Edinburgh’s Economy Outperforms London - A Glasmanite Townie Response

 

Edinburgh’s Economy Outperforms London, whoopee doo! Crack open that rare bottle of Glenlivet single malt and if your first name happens to be something like Boyd, Crawford or Sinclair and you work in Edinburgh’s business, financial services or university management sector, then take the rest of the day off and head down to The New Club for lunch.    

This statistic being shared as some kind of good news story, should give us at least some cause for concern, mainly because cities don't have micro-economies, nations do. Edinburgh is not some sort of city-state of Sparta or the Free Hanseatic city of Bremen and its wealth does not trickle down to the rest of the nation. The concentration of wealth and capital in big cities and the abandonment of small towns is the exact opposite of what devolution was meant to deliver.

For example, the fact that Boyd, Crawford and Sinclair running the banks, businesses and universities in Edinburgh have all manged to accumulate higher profits than City of London traders Sebastian, Nigel and Harvey, is irrelevant to the vast majority of ordinary people across the country. We don’t need a Hobson’s Choice between either Edinburgh shareholders wearing tartan trews or London shareholders in pinstripe suits, we need a coherent industrial policy and the redistribution of assets and power to local communities.  

Instead, all we have seen since devolution is an increase in the centralisation of power and capital to Edinburgh and the stripping out of our towns and hollowing out of our municipal intuitions, with the closure of local shops, colleges, churches, pubs, community centres, youth clubs, high street banks, building societies, police stations, fires stations and hospitals.

Nor should we be in race to the bottom against an economically struggling City of London. The Scottish Government too often points to examples of England being even worse, despite the fact that nobody in Scotland really cares if our NHS wait times are slightly ‘less-worse’ than England & Wales or if the number of drug deaths in Scotland are now marginally improved compared to that of England or if our housing crisis and growing attainment gap is not quite as big as England’s.    

Is anyone in Scotland honestly interested in being measured against other parts of the UK? Do Scottish people seriously respond positively to the politics of…’Well, it could be worse, you could be in England’ or the rhetoric of… ‘Consider yourself lucky you’re not down south’. It was exactly that same type of ‘We might be rubbish but if you don’t vote for us you’ll get the Tories and they’ll be even worse’ patter, which eventually caused Scots to wholly reject Labour at the polls.   

In reality, our problems are our own and this kind of low bar aspiration is not any kind of positive vison for the future of our country. Parents in Scotland are worried about their own school kids finding employment and having somewhere to live, they are worried about their own elderly parents receiving decent social care when the time comes.

Or in other words, we are interested in our own struggles, our own communities and our own daily lives and local services, not London’s economy or Edinburgh’s wealth accumulation for that matter, because this approach to economics has been a disaster so far.

Indeed, Scotland was once a dense network of democratic vocational and civic institutions and local associations, with its numerous Royal Burghs, mill towns, mining villages and shipyard towns, each with their own autonomous trade rights and liberties.

Today our focus seems to be entirely on metropolitan cities like Edinburgh. Meanwhile, the de-industrialised areas of Scotland such as Greenock, Grangemouth, Motherwell, Paisley, Falkirk etc and its provinces, suburbs and outlying areas have been left asset-poor and neglected.

Only by providing funds for regions that have been ‘denuded of any capital’ as Maurice Glasman puts it, and endowing local institutions and vocational institutions, such as regional banks and sector specific vocational colleges, with autonomy and truly devolved power, can we ever hope to genuinely generate jobs in our communities.

More so, I’m not entirely sure just how many people from the aforementioned towns now attend Edinburgh universities but I am probably not alone in thinking that the emphasis should be shifted back on to regional vocational colleges and more apprenticeship as a condition of labour market entry.

As Maurice Glasman has previously stated -  ‘The contempt for manual work has a long history, but it needs to end. The distinction made in the 1830s between a profession and a vocation was decisive in the degradation of vocation as a practice. Professions required an extensive apprenticeship combined with control over labour market entry. Medicine, law, dentistry and even accountancy were elevated in their status through legal recognition. This was the not the fate of skilled manual labour whose status was abolished and whose conditions were deregulated.’