Few people will be ticking the days off in their diaries before they can vote in the Scottish General Election on May 5th but I will be doing just that here, telling the story of my bid to be the MSP for East Lothian.
Where you plunk your cross will be entirely up to you but if you are looking for reasons why you might vote for Dave Berry and the SNP try coming back here to read my daily journal, see what comments visitors have left and make some of your own.
In 1997, Gordon Brown announced what he claimed were the “most radical welfare reforms since the Second World War” and declared that the unemployed young would be first in the firing line. “How,” he asked, “did a society like ours get itself into a position where we are wasting young people’s talents like this?” Under his new Welfare-to-Work programme, funded by a £5 billion windfall tax on the privatised utilities, the welfare state would be transformed, making it crystal clear that “staying at home is not an option”.[1]
That was 13 years ago. Fast-forward a dozen years of supposed fiscal ‘prudence’ during which the biggest fiscal crisis in memory crashed everyone’s party and we find Gordon’s replacement as Chancellor, Alastair Darling admitting on August 19th 2009 “this country risks a ‘lost generation’ as the number of NEETs (Not in Employment, Education or Training) rises to nearly 959,000. These figures are further evidence that the recession has had a devastating impact on the ability of school and college-leavers to find work.”
Given such a decade, it was pure déja vu to witness Labour Leader Iain Gray declaim to the faithful gathered in a drookit Oban last weekend that “What holds this country back is not its constitutional status. It is every child growing up in a family made dysfunctional by drugs or alcohol. It is every pupil who leaves a school unable to read write or count properly. It is every youngster who drifts into unemployment and an empty future.”[2]
Mr Gray’s speech was peppered with personal international references from Chile to Mozambique to Cambodia, so recent claims that he has no hinterland clearly cannot be true. He must therefore be fully aware that, as a part of Britain, Scotland shares an abysmal record of failure in NEETs as, in contrast to elsewhere in Europe, our numbers continues to rise—a calamity that affects many more than just those youngsters involved.
Government figures show that each new NEET dropping out of education at 16 costs an average of £97,000 during their lifetime. The worst will cost more than £300,000. Given that these figures are worsening (the million mark was passed in Q3 of 2009), that is well over £100bn of public money diverted from schools, hospitals, etc, to say nothing of anger, frustration and disillusionment suffered by generations of youngsters whose hopes lie in ruins.
Comparable rates in other European countries[3] throw a harsh light on any achievement we may claim through the Chancellor £5bn windfall spend after 1997. While both UK and Scottish NEET statistics now hover over 15%, our Nordic Council neighbours tell a very different story. Both Denmark and Norway hover around 5% with a lower figure for 16-year-olds while Scotland’s fare worse than our average. And how has ‘little’ Denmark weathered the recession now buffeting ‘Great’ Britain so badly? Their overall unemployment rate has risen from just under 4% in 2007 to just over 4% this year.
As long ago as December 2006, East Lothian’s then Labour administration had developed its own NEET strategy, with five priority targets aimed at East Lothian’s three areas of multiple deprivation, all identified in Prestonpans and Tranent. At that time, our economy was still booming and the total of all NEETs in Scotland was only 32,000, while East Lothian’s was barely 500. After three years of following their ‘targeted’ strategy, that number is now 1,720 or 28%[4] of the age group. This tripling to over 1 in 4 is a miserable failure for any strategy. Only South Ayrshire and (more ominously because that’s where our good jobs are) West Lothian and Edinburgh are worse.[5]
However, if East Lothian were to suddenly find itself on a par with Denmark, we could find our NEET tally collapsed to 370 and £170,000,000 freed up to invest elsewhere. More importantly, an additional 1,300 of our young people would be contributing locally with jobs, hopes and a real future. Is such an enlightened option not worth consideration, rather than ridicule?
In his speech, Mr Gray seemed to relish blaming the Scottish Government for our present ills: “In the chamber and committees the Labour group has harried, hounded and hamstrung SNP ministers.” If, as he claims, “Our public finances were sustainable and our spending in-line with the needs and priorities of the people” and “The Labour government held our economy together”, he must expect the public to suffer collective amnesia over this past decade. That whole time, it was Labour administrations at all levels who doubled the spend of public monies in education and health to so little effect, as well as funding—yet still failing—many worthy causes such as NEETs.
East Lothian may still be relatively prosperous but it still has its areas of multiple deprivation. Worse, with NEET rates now triple what they were before, some new thinking must precede hosing in any more money after the last largesse, especially as we should be agreed that we have none to spare. Oban’s rain was heavy but even it cannot wash away a fiscal reality that ex-government ministers of any or all stripes ought to share.
