Meeting of the Parliament 04 June 2019
Thank you, Presiding Officer.
On one level, I welcome the fact that the debate is beginning to include a wider range of views on the wider question of economic growth—its meaning, role and place in our economy. For a long time, only the Greens raised an objection to the fixation on economic growth and the primacy that the GDP metric is given in our economy. Relentlessly chasing after economic growth measured in GDP terms has always prioritised private riches over public wealth. It is inextricably linked to climate change and biodiversity loss from the fragmentation, pollution and degradation of habitats, the extraction and depletion of finite resources, and the exploitation of human beings around the world.
GDP growth fails to capture inequality, economic justice, people’s health, the state of our environment or wellbeing. It also fails to recognise the need to share economic benefits or to protect people from the consequences of economic activities. I am not surprised that the Conservative Party has not yet joined us in that deep debate about the meaning and role of GDP growth, although more and more people are having that discussion.
I was interested that Neil Findlay raised that question, too. Although the Labour Party amendment mentions economic growth, there is much in the second half of it that I can agree with. We are not going to agree on the independence question—not at this stage, although perhaps, one day, more people in Labour will come with us on that. However, even if they do not come all the way, there is a lot more that we could be doing to address low wages. We could be doing that here and now if the Labour Party had backed devolution of employment law in the debates in the Smith commission. We could have repealed anti-trade union legislation to help to restore the balance of power in the workplace. Even if the Labour Party does not join us in arguing that independence should be the ultimate trajectory for Scotland, I hope that it will come at least so far as to say that we should be seeking control of employment law.
I have mixed feelings about the Government’s amendment. It is clearly a significant improvement on the motion. It recognises that we should not just trumpet low unemployment and high employment rates, because we need to acknowledge that the canard that work is the route out of poverty no longer applies. That notion is broken. We know that a huge proportion of the poverty in our society is in-work poverty, so the quality of employment matters, too.
However, the amendment describes how the national performance framework should work, not how it works at the moment. The NPF still prioritises and places far too much emphasis on GDP growth. Moreover, the measurements of progress against the NPF show close to zero progress on issues such as poverty wages and income inequality.
The Green amendment, which was not selected for debate, agreed that a new policy framework and a new direction are necessary but asked: to what end? Just to race ahead with more GDP at any cost is not the approach that we should be taking. Instead, we should be learning from the likes of the enough coalition
, which was launched recently. The coalition questions the notion of growth and asks: what is real prosperity? How do we create it and share it, without continuing today’s extractive, polluting and exploitative economy?
I look forward to the debate continuing. I am certain that those questions are the ones that all political parties will have to face up to in the coming years and decades.
16:06