country in the world’, with record levels of alcohol abuse, knife crime and murder.

Just this week, we have seen published the Calman Report: ”devolution has been a remarkable success” it says, “But the present system also has shortcomings.”

Their conclusion was that the first iteration of devolution was lopsided. All of the significant legislative powers which should properly be devolved to Holyrood had been. But the Scotland act provided a very limited devolution of fiscal power.

The Calman Commission was a remarkable achievement. Cross party, driven by the Scottish Parliament against the will of the Executive arm, cross administration with support from the UK government and cross sector in the commissions mix of business, voluntary sector and politics, yet it delivered a unanimous report which has bound that unlikely group of supporters together rather than pulling them apart.

Its recommendations will not make politics in Holyrood easier. But it will make them better. Future Scottish governments will not be able to simply slide by the question of how and to what degree Scots should be taxed. And they will not be able to turn any criticism of their budget into a complaint about the settlement they receive for somewhere else.

At a time when the people’s trust in their politicians is as low as we have ever known, this is not about giving more power to MSPs. It is about giving more power to those who elect the MSPs.

Much of what Westminster is now contemplating in order to try and restore its own credibility is already in place and entrenched in Holyrood. We are elected by a proportional system. We have no appointed chamber or any unelected involvement in legislation or government. The legislative priorities of backbenchers and committees cannot be ignored by the executive. Our expenses are published quarterly for the world to see.

But we have been insulated from the consequences of Scotland’s economic performance, because we have not had to face up to declining revenues even in recession. So Calman’s recommendations are very much about a maturing of the Scottish Parliament as a democratic institution.

You know I have been in and around politics for a long time, as a campaigning Trade unionist, as a Party activist and as a politician in the Chamber. But I cannot remember a time when politics and the democratic process have stood so low in society’s estimation.

Is it really just MPs’ expenses which are to blame?

Or is it the economic crisis and a sense of powerlessness over our lives.

The credit crunch was not the first global economic crisis. But it was the first crisis of globalisation. The supra national nature of banks combined with the instant interconnectedness of our communications technology, and a 24/7 news cycle meant that the credit crunch was halfway round the world before politics had its boots on.

Paradoxically the other great challenge we face – the climate crisis – seems like a leviathan of doom laden destiny steamrolling our future across geological time.

And all of this happens against a demographic trend which sees our population aging and a smaller working sector, increasingly worried about their jobs, with ever more elderly citizens to support.

Jobs, climate change and the aging population are the challenges of the next ten years and beyond. They threaten to leave us feeling helpless, creating fear and uncertainty in a new and changing world that seems to be acting regardless of us. People naturally search within their political culture for hope and vision, improbable speed of action and hunger for instant results.

No wonder there is a disconnection between politics and the people. The question we are being asked, and too often fail to answer, in every country where people are free to ask is, “what will you do? How will you lead”

These are serious times, and they call for serious parliaments and serious parliamentarians.

Those who use our democratic structures to debate the colour of the Saltire, to seek the repatriation of a Scots queen dead these four hundred years, or to pardon a pirate with whom they share a name are wasting our time and time is one thing we do not have in the 21st century.

Those who seek to diminish or devalue our Parliament in pursuit of a parochial purpose are gravely out of touch with reality and public expectation.

On the opening day of the Scottish Parliament in what is still the finest speech made there, Donald Dewar spoke of the voices from Scotland’s past which echoed through the chamber: the speak of the mearns, the shout of the welder in the din of the great Clyde shipyards: “The speak of the Mearns, with its soul in the land; the discourse of the enlightenment, when Edinburgh and Glasgow were a light held to the intellectual life of Europe.”

But it is not only the voices of Scotland which resonate in Holyrood to this day, it is the values too.

And just as we are preparing to build great ships again on the Clyde and the Forth, and just as our reform of land ownership has returned the soul to our land, now is the time to rededicate ourselves to the values and the vision of the Scottish enlightenment. The thinkers and politicians – and in those times the two were more often than not the same – faced the challenges of a world which was changing quickly too. But on the streets and in the coffee houses of Edinburgh they believed that they could shape those changes and create the kind of world they wanted to see. They did not simply discuss the failings of their politicians, they debated the direction of their politics.

