A Tale Of Two Cities
I am publish Winning The Second Independence Referendum — A Manifesto For Scotland In The European Union After Brexit.
There are a couple of core themes to the book: we must focus on our tax base in Scotland — and the future of our cities is, and will be, multi-national.
Pat Kane has a precopy of it — and it has written of his concerns in his National column this week.
I thought I would take the opportunity to respond to him.
The political imperative of thinking about our tax base is critical — the collapse of the oil price is real and damages our tax position as an independent country. The lunacy of Brexit makes that simply worse — there is no way round that.
Pat’s core concern, I think, is that we simply copy the model of London, or of Dublin, of prostrating ourselves before international business and hope they bestow their attentions on us.
The defining political narrative of the last 20 years has been market fundamentalism — the market — and its pricing mechanisms — is the defining human institution and all must be subsumed by the mighty behemoth. This is a nostrum I most definitely do not subscribe to.
I believe the free economy is a vital pillar of society, alongside the rule of law, the justice system, defence and provision of health and social services. But I do not believe the market stands above them.
My approach to defining the sort of Scotland I want to see comes from a different place.
When I started thinking about the future of Glasgow I looked 30 years out — what would success look like. It is clear that economically successful cities attract new residents, from many countries, and unsuccessful ones lose their children, their newly hatched university graduates, to more successful ones. So if you want Scottish cities to be successful you have to accept that as a premise.
The other thing that inspired my thinking was the growth of the tech scene in Edinburgh. 8 or 9 years ago when the scene was starting to establish we had real problems hanging onto talent — key people kept leaving. Jennie Lee went to Google in California, Sam Collins went to London, in time Dale, Hassan, Bruno, Qnoid all joined them.
And who could blame them? Like-for-like salaries in London were 40%, 50% higher — in San Francisco 100%, 150% higher. The real question was why didn’t everyone go? The answer was that Edinburgh is great city to live in: beautiful, walkable, cultured, exciting.
At the time everybody was trying to copy Silicon Valley — and in Edinburgh we decided not to compete on their terms. How do you beat the Harlem Globetrotters? Play them at anything you are good at, Twister, Tiddlywinks, anything but Basketball. To grow the tech scene we had to focus on our strengths — which is life-as-it-is-lived in Edinburgh. We raised our international profile by starting our major tech event, the Turing Festival, during the Edinburgh festivals.
Everybody said that was nuts, but it turns out playing to your strengths works — we got really major speakers from around the world, not because of us, but because of the famous Edinburgh Festivals.
Ireland based its economic strategy on slashing corporate taxes and getting big US tech companies to set up operations there subsidised by effectively shuffling their European profits into the low tax domain.
But when you look at the big meta-trend in employment it is the move to work-from-home, remote working. I do it for a US tech company based out of Seattle. Remote working offers us the opportunity not to attract companies, but to attract their young mobile workers — the sort of people who will found the companies of tomorrow. So my economic development focus is the exact opposite.
People will go and live in San Francisco — which is a slum that makes Airdrie look like paradise, because San Fran is the global leader. Market Street in San Fran, the main street where Twitter has its HQ has a couple of hundred seriously homeless people living on it in a way that is third world. Scotland can attract people who don’t want to live in cities like that — and those people accept that tax is the subscription fee for civilisation.
When we looked at Glasgow with its 12% derelict land it looked hopeless — until you change your view of dereliction and say “how do we make that rocket fuel for growth?”. You do that piece by piece — focusssing on under-utilised land between the city centre and the south side, between this working bit of the city and that one. Changing tax powers, changing regulation fixing the city one piece at a time, and every time adding to the tax base sustainably.
From that perspective — the people and infrastructure of our ‘forgotten’ towns like Airdrie are our under-performing assets — the aim is to make them such that people all over Europe think “I want to be an Airdrieonian, I want to live in Airdrie”.
The difference between that and the London-as-safari-park-russian-mob-money couldn’t be starker. Slash tax, drop oversight and manufacture housing bubbles is the very opposite of what I believe.
Jimmy Reid would have said that in every flat of every towerblock in Coatbrig there is a Brian Eno who never got the chance.
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