[1] Meet the Neets, Daily Telegraph, 15th April 2007
[2] Leader’s Speech to Labour’s Scottish Conference, Oban, October 30th 2010
[3] Starting Well or Losing their Way? The Position of Youth in the Labour Market in OECD Countries. Glenda Quintini and Sébastien Martin, OECD SOCIAL, EMPLOYMENT AND MIGRATION WORKING PAPERS No 39, 2006
[4] Scottish Census Results On-Line 2011
[5] Youth Unemployment Rising in Most Areas, The Guardian, 11th August 2010
The severe weather of the last few weeks put everyone under strain. While much heated discussion was about keeping roads and pavements clear so that people could go about their business as best they could, little has been said about how well public transport has stood up to the test. With its rural hinterland and distance between its towns, many East Lothian residents rely on public transport to get to work, to shop and to socialise. We have invested heavily in transport infrastructure, with East Lothian projects including the dualled A1, the A720 City Bypass, Wallyford station and upgraded ScotRail trains. With many cars stuck in recent wintry conditions, this was a chance for public transport to shine and lure people from their snowbound cars.
In reality, the picture was mixed. FirstBus came through well, keeping most services running, albeit late, with missing journeys and some part-route runs. Local companies like Eve and Prentice, with more rural routes, should be commended for doing better in atrocious circumstances; their services ran except some housing estates where even their smaller buses could not beat deep snow and stuck cars on narrow streets. That lasted only briefly until ELC winter crews—whose many hard jobs well done also deserve commendations—reached them. But there was no wholesale loss of service, such as Edinburgh had on December 7th when Lothian’s entire bus fleet was pulled.
But I have to commend local crews and depots. As a user of local buses myself, I was impressed how they were kept running under very trying conditions. The quiet patience of passengers waiting in fierce cold for delayed services was usually rewarded. Buses provided a lifeline for those trying to get to work or from isolated rural houses to the shops.
However, the same cannot be said for ScotRail. Not only was service very erratic but their information system lost all credibility with huge inaccuracies. While I sympathise with their difficulties and praise train crews struggling to run to time, ScotRail’s inability to keep sets running as snow accumulated on them simply compounded the effect of Network Rail’s unheated points failures in such weather.
In common with most of Scotland, significant service reductions meant days with no trains to Dunbar or North Berwick or erratic, partial and delayed services even on ‘good’ days. Worse was the complete dislocation of ScotRail’s website and telephone information from reality. Worst of all was ficticious data on station screens showing many non-existent trains. Three people were stranded at Longniddry in bitter cold on December 6th, waiting for a last Edinburgh train, showing ‘On Time’ for 22:33 until well past that. It never came. By the time they realised this, the last bus had gone.
Nobody expects everything to work like clockwork in such difficult weather. But, since they insist on upping fares from January 1st yet again, the least ScotRail could do is address its public information meltdown, and thereby treat its customers properly under normal conditions—let alone under these extremes.
The fifth annual Halifax/Bank of Scotland Quality of Life ranking of council areas, released at Christmas, produced few real surprises in Scotland. Aberdeenshire took first place for the third time and only Shetland and East Dunbartonshire managed to edge East Lothian into fourth place. Nitesh Patel, economist at the Bank of Scotland, said: “Aberdeenshire scores highly relative to the average for Scotland on many of our indicators, such as health, life expectancy, employment rates, average earnings, secondary school results and climate.”
While Aberdeenshire has consistently been top or second, with Shetland and East Dunbartonshire in hot pursuit, East Lothian has been edging up to a consistent fourth place in 2009 and 2010. While this is good news for all concerned, these ratings do not impress when compared within the UK, where Aberdeenshire placed 178th.
Top in the UK was Elmbridge in Surrey (which includes ‘stockbroker belt’ Esher and Weybridge) where 95% of people were in good health, life expectancy is 81.4 years, 75% were employed, earning £1,018 per week. Of the top 30 locations named by HBOS, only three were outside southern England—and none north of the Midlands.
I have no wish to be jingoistic about this, but such rankings imply something basically wrong with HBOS’s concept of ‘quality of life’ and how to measure it. Certainly those parameters cited deserve consideration but other key ones were ignored. And, if Surrey’s such a gem, why do so many of its residents—with plenty of options—choose to move here?
South-East England is a gridlocked nightmare. Despite over £1trillion in motorways and an intact rail network unblighted by Beeching, average commute distances and journey times remain uniformly onerous—by car or train.
Scotland’s worst bottlenecks (M8/Harthill: 56,400 vehicles per day or A720/Dreghorn 81,200 vpd) are dwarfed by the legendary M25. It easily tops the UK ‘linear car park’ league at 210,000 vpd, while the M3 ranks sixth at 130,500. Elmbridge’s pricey properties fills the angle between these two. In fact, SouthEast England boasts all 25 of the UK’s most congested roads. SouthWest trains (serving both Esher and Weybridge stations almost an hour out of Waterloo) has the worst punctuality record of all UK train operating companies over the last decade.
How can quality of life—let alone carbon neutrality, and thereby sustainability—be viable in so congested an environment? If HBOS considered—as many do—that easy access to culture and recreation is also important, then East Lothian journey times of minutes to theatre or concert, stadium or golf course, beach or moor, might put even our Scottish competitors’ gas at the peep. I will write to congratulate Aberdeenshire. But I will also suggest to Mr Patel that HBOS downplay the material to include more sustainable and low-stress elements in future rankings.
davidsberry 