Our times demand that of us again.

For too long we have told ourselves that our schools are the best, our skills the most modern, our inventiveness world leading, our integrity internationally prized.

Just saying it has not made it so. Now is the time to act to make it true again.

The banking crisis has tested our own belief in our reputation. But we have been here before. This is not the first time the Bank of Scotland has been bankrupt. In 1704 it closed its doors to creditors, broken by the Darien disaster. The Bank of Scotland was on its knees, and so was the country.

The solution then was the Union – sharing risk and loss across a much larger economy to allow recovery. And the solution last year was the union too – sharing risk and loss across the much larger UK economy. That alone allowed Godon Brown and Alistair Darling to save the Bank of Scotland and then RBS. Not to save the BANKS but to save the economy.

We should not underestimate the scale of disaster which was averted. HBOS and RBS would have closed, like Lehmann brothers.

Think. Think for a moment what it would mean if the bank you take for granted ceased to exist overnight. You get up one morning and the bank is gone.

You go to the cash machine and it says ‘Machine Out of Order’ – just like the next one you try, and the one after that. You’re at the petrol station and your debit card won’t work. So you try your credit card, but it won’t work either.

You want to check your wages online. They haven’t gone in. Your employer’s bank account has been frozen. It’s an asset of the bank.

You fall back on your savings, but the account is frozen. The bank’s creditors are fighting over it.

Your mortgage is foreclosed by the liquidators – pay us everything you’ve borrowed now, or we’re taking the house back. Your home is an asset for the creditors to fight over.

And it’s not just you. No-one is untouched. No-one can help you because everyone is in the same boat. It is chaos.

That’s what would have happened. And that’s what was averted when Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling stepped in. I want you to remember that the next time you hear someone talking them down. That’s what decisive, world leading action by Britain’s Labour Prime Minister and Britain’s Labour Chancellor, did for Scotland. That’s the benefit Scotland gets from Union.

And the Union does not simply share risk. It shares opportunity too. In its youth, the Union allowed the Glasgow tobacco merchants to virtually take over trade with the colonies – by innovation because they dealt directly with the growers – and to build the very fabric and the institutions of this city in which we meet this evening.

I should say it took a couple of decades before the benefits of the union began to flow – so devolution is ahead of the game.

Today that opportunity allows Scottish companies whether they are selling services, whisky or electricity access to a market ten times the size of Scotland without crossing a border.

The task given to the Scots of the beginning of the eighteenth century was to make the loss of a Parliament the springboard for a century of progress which shaped their world. Our task at the start of the twenty first is to make our new parliament the springboard for a century of progress which shapes our world for the better.

To accept any lesser ambition for our devolved parliament is to let down those whose voices and values echo through it. To use it as an excuse to look in upon ourselves and to hell with our neighbours is to ignore the example they gave us of how to look outwards to the world and its challenges.

Those enlightenment Scots were in no doubt of their starting Point One of the last acts of the old Scottish parliament was the Education Act of 1696 – which created the legal requirement for a school in every parish. Adam Smith supported universal education provision, and lauded the parish schools which, he said, “has taught almost the whole common people to read, and a very great proportion of them to write and account.” The impact was clearly revealed in the Statistical Account of 1831 showing literacy levels for Scotland far higher than any other European country.

Education should be our starting point too. We were the first country in the world to provide schools for every child. Now we should be the first country in the world to deliver 100 per cent literacy and numeracy.. We know how to do it. West Dunbartonshire council has shown the way. Scottish Labour has established the Literacy commission, chaired by Judith Gillespie of the Scottish Parent Teacher Council. When they report in the autumn then we should implement their recommendations right away. If the SNP will not do it, then we will in 2011. If it needs an army of literacy teachers and volunteers then we will recruit them.

To make their task easier we should continue to extend early years provision to provide the best start possible as early as possible for every child. Then we should legislate to give every young scot not just the right to school until they are 16 but a job, school, college, apprenticeship or full time volunteering place until they are 18.

Jack McConnell’s Project Scotland provided training for work through volunteering and 80 per cent of those who participated moved into real jobs or further training. The SNP cut the funding for this at the very moment when President Obama and Teddy Kennedy were delivering billion to quadruple the number of people on the equivalent programme in the US, as a response to the recession. We should reinstate project Scotland now. If the SNP will not then we will in 2011.

