RETURNING TO SCOTLAND, I look with horror at our politics. From the perspective of someone who has worked in Chinese-UK relations for nearly 20 years, in Beijing and London, it looks as if our politicians, like those at Westminster, are playing musical chairs on a sinking ship.
None of them appear fully to grasp the extent of the danger we are in, especially when compared with the ever more educated and affluent economies of Asia. The UK as a whole faces existential challenges – a fragile and de-developing economy, energy insecurity, defence failure and an identity crisis – but Scotland is exposed worst. We have lost our industries at the gallop (the latest to go is the Glasgow financial services industry), our once great education system is not preparing children for the future and the proportion of the country’s wealth expropriated and spent inefficiently by the state bureaucracy is already over 55 per cent.
No political party admits the dangers. On the sidelines, there are debates between free marketers and protectors, but they reflect the ideological mindset of our politics rather than facing up to reality.
What we need is political leadership which changes the agenda of politics, puts first the rejuvenation of our economy because, without that, not only do we have no welfare or health services, but we decline ever more rapidly into ‘third world’ or semi-colonial status. We worry about Chinese or Arab power over our economy, but “US companies have carved up Britain between them, siphoning off enormous profits, buying up our most lucrative firms and assets, and extracting huge rents from UK PLC – all while paying little or no tax. Meanwhile, policymakers, from Whitehall mandarins to NHS chiefs, shape their decisions to suit the whims of our American corporate overlords.”[1]
Theory – Hayek or Keynes – can be combed for ideas, but what we need are initiative – fire in the belly – and pragmatism. Pragmatists acknowledge that money has to be made before it can be redistributed and that commercial enterprise, big or small, is best initiated and run by people independent of government, but that government’s first responsibility is to ensure the framework, and the incentives, for them.
The second is to get out of our hair. Right now, a thicket of regulations makes even something as basic as opening a business bank account, converting a building to a new use or taking in investment, a nightmare. Armies of overpaid regulators and officials stifle enterprise and the desire to be enterprising. And this in the country that made the modern world, the country of Adam Smith, David Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment.
It was a member of the Central Committee of the CCP who pointed this out to me when I accompanied him to Scotland. Leng Rong is a smart former professor of philosophy whose job is crafting the Chinese leader’s ideological pronouncements. I’m not quoting him (I don’t want to see him imprisoned because of what I’ve attributed to him) when I say that we have something to learn from China’s experience.
By 1980, Maoism had succeeded not only in murdering at least 70 million of China’s best and brightest, but had obliterated the education system, expropriated farmers’ livelihoods, destroyed private enterprise and wrecked virtually all of what we now call infrastructure. So how did they then manage to achieve, in 30 years, the industrial and information revolutions that had taken us 300 years?
They didn’t have an Adam Smith of Kirkaldy. But what they did have were thousands of James Watts, William Cullens, Andrew Carnegies and Pete Cashmores, all desperate to breathe free and feed their families. But even these guys could not have succeeded had a political leader not removed the crushing hand of bureaucracy and the blind idiocy of ideology.
When Deng Xiaoping (pictured) got into power after Mao’s death he was faced with a revolution at the bottom of society. The bureaucrats tasked with running collective farms and nationalised industries were openly disregarded, as desperate people started producing and trading on their own account. Deng recognised that he couldn’t stop this and realised that he shouldn’t, so he not only commanded the civil servants to dismantle the state economy but, even more important, incentivised them to turn from naysayers and controllers into facilitators and catalysts. Middle to senior ranking officials were to be held accountable for GDP growth in their areas and sacked if they failed. Juniors were allocated villages or family groups and told that they had to ensure they got into gainful employment or set up businesses if they, the junior civil servants, wanted to survive in the bureaucracy.
Deng also cleared the ideologists – the equivalent of our net zero, DEI or trans zealots – out of government and ensured that engineers and workers would make the decisions. Unfortunately for China (though maybe good for us) President Xi Jinping is, today, reversing some of Deng’s policies, bringing back the party and its statist ideology which he learnt in his Maoist youth, to the despair of the younger generation and the less self-serving among the political elite.
Get the message? Deng changed China’s agenda. Politics was out, governance was in. Reconstruction of the economy was the essential basis for future development. Nothing else mattered, so ideology or minority concerns were sidelined as the foundations were rebuilt.
In wartime, our political leaders have, in the past, forgotten their differences in the common cause. We might see that happening today, if one of our political parties advanced a programme of national regeneration. But to implement a programme which involved some of the massive changes advocated by Tom Hunter, Jon Moynihan or Torsten Bell would require changes to the political system.
Insurgent parties have been advocating PR for the Westminster Parliament for aeons. But that’s not enough to satisfy an electorate contemptuous of career politicians. We need to remove the incentives to toady to the party leadership or powerful lobbies rather than the voters, implicit in a system in which the politicians’ objective is not analysis or legislation but becoming a minister. In the US system, ministers are accountable to, but not in, the legislature. Thus, ministers can be experts, or just good managers. Not people who have spent their entire lives creeping up the political ladder since schooldays and are dependent upon facile political skills for a living.
Here we are straying away from devolved matters, but don’t write off these ideas because of that. There are plenty of changes that can be made even within the scope of devolved powers. In the final analysis, though, the Scottish economy is so bound into that of the UK as a whole that we could not achieve the changes necessary to save us, without convincing the rest of the United Kingdom.
For that to happen, we’d need a consensus among the Scottish parties that there is a Scots point of view, deriving from three factors: First, the failure of the independence movement and of the established parties altogether to offer a way forward for Scotland, as well as the loss of faith in the party leaders. Second, that the failure of the statist, ideological projects of Labour and SNP, has resurrected the identity of Scotland that mobilised and motivated our forebears: educated, enterprising and extrovert. Third: the accelerating decline of the Scottish economy makes it urgent to apply emergency solutions.
So, what do I want to see? I don’t care which party picks up the baton, as long as it jettisons its old baggage. As a youngster, I canvassed for Labour. Seeing how corrupt Labour was in Glasgow, I stood for the Tories. The SNP of Rob McCormack and Margo MacDonald could have had me, but not the pitifully spiteful and parochial party it became. Although sharing the general revulsion at recent Tory administrations, I cannot bring myself to like a Starmer government which so irresponsibly throws down the gauntlet (our depleted and desperate armed forces) at Putin’s Russia without proposing how he’s going to raise the money from an economy which Rachel Reeves is further debilitating.
If you know of a party that faces the truth and will tell it to the Scottish people, please write and tell me: HugodeBurghAuthor@gmail.com
I want to join it.
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[1] Hanton, Angus (2024) (press release for) Vassal State: How America Runs Britain, London: Swift
Photo of modern day Shanghai courtesy of Adobe Stock. Deng Xiaoping by Schumacher, Karl H. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1379910
