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Good morning colleagues, I'm delighted to be here.
As I said yesterday, there's been an outbreak of positive
thinking across Scotland and I've been invited to present the sort
of gloomy and negative picture thereby reviving an honourable
Scottish tradition that's rather in decline. Colleagues, Scotland is so unequal
that the pressing question of our day is how do we contribute to social justice.
And fundamental to that, of course, is the issue of distribution.
At just a few hours old, the human baby makes a valiant attempt
to mimic the expressions on the mother's face to establish the social
connections, the social cues on which that baby's survival will depend.
'Recognise me. I'm like you.' In the same way as we now know that new
born babies cry in their mother tongue. That baby knows what we often forget,
that we depend on each other, that human beings are profoundly,
quintessentially social, hence the importance of the social determinants both
societal, how power, privilege and resources are distributed and also social,
the impact of that distribution on human relationships. And I guess what I think
I've seen happening over the past few years is a sea change in how
deprivation and poverty are spoken about in Scotland. And that change is related to
the rise of psychological and behavioural explanations for Scotland's problems.
In public health, for example, psychoanalysis is increasingly preferred to
economic analysis. Clearly there are important social values and
assets based approaches, respect for people's strength, resourcefulness, resilience,
creativity, the power of the human spirit, the power of collective action,
many of the things that Nicola is going to be talking about in the
work that's going on in The Borders. These values have a long history in Scotland.
But my problem is with what happens around five key issues.
What happens when those values that have that long tradition are separated
from an analysis of social justice in human rights? What happens when assets
approaches are used to suggest that Scotland's problems are predominantly
psychological and cultural? When dependency and need are stigmatised?
When assets approaches are used to attack public services which, after all, are
collectively owned assets? And when hard questions about competing interests,
corporate power and redistribution are avoided? I want to make it clear that
recent years have seen a welcome recognition of what might be called the non-
material dimensions of poverty and deprivation. You see those in the human
development initiative and in efforts, I think, globally to capture what have
been called the missing dimensions of poverty to draw on the testimony
of people living in poverty, issues of dignity, affiliation, respect,
meaning and autonomy. There's clearly a difference between
starving and fasting. That agenda is part of a broader critique of
materialism and undue focus on income and wealth. Well-being doesn't depend
solely on economic assets as Sen has observed. The market doesn't have a
monopoly on meaning. The interest in all those issues
- the social, emotional and spiritual impact of poverty and deprivation, poverty
and inequality - I do think that's deepened our understanding of the social
determinants of health. Yes, material conditions but also control over lives,
participation in decision making, political voice. International studies show that
status, the respect that you receive from others, control, influence over your
life and relatedness, affiliation, sense of belonging, those things are universal
across cultures' determinants of well-being and we do need to pay
more attention to injuries to those needs, those needs for status
control and relatedness. The freedom to live a valued life
clearly depends on more than money. But in all those accounts that I've described,
the distribution of economic assets is still of fundamental importance.
There's a link between living conditions and dignity. The idea of justice is paramount
to what's fair. And that's my first problem with the assets agenda.
What's the analysis of injustice? Who and what creates inequalities
in Scotland? What's the relationship between economic policy and inequality?
I mention all that because there's a recurring and quite dangerous assertion
from the assets movement and that's that tackling inequalities in Scotland has failed.
What we've tried, though well-meaning, hasn't worked.
But what is it exactly that's been tried? It's true there's been a huge effort
to address the symptoms but material inequalities have increased.
It's surely no surprise then that health and other inequalities have got worse.
That's a symptom. In fact, recent OECD figures from Divided We Stand
show that public services reduce inequalities in the UK more than almost
anywhere else and that this impact has increased over the 2000s.
So against all the odds, public services have improved their impact
on reducing inequalities. But what are they up against?
In the past decade, the richest have seen a sharp increase in income in
Scotland and yet the inequalities of the Thatcher years have remained intact.
So there's an added complexity. Of course income inequality isn't the
only driver of other inequalities. But let's look again briefly at the evidence.
In the UK as a whole, income inequality is near to its highest point since 1961.
In Scotland, the income inequality gap has widened since devolution.