In the middle of the Scottish leadership election I presented certificates to 150 youngsters from Edinburgh and the Lothians at the end of a summer school. All had given up their summer to undertake courses in subjects from engineering to economics designed to improve their chances of getting in to University. Almost all will be the first from their families to enter higher education.

Not only should we share the pride of these young people and their families, we should do everything to support their achievement. In the face of challenges like the climate crisis, globalisation and the current credit crunch we need the best of our youngsters to have the best chance to make the best of themselves. This is not about social engineering, or positive discrimination – it is about tearing down the barriers of low income, low aspiration or social division which keep too many of our brightest, ablest youngsters out of higher education.

We need new paths from every college to every university and from apprenticeships to higher education and more apprenticeships for graduates themselves – as INEOS and Forth Valley College are providing already.

In the 21st century there will be no artificial division between thinking and doing and we should ensure that there is not. That’s not new. After all James Watt was an instrument maker and Thomas Telford a genius who knew a bit about building things too.

I have tasked my Shadow Cabinet colleague John Park with preparing an industrial strategy for Scotland and what government needs to do to make it happen. It will look at futurejobs for Scotland, green jobs, manufacturing jobs, service jobs.

But I am asking a lot. David Watt of the Institute of Directors told me about a you tube video - “did you know”. Its core fact is that the top ten ‘in demand’ jobs in the USA in 2010 did not exist in 2004. We are preparing students for jobs that do not exist yet, using technologies that haven’t been invented, to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.

So I am asking a lot of John. But I am asking it of him, because we have to do it. And politicians cannot do it alone – all of Scotland needs to think about what are the jobs we will have and need to prepare for in the future. Our Parliament can lead that debate but it cannot resolve it in the Chamber.

Scotland needs a national conversation about something that matters: a national conversation about jobs. And I am asking John to lead it.

The difference between our national conversation and the SNP’s national conversation about the constitution, is that jobs are the priority of our people. This is what they think about, worry about and want to know what we can do about it. It is a conversation with Scotland which resonates, rather than echo in an empty room.

Our prosperity will be built on the skills and education of our people. But the time has come for a new partnership between the enterprises that will utilise those skills in order to raise productivity and strengthen that mutually beneficial relationship. Better skills utilisation cannot simply mean the public sector trying to match the sometimes every changing demands of the private sector. We need to rediscover scholarship schemes and public private funding of students and trainees who study and work in their chosen field too, so that they have the rounded skills, soft skills like communication and teamwork as well as intellectual knowledge and can be more effective more quickly.

If our economy needs more science and technology graduates or more IT experts then we need to incentivise study in those areas with support from the companies who need them

We began this work in the first eight years of our Parliament along with support for innovation and entrepreneurship. And we need to do more.

But we did not think enough about the organisational structures into which this potential would flourish and these skills produce.

I rather think we unwittingly went along with a vision which placed too much emphasis on the potential for individual wealth and did not think enough about the social partnership which allows for profit and wealth creation but recognises its role in society.

Early attempts at a formal social partnership between government, business and the trade union sector foundered. We need to revisit them and soon. The worst excesses of the bonus and lottery win salaries have been laid bare and discredited.

Earlier this week the director of a well known construction company explained to me how his company had asked staff and management to take a pay cut to try and keep together through the downturn. Unanimously they felt that was in their mutual interest, far more than cutting jobs. That’s happening all over the economy in companies with trade union organisation and without. Something is happening – it is not every man or woman for himself.

Our politics should respond - The Scottish government should be supporting that for example by subsidising short time working – it is better than more job losses or businesses closing. Holyrood should try again to establish more formally the idea of social partnership.

That is why Scotland needs a trade union voice on the Council of Economic Advisers – it is not about fair representation, it is about a whole perspective on the economy which has been simply excluded by a Scottish government that is yet to realise that the world has changed in the past year.

