Our Kingdom: Christopher Harvie, writing over on our mothership, has a must-read perspective on the ongoing crash of 07. In an earlier OK post yesterday Tom Griffin described how an Irish process is developing that is separate from the UK's but is slowly drawing Northern Ireland into its gravitational pull. Chris points to a more dramatic conflict as Scotland sees the interests of its own domestic economy diverge from London's. Hitherto, the London political class - politicians, functionaries and media - have been dismissive of Scottish calls for independence, as they seem purely ideological rather than practical, national but not economic. Demand for 'its oil' was regarded as opportunist while the reality was English subsidy supporting Scottish inadequacy. Could this now change? If the 'globalisation' of the M25-economy proves to be flimsy and Scotland sets itself a better course, the balance of argument changes. Then financial crisis and nationalist dynamics will interact and may reinforce each other. This is the implication of the Chris Harvie article. As an SNPer he wants it to be true so, yes, this could make him less than hard-nosed. But maybe it improves his vision. Here are a couple of tasters. He opens,
The first meeting of Scotland's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) convenes on 20 September 2007. Among its eleven members are a couple of Nobel prizewinners (Finn E Kydland and James A Mirrlees), and the economics journalists Frances Cairncross and John Kay; its chair is George Mathewson, until recently governor of the huge Royal Bank of Scotland. The composition of the CEA was announced by first minister Alex Salmond on 28 June, less than two months after the elections to the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh which brought his (and my) Scottish National Party to power after it won the narrowest of victories over the Labour Party.
Gordon Brown, who became British prime minister on 27 June, received far more publicity in the London media for his own rather odd collection of economic advisers (among whom the TV tycoon Alan Sugar and the head of the private-equity company Permira, Damon Buffini, figure prominently). But as the financial sector‘s troubles accumulate and the Bank of England is forced to bail out Northern Rock, one of the country's leading mortgage-lenders, the impact of Brown's longstanding economic record should be a matter of focused deliberation in the new Scottish body - and not only there.
Later he argues,
the crisis over Northern Rock is structural as well as symptomatic (see Ann Pettifor, "Debtonation: how globalisation dies", 15 July 2007). Financial regulation in Gordon Brown's Britain has been less "light-touch" than disorganised and incompetent, with reorganisations and duplications - police, customs, revenue, financial services authority (FSA), serious fraud office (SFO), serious and organised crime agency (Soca) - trampling over each others' bailiwicks. The Bank of England's rescue of Northern Rock - preparing the way for the sale of the stricken company - cannot disguise the failures of coherent thinking that have led to this pass.
Read the whole thing HERE.
