Enterprise in Scotland

Well, I don't know who she was. Some Tory MSP - no doubt labelled rent-a-mouth by her opponents. She, it seems, said in the Scottish Parliament this week that she would be happy if the state had no role in the NHS. In other words, she'd be happy to see the NHS privatised.

Either she's too ignorant or too young or too well-off - or all of these - to have any idea exactly why the state came to play a role in healthcare in the UK in the first place. There are lots of stories from two world wars of the shock recruiting officers got as they discovered the poor health of a lot of  soldiers. TB and rickets were rife. Malnutrition was normal among recruits from industrial areas, where there were regular outbreaks of highly contagious and debilitating diseases like diphtheria, measles and scarlet fever. Medical conditions went untreated because treatment had to be paid for and poor people couldn't pay.

The NHS wasn't some treat for the poor. Having a healthy workforce was an absolute necessity if the UK was to compete in a highly competitive industrial world.

According to people like Thatcher and her wingman Tebbit in the 1970s, workers (working class people, that is) had to be chivvied and bullied into changing jobs or changing where they lived if they wanted work. 'Traditional' industries - the industries that had grown up in the UK and made a fortune for their owners, who then failed to re-invest in order to stay competitive - would be wound down.

The burden of finding jobs passed to the workers. If they couldn't find work, it was their fault. They had to be more 'enterprising.'

I heard all this in the 1970s and 1980s. I used to wonder if politicians then had any idea about 'enterprise' themselves. A lot of them seemed to come from comfortable professional jobs in universities, banks, the law, the civil service, etc. I always wondered how many of them had any experience of setting up a business, making it grow and selling it on to start up something else. 

That's a Scottish thing: for a couple of centuries Scots, living in one of the poorest countries in Europe (and kept that way, in my opinion, by a UK government keen to 'pacify' the island after 1701)  have had no option but to get an education and then get out in the world and make their mark.

Adam Smith, a Scot, was the first big name in capitalism. The Bank of England was founded by a Scot. A lot of the 'Founding Fathers' of the USA were Scottish immigrants. How about the McQuarie Bank in Australia?

You can read about this and more on wiki:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Scots_Invented_the_Modern_World

You can't build an enterprising society without workers. There was a period when this was blindingly bleeding obvious and workers got their due in terms of wages and conditions. But then, employers decided the rewards had to be split not two ways - employers and employees - but three ways, with a cut going to the shareholders, who over time have become greedier and greedier.

Now we don't see people as a workforce but as a burden. They need health care, education, housing. They have expectations: they want their families looked after too. And they come with baggage: some are disabled or old or in need of expensive medical treatment for conditions that have come from the jobs they used to do (look up silicosis) or have inherited (diabetes). Of course, more and more they are expected to pay for the treatment themselves or crowdfund it, because 'the state' - that's you and me, folks - the people who pay the taxes - can't afford their treatment. 

My new resolution is this: I'm not going to be told about enterprise by a bunch of millionaire banksters in the Home Counties (ever wondered where that is - and what that phrase it tells you about the UK?).

I see poverty around me daily. I give to charities that support the poorest among us. I know what needs to be done. We need to become ashamed that nearly 1 in 5 of children in Scotland live in poverty. The way to prevent that is to make sure poor people have access to decent services: health, education, housing.

I have to say that photos like this totally tick me off. This is not how most families in poverty live in Scotland: most parents work very hard to make sure their kids get a decent life. They may not live in leafy suburbs but their kids are mostly well-fed, well-dressed and well taken care of. 

What won't help Scotland is waiting for the UK government to ride to our assistance. That's never going to happen.

Right now, we live in the worst of all worlds: our finances are controlled by a political party that is out of sympathy with most voters in Scotland. The Tory Party think they can bully us into being as supine as English local authorities. But we pay in a lot of cash in taxes and we know we don't get it back. We want - and need - control of our own services.