The next ten years should also see Holyrood actively support diversity in the economy – more support for family firms, the use of procurement to support small businesses, not, as currently businesses of 200 employees or less – which pointlessly ring fences 90 per cent of companies. We should reward those who play there part in the economic partnership, by training their staff and reducing their carbon footprint. And we should more actively support cooperative and social enterprise models which build our values into their very structures. There is no better example of what I mean than the co-operative model.

After all this was a trail blazed by the Fenwick weavers and Robert Owen in new Lanark. The store was once bigger in Scotland than Tesco is today. And the Co-op bank remained sound through the banking crisis thanks to its fundamental principles being right.

Cooperatives reflect the values we are trying to get back to after a period of excess which went wrong.

In the first ten years of devolution we created Cooperative Development Scotland and funding for Social enterprises. In the next ten years we need to mobilise these models in every area of job creation, addressing climate change and services provision for the elderly. This summer, Cathy Jamieson will be visiting nurse co-operatives in England, that are successfully deliver frontline primary care services by the people for the people. As we look to the challenges of the future, we must explore how the mutual model can revitalise and invigorate our public services.

I believe that Scotland can get through this down turn and emerge stronger. But that does not mean returning to 2007. It means looking forward and taking the chance to ask what kind of world we want. It does not mean fantasising about a future built on a finite and price volatile commodity like oil. The Calman Commission’s research demonstrated once and for all that it would be simply mad to have at the core of our economy an income which could swing for 1 to 12 billion pounds in as many months, and which may last only a few decades more.

But we do have to build our future on turning the skills of our oil and gas industry to the development of much larger scale renewable energy generation. That is those future jobs again.

And of course it is also about the sustainability of the future we can make or ourselves. Since John Muir and Patrick Geddes there are those Scots who have told us that the way we live cannot be allowed to destroy our planet.

At last we are listening but now we have to act. And devolution means we have to take responsibility in Scotland. This week Labour laid amendments to the Scottish Climate change bill which would make it the most ambitious in the world. Yesterday the First minister told me he did not have the powers to do that.

He does have the powers to do it. He just does not have the ambition or vision to want to. The truth is he that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else. Excuses are certainly not good enough for the kind of Parliament I want Scotland to see.

A parliament is not just about the policies it chooses. It is also about the values which drive that choice.

Labour’s core belief that we are stronger together, weaker apart led us to create the Scottish Parliament, but they led us to create that parliament within the framework of the Union. Our values of opportunity, solidarity and mutualism drive our policy agenda on jobs climate change and the elderly, but they drive us to solutions which will eradicate poverty and build equality.

To take devolution forward and to make our parliament once again a vehicle for social progress then we must now rededicate ourselves to these values. Calman’s proposals will give our Parliament new powers and new possibilities to shape the better Scotland we believe we can have. And within that Parliament we should set ourselves a standard to work to that embodies our values and our vision so we do not lose our way.

Labour at Westminster is currently passing legislation to make every public body responsible for monitoring the impact of everything it does on social inclusion in England. The devolved government in Wales has signed up too. The devolved government for Scotland has so far prevaricated. But what better ambition could we have for our young Parliament and our public bodies than enshrining in law that they be judged in perpetuity by how they raise up the poor, break down barriers and build a Scottish society founded on equality?

Those of us who had the privilege of hearing Donald Dewar speak that day of the new parliament opening will never forget how we felt.

Our obligation is to find within ourselves that inspiration every day in the chamber and then turn it into action.

We are all so proud of Burns and how the world knows him and his work. What the SNP miss is that he is loved worldwide not for his Scottish ness, but for his humanity.

His vision was such that from his plough or from the penitent stool in church or from his seat in the globe tavern he could see the world and all that’s in it.

That 1st of July 1999 one of the great moments was Sheena Wellington singing “is there for honest poverty”.

Those of us in the chamber remember how we all joined in on the last verse – even famously the Queen. No one had told us to – it just happened.

But what I only realised years later was that the song did not end in the chamber. It was picked up in the public gallery, and out into the streets and down the mound and into Princes Street Gardens and even to other places where people were watching together on television.

The words of an enlightenment poet and the universal values of dignity, solidarity and common humanity echoing through our parliament and then resonating throughout the land.

That’s the music we need to hear to drive devolution forward. To drive Scotland forward. And I believe we shall again.

19 June 2009