The SNP’s flagship economic strategy is pure window dressing

It was an odd launch event for what had previously been a much-touted initiative. While all eyes were on the war in Ukraine, Scotland’s finance minister, Kate Forbes, took to Dundee to set out Scotland's new ten year National Strategy for Economic Transformation. Such events usually involve a room full of press, lots of questions, photographs, one-on-one interviews and then widescale coverage in the Scottish media.

This event however was characterised by complaints from print journalists that they were excluded on spurious grounds of ‘ongoing Covid restrictions’, despite the finance minister speaking to a room full of business people and some select journalists to which this rule seemed not to apply. Subsequently, a ministerial statement on the strategy was made at Holyrood, late in the day and with very little notice.

Why the reluctance to engage with the press and debate the new strategy? It might be because the Scottish government knew the media would give them a hard time. As the paper was released, Roz Foyer, general secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC), who sits on the Scottish government's advisory council that shaped the strategy, commented on it, saying: ‘Sadly, this is more a strategy for economic status quo than economic transformation.’

Foyer said it has a ‘sprinkling of good ideas’ but that it was a ‘missed opportunity to address the challenges before us and make real, transformational change’.

The pro-business, entrepreneurial side of the spectrum was equally unhappy. Scotland's first homegrown billionaire, Sir Tom Hunter, was scathing. ‘What we have here is a long wish list with no magic wand to deliver it,’ he said.

So what’s so wrong with the strategy? The 56-page report outlines five ‘programmes of action’. These are: ‘entrepreneurial people and culture’, ‘new market opportunities’, ‘productive businesses and regions’, ‘skilled workforce’, and ‘a fairer and more equal society’. Much of the subsequent detail then consists of generalities and platitudes, and there is little by way of concrete proposals.

Where there are tangible initiatives put forward, it is questionable how beneficial they will be. One proposal, for example, is to appoint a ‘Chief Entrepreneurship Officer’ in the Scottish government to ‘work in partnership with industry and investors to drive forward our ambitions on entrepreneurship, including support for businesses with alternative ownership models, and working across the wider skills system’. Another is to establish an investor panel chaired by the first minister ‘to attract investment to a pipeline of projects in Scotland that support our transition to net zