New Statesman Scotland
If the suits at the Treasury are to be believed, the average Scot is a lot less enterprising than his or her English counterpart. According to figures just released (for the year 1998), it seems that the English start new businesses at an average rate of 42 per year per 10,000 adults, while the average rate north of the border is a paltry 28. Even booming Edinburgh (at 40) falls short of the English average. Only the gale-battered folk of Shetland do better: they manage 59 business start-ups per 10,000 per year. Bumping along at the bottom of the start-up league table are Inverclyde and West Dumbartonshire with a measly 17 - 40 per cent of the English average.
All of which is grist to the mill of those folk inside the M25 who have been arguing for decades that the Scots are a bunch of whingeing, subsidised, tax- cosseted wimps - and that it's time they faced some of life's harsher economic realities (but don't, for God's sake, get them talking about North Sea oil revenues).
For all that, Gordon Brown and his chums have posed at least one interesting question: if we Scots are less enterprising than the English, why is it? What has happened to the people of John Law, Adam Smith, Alexander Graham Bell and Andrew Carnegie (not to mention Brian Souter and Ann Gloag)?
A number of answers have been put forward. One is that the heavy industries such as coal, steel and shipbuilding, on which the Scottish economy relied for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, are just not conducive to spawning the kind of com-panies that start small and grow big. Another suggestion is that our enthusiasm for the welfare state created a dependency on the public sector that we are finding hard to shake off.
Yet another explanation is that, because home ownership in Scotland is relatively low, fewer of us have the collateral to raise the money needed to start new businesses. Or that our "inward investment" strategies have been so successful, and we are now so good at attracting foreign companies, that we have forgotten how to design and make things for ourselves. Any or all of the above might be true.
But it occurs to this diary that business start-ups might not be the indicator of economic success that Gordon Brown seems to think. When Concert (aka British Steel) closes down its mills in Yorkshire, and Ford puts an end to car-making in Dagenham, the chances are that business start-ups in those areas will soar. But it means that, in place of thousands of steady, well-paid, skilled jobs, hundreds of men and women will be scrambling to get by as self-employed minicab drivers, window cleaners, hairdressers, corner green- grocers, double-glazing salesmen and care workers.
A few of these enterprises will grow and go on to employ other people, but not many. Business start-ups, certainly. But is it really economic improvement?
On the subject of surveys, it is now al-most a year since the Queen coached her way from Holyrood House up the Royal Mile to the Mound to open Scotland's new parliament. Which raises the question: what kind of a parliamentary year has it been? How have the MSPs performed? And how has it all gone down with the Scottish public? Over the past few weeks, this diary has been taking its own (devastatingly unscientific) soundings, the results of which can now be announced.
And the truth is that enthusiasm is muted. There seems to be a consensus that the parliament is a Good Thing (in the Sellars & Yeatman, 1066 And All That, sense), but parliamentarians could do with brushing up their act. The MSPs made a huge mistake in spending so much time at the start sorting out their wages, conditions and holidays. The so-called "Lobbygate" row did some damage, and there is a perception that more time has been spent on "peripheral" stuff such as fox-hunting and Clause 28 than on housing, health, education and the business of "real" politics.
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