In his first speech as first minister to his party’s annual conference in Aberdeen on Tuesday, Humza Yousaf told delegates: “When it comes to values, I’ve got absolutely no idea what Keir Starmer stands for.” Then Yousaf elaborated: “On the economy, Keir Starmer says he wants growth, growth, growth. There’s a huge problem with that, because he also supports Brexit, Brexit, Brexit. Brexit can’t be made to work for Scotland.”
So what rival prescription does the SNP leader think would work for his fellow Scots? Surprise, surprise — he splashed the cash. There was another £300 million over three years to cut NHS waiting lists, and up to another £500 million over five years to anchor an offshore wind supply chain in Scotland.
Then there was about £100 million over five years for arts and culture, and even £400,000 to help Aberdeen city council rejuvenate Union Street. Yousaf even froze next year’s council tax without bothering to consult Cosla or his own ministerial colleagues. Buying off local government’s rage about that now threatens to burn another hole in the Scottish government’s coffers.
His predecessor, Nicola Sturgeon, didn’t appear to have a problem putting growth at the heart of her political ambitions. But crucially, while wrestling with the mechanical obstacles that had to be overcome if her party was ever to achieve its core mission of restoring Scottish independence, like what currency it would choose, she did start asking questions about what kind of growth would still be acceptable to a new nation state
In 2016, in the wake of Britain voting to leave the European Union, Sturgeon launched a Sustainable Growth Commission, chaired by former MSP and economist Andrew Wilson, who had also written the case for Yes in the 2014 referendum. Wilson’s Commission reported in 2018. Its fiscal case for initially retaining sterling as an independent Scotland’s currency raised a lot of party hackles. But the then-first minister’s thinking about economic growth was already moving on. She forged an alliance with the governments of Iceland and New Zealand, both also led by women back then, that sought to reassess what kind of growth they should all be pursuing.
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In July 2019 Sturgeon gave a short talk at a TED summit in Edinburgh called “Why governments should prioritise wellbeing”. It is still available online and has now been viewed more than two and a half million times. As the Fraser of Allander Institute (FAI) has pointed out Sturgeon was not the first politician on these islands to question what kind of growth governments should pursue. Way back in 2010 David Cameron gave a speech in which he opined “I do think it’s high time we admitted that, taken on its own, GDP is an incomplete way of measuring a country’s progress.”
Of course capturing the ups and downs of a numerical quantum like gross domestic product (GDP) and analysing how it changes over time is lot easier than measuring a human concept like wellbeing. When prime minister David Cameron asked the Office for National Statistics to start measuring life satisfaction. ONS asked its sample “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays? Where 0 is ‘not at all satisfied’ and 10 is ‘completely satisfied’.”
Over the period 2012 to 2018 the mean results for all four constituent parts of the UK never strayed below 7.42 or above 7.91. By two or three first decimal points Northern Ireland respondents emerged as the most satisfied across the UK. “This is despite having weaker labour market outcomes, a smaller level of economic activity, higher rates of social deprivation than other parts of the UK and a fragile political environment,” ONS notes.
The latest monthly GDP estimate for Scotland, covering July 2023 appeared on the September 27. It showed onshore GDP rising by 0.1 per cent in July. “In the three months to July, GDP is estimated to have fallen by 0.1 per cent compared to the previous three month period. This indicates an improvement relative to the fall of 0.3 per cent in 2023 Quarter 2 (April to June) the release tells us. The release also has a single chart that shows ‘the trend in underlying quarterly GDP has been broadly flat since the end of 2021”.
But if you focus on monthly GDP “underlying growth has remained broadly flat around the level it was in 2019” the release tells us. The whole of 2020 and 2021 saw a precipitous slump when GDP shrank by more than 25 points thanks to the Covid pandemic, then climbed painstakingly back to where it had started. Not just Brexit, Brexit, Brexit first minister.