A fifth of the population shares 6% of Scotland's income.
A fifth share 45%. Scotland is doing marginally better than
the UK and that's always trotted out but it's only
marginally better against a very, very bad set of statistics.
The UK as a whole is doing very badly. Transfers and taxes have become less
redistributive, benefits have become less redistributive, more people are
working at low wages, etc. etc. Relative to the OECD average,
in the 80s we overtook the States in terms of levels of inequalities.
And we're much closer to the States than we are to the OECD average.
We also have some of the lowest social mobility in the developed world.
All these figures, colleagues, are about assets but they're about the distribution of assets.
Perhaps without meaning to, and this is my second major concern, the assets
agenda stigmatises dependency and need. It implies that take-up of
welfare is driven, not by market failure, but by certain character traits,
dependency, deficit coping styles. But isn't dependency, thinking
back to that baby, a feature of being human rather than a moral failing?
As the Disability Rights Movement would have reminded us actually dependency
is a gift reminding us of our humanity. In material terms of course,
isn't it also the case that it's the rich who are most dependent, not the poor,
and that the focus on the dependency of the poor in the current dependency
discourse is a distraction from the fiscal and economic legislation
that supports the benefits of the rich - tax, inheritance, property
capital gains, private schools. Actually in Scotland the rich are utterly
dependent hence the howls of outrage whenever there are any
attempts to reduce that dependency or promises to do so in the future.
In Scotland as elsewhere, actually the poor live much more likely on the planet.
Of course there are issues raised by the assets movement that need addressing.
There's an important debate to be had about transforming the
relationship between public services and disadvantaged communities. 00:09:23.80 ,00:09:28.98 The current welfare system is inadequate, it's demeaning and it needs changed
and everybody in that room is aware of that. But we should be clear what
that debate is about. That's a debate about social justice and human rights.
As Colin Mair has shown, when Scotland contains two entirely different worlds,
one amongst the most privileged in Europe, the outcomes of the most
privileged in Scotland exceed or match the best outcomes across a whole
range of indicators of any in Europe. It's a great place to live if you're well-off.
The other Scotland is experiencing outcomes that Colin Mair has called shaming
and shameful and who could disagree. Is that a result of public
health focusing on deficit? I don't think so.
Blaming the public sector, public services who are picking up the pieces
and picking up the tab, it's unfair and it's a dangerous strategy
mainly because it lets unregulated, free-market capitalism right off the hook.
And it reinforces the neo-liberal attack on universal values on collective
responsibility on pooled services and pooled risk, things that have been
fought for long and hard. Deep seated problems persist,
not because communities have an unacknowledged awareness of their
assets but because assets are so unequally shared.
And that pattern of distribution it's not accidental and it's not inevitable.
Colleagues, I think there are some urgent and difficult conversations about
inequalities in Scotland at this very important time and about the policies
in practice that support those inequalities. And those are questions about the
legacy of the unfettered free market, about who benefitted in the
boom years and why and at whose expense. They're difficult conversations
about levels of regulation that might be needed to ensure that corporate
interests don't take precedence over other interests, social interests -
health, welfare, justice, the environment, the well-being of children -
the levels of regulation that will be needed to meet the Scottish
Government's solidarity target. As it stands, what concerns me
is that the focus is on "radical change in the design and delivery of public services"
rather than on a radical change in the economic and fiscal policies that, in
Scotland as elsewhere, sanction gross inequalities and obscene greed.
My concluding reflections... The language of assets include some themes
with a very long history in Scotland but in the past, those themes,
that celebration of the power of the human spirit, that refusal to be
labelled, pathologised, ostracised, criminalised. Those themes have been linked
to an analysis of power and the struggle for social justice.
I think we need to renew those links, that solidarity, and
there's never been a better time. There's a growing public distaste
for the scale of inequalities. We're seeing new routes to resistance
and new forms of expressing solidarity. There's activism bubbling up on
the streets and I'd like to ask, how should we respond to that activism.
What is our responsibilities in relation to it and where's the leadership
within the public sector and the third sector around that activism?
Clearly, no single model or solution will solve what we're up against
but there are some non-negotiable values.
Thank you for your attention.