Nice one,
Nicol – but 25 years too late
Cynics might
say that Tuesday’s much-hyped announcement of “the world’s biggest wave energy
farm” by Deputy First Minister Nicol Stephen is a suspiciously well-timed
diversion from the fiasco of the Liberal Democrats’ Scottish Conference. There
Mr.Stephen had hoped to seize the moral high ground by claiming that his party
would refrain from personal abuse in the upcoming Scottish General Election:
unfortunately he neglected to brief either his boss or his MSPs, who were almost
immediately caught on camera up to their usual old tricks of smearing and
slandering all their opponents.
Naturally
the announcement of the £13 million funding for the Orkney-based wave farm is
welcome but it must be seen as (excuse the pun) a drop in the ocean compared to
the scale of R&D funding made available to nuclear energy (estimated at £135
billion from 1946 to 1996). In the world of energy research £13 million is
little more than petty cash.
How different
things could have been. Serious exploration of the potential of wave power
devices started over 30 years ago and between 1976 and 1982 there was an
explosion of technological innovation. Various types of wave energy conversion
devices were developed up to the level of prototype models, including the
“Salter ducks” at Edinburgh University and the “oscillating water column” at the
then National Engineering Laboratory in East Kilbride.
But the new
technology had powerful enemies, particularly in the nuclear industry, and they
eventually succeeded in killing off the UK research programme. Funding was
withdrawn in 1982 and most of the research projects crumbled away or were scaled
down to little more than holding operations. Foreign research groups also cut
back their efforts, reckoning that if wave power was not viable in the Scottish
waters it was unlikely to work elsewhere.
How different
our world might now be if wave power had been given the political backing and
large-scale funding it deserved over the past 25 years. It would now be a fully
mature energy industry on a vast scale, not only in Scotland but world-wide.
Apart from providing jobs and wealth it would be making a critical contribution
to global warming mitigation.
Let us hope the
latest announcement is not another false dawn. A flashing danger light can be
found in a completely different energy technology, with signs that Westminster
is dragging its feet over funding of the path-breaking hydrogen power station at
Peterhead. The design phase of this £600 million project is now complete but the
project risks being abandoned if the promised funding does not arise.
What has this
to do with wave power? What both these technologies (and, for the moment, only
these technologies) promise is large-scale base-load electrical power with
minimal carbon emissions. Up to now this combination was regarded by the nuclear
industry as its USP (unique selling proposition). A prime objective of the
nuclear lobby must be to kill off these rivals before it is killed off itself.
Possibly I’m
wrong. Close and prolonged proximity to the nuclear industry has possibly made
me slightly paranoid. But I urge everyone – politicians, energy analysts,
industrial consultants and journalists in particular – to watch developments
very attentively.
And watch this
space!
Ukania on
the slide: how the indices are adding up
It could have
been worse. The UNICEF report ranking the well-being of children in developed
countries put the UK in 21st place. This is because the survey was
limited to 21 countries. Given the comprehensive scale of the UK’s poor showing
in almost every category and the huge gap between it and the other countries
surveyed it is pretty safe to assume that its ranking would be much lower if
further countries were added to the sample.
Only a couple
of weeks previously a survey of “the best countries to live in” placed the UK in
37th place. The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) “Index of
Democracy” recently put the country in 23rd place, near the bottom of
the “full democracies” category. Next year’s index may not be so kind: recent
revelations on the extent of corruption in high places and the astonishing
behaviour of the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, may lead to a swapping of
places with Italy, (currently languishing in 34th place but now
Berlusconi-free), and demotion to the “flawed democracies” category.
The
EIU’s most recent “Quality of Life” Index places the UK in 29th spot.
The “World Map of Happiness”, compiled at Leicester University, puts it 41st,
beaten not only by the usual high performers such as the Nordic countries,
Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg and the Netherlands but also by the
Bahamas, Bhutan, Brunei, Costa Rica, Antigua and the Seychelles.
And so it goes
on. In the “Worldwide Press Freedom Index” the UK comes joint 27th
(below Nambibia, Benin, Bosnia and Bolivia). In the Transparency International
“Corruption Perceptions Index” it manages joint 11th place, but this
was before the OECD’s near-unanimous condemnation of the UK Attorney-General’s
blocking of the Serious Fraud Office’s attempts to undercover massive fraud
behind arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
Now I am one of
the first to recognize the limitations of all these exercises in international
comparisons. Major methodological problems surround the relative weightings
assigned to various components of the indices. It is not always possible to
compare like with like. And there are frequent anomalies: for example, France is
viewed as the best place in the world to live but its score on world happiness
is even worse than the UK. Apologists for the Blair/Brown Government have been
quick to seize on these caveats in their attempts to rubbish their critics.
Yet the UK
consistently performs abysmally in such international comparisons. They can’t
all be wrong or explained away by technical idiosyncrasies. They also chime in
with anecdotal evidence from other countries and the day-to-day experience of
societal decay within the UK, the rapid erosion of civil liberties, the
increasingly obscene contrast between the super-rich and the poor and the
heartbreaking injustices inherent in the tax and benefits system.
Ukania is
increasingly (and increasingly seen to be) a socio-political basket case. To
coin a phrase, it is no longer fit for purpose.
So what works?
What is striking from all the indices is that the same group of countries are
always present in the upper echelons of achievement. The Nordic nations,
Ireland, Austria, Switzerland, Benelux, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are
almost invariably top of all these lists. This is not to say that all larger
countries fail: France, Spain, the USA, Germany and (recovering) Italy are all
well-placed to offer their citizens a prosperous and just society. But the best
model of the good society is undoubtedly the relatively small Northern European
nation (with Australia, Canada and New Zealand not far behind).
So where does
this leave Scotland? For as long as we remain shackled to the UK we can expect
to share the same dismal performance ratings. We may be better placed than
England in some areas, for example in the Democracy Index as a result of a more
democratic voting system and a higher proportion of women in elected office. In
others we may do even worse, e.g. for the Press Freedom Index the almost total
control of the Scottish mass media by the unionists is even worse than the
situation in Italy under the Berlusconi regime.
Possibly the
most intriguing feature of the UK’s disastrous showing in all manner of
international indices is the lack of any clear connection with macro-economics.
In the IMF’s ranking of countries by GDP per head of population the UK comes 18th.
Even when Scotland leaves, EWNI will remain in or near the top 20 of the world’s
richest countries. In world economic rankings the UK occupies a position similar
to that of the Scotland football squad in FIFA tables: far from the best but by
no means the worst.
The UK’s
downward spiral in the quality of society rankings is not due to a lack of
economic resources but to institutional incompetence and a collapse of the
social contract. Thatcher and Blair have torn up the security blanket of social
democracy but failed to provide any sustainable alternative.
We in Scotland
have alternative models to follow, whether they be the high-growth strategies
of Singapore and Ireland or the egalitarian, socially just and environmentally
prudent path of our Nordic neighbours. Whatever road we take it cannot help but
be better than the prospect of rapid societal decline as part of Europe’s last
medieval monarchy.
Get the
name right, Gordon
Gordon Brown’s
super wheeze of disguising or downplaying his embarrassing Scottish origins by
indoctrinating school-kids with a compulsory “Britishness” identity has been
badly received, to put it mildly. The negative reactions may even cost him the
premiership.
In a spirit of
Caledonian solidarity the Flag offers this advice: get the name right, Gordon.
“Britishness”,
as a brand, lacks clarity. “Britain” is, at best, a geographical concept. It is
used as a shorter form of “Great” (more correctly “Greater”) Britain, a term
used to differentiate the island from mainland Britain (or Brittany). In a
strict sense Great Britain excludes Ireland (North and South), the Isle of Man,
the Channel Isles, the Isle of Wight, Anglesey, the Inner and Outer Hebrides,
the Northern Isles and the Bass Rock.
As
a political term “Britain” is much less specific. At its broadest it encompasses
everything and everyone who was ever involved in the old British Empire. How
much it means to most of those so defined is uncertain. When I lived in Canada I
was surprised to find that, as a “British subject” I was entitled to vote in
Canadian elections. You see more Union Jacks in Australia than in England,
(although in the former they are obliged to share space with the Southern
Cross).
Undoubtedly
“Britain’s” finest hour was during World War when she “stood alone” against the
Axis powers. But the “Britain” that stood alone was not just the United Kingdom
but the British Empire and Dominions. The war would have been lost without the
courage and sacrifice of Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, not to
mention the tremendous contributions of troops from Africa, Asia and the
Caribbean.
When unionists
try to hijack Remembrance Day as a celebration of the current constitutional
settlement then they demean and insult those who came from far-off lands
(including the Poles, the Free French and many others) to fight and die for
freedom. Is it suggested that the fact their countries have progressed to
independence is somehow a betrayal?
“Britishness”
is such a vague, amorphous and (at times) controversial concept, with its
meaning varying from place to place, that it is no basis for the new state
identity Brown wishes to impose on us. He needs to accept that the state is
properly called not England, Britain or Great Britain but the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or UK for short. Admittedly this can be
somewhat antiseptic: teaching UK-ness in schools doesn’t exactly have a ring of
authenticity.
One solution
might be to adopt Tom Nairn’s description “Ukania”. That’s quite a nice term. It
can be readily adapted to adjectival use: Ukanian history, Ukanian football
team, Ukanian party politics.
It also has a
certain affinity with Ruritania, the fictional country in which Richard Hope
located such novels as The Prisoner of Zenda.
Ruritania,
according to Wikipedia, is rather an unpleasant place, an absolute monarchy
ruled by a feckless, autocratic king, characterised by intensive police
surveillance of suspected subversives and a society deeply polarised between
rich and poor.
Sounds
familiar.
