The Common Weal project

Really just wanted to link to an excellent article by Robin McAlpine of the Jimmy Reid Foundation, from the Sunday Herald of September 15th 2013.

The full piece can be read here.

In particular, these paragraphs really resonated with me:

Britain, meanwhile, is offered two versions of a low-wage economy - one with cash transfers to the poor, the other with emergency payments to the poor. Where Nordic politics agrees about sharing economic growth among the people, British politics agrees on sharing austerity among the people. Their politics agrees on the benefits of universal public services, ours agrees on the need to ration public services. They agree that growth must be based on productivity and innovation, Westminster agrees that growth must be based on cost-cutting and speculation.

What the Norwegian elections really show is that genuinely plural politics in a genuinely competitive economy with genuinely high social cohesion and no real poverty is not only possible, it is normality for millions of our neighbours.

We've been sucked into the belief that there is no alternative; to our failing economy, to our corrupted politics, to our fragmenting society. We've been fooled into thinking that Westminster is normal, that apathy and alienation are normal, that finding endemic poverty in one of the world's richest countries is normal. These things are not normal - or they needn't be.

The Common Weal project isn't about creating a novelty replica of an imaginary Scandinavia and it is certainly not about creating one political opinion without diversity. It is about achieving a better socioeconomic foundation for Scotland precisely to allow genuinely diverse and plural politics to flourish.

The project is driven by the pragmatic attempt to identify where success has been achieved elsewhere and to work out how it was achieved. Crucially it then seeks to develop a distinctive version which is applicable to the Scotland we have today. It draws heavily (though by no means exclusively) from the Nordic nations because their social and economic outcomes are so good. Surely this approach makes sense? If you can find any social or economic statistic which would make you favour the British model over the Nordic one, you're either a multi-millionaire or a masochist.