Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 09 March 2021
As the committee reports make clear, and as witness after witness has attested to this Parliament, the Scottish Government’s climate change plan lacks clarity, lacks transparency, lacks detail, lacks evidence and lacks a plan B.
In the cabinet secretary’s absence—I am sorry that she is not here and I wish her well—I will quote her. In her defence, she told the ECCLR Committee that the Scottish Government’s climate change plan is not intended to be “encyclopaedic”. People are not expecting a 32-volume encyclopaedia, but they are looking for a simple, honest and clear working plan that is credible, intelligible and persuasive.
In the absence of that, it is as if promises are made by the SNP Government to the people with the full and certain knowledge that they will not be kept. It is as if there is no intention that a law that enshrines targets, which was passed by this Parliament less than two years ago, will ever be implemented, let alone enforced, while the SNP is in office. It is as if these most serious questions of the future of work, the survival of the planet, and international and intergenerational equity—these questions of life and death itself—can be set aside.
In its inquiry, the ECCLR Committee heard of a significant implementation gap, and nowhere is that gap greater that in the Government’s lamentable record on jobs. It is no use the First Minister announcing on 1 September a
“national mission to help create new jobs, good jobs and green jobs”
if, on 3 December, the jobs and communities around the BiFab yards are abandoned. That was the latest chapter in a decade of failure that the Scottish Trades Union Congress has rightly characterised as
“broken promises and offshored jobs”.
Last year, as Scottish Labour leader, I commissioned a report on green jobs. It showed how we could recover jobs, retrain workers and rebuild businesses by investing in green transport, renewable energy and energy efficiency, social and affordable housing, a Scottish conservation corps, a national care service, recycling and waste management, and an active industrial and manufacturing strategy.
All the evidence that is before us today, though, is that the current Government relies too much on market mechanisms and technical fixes and far too little on the role of the active state, which is precisely what we need as we recover from Covid.
We need a vision of a different kind of society and a different kind of economy, and for me that means a fundamental change in the relations of power: the decentralisation of industry; the localisation of economics; the promotion of self-management and self-sufficiency, and of co-operation; the humanisation of work; land reform; the creation of an active non-bureaucratic state; and popular democratic planning, involving businesses, workers and their trade unions, with full employment at its heart. I tell members that those changes are not only visionary; they are urgent. They are not only radical; they are realistic. Most important of all, they are not only necessary; they are possible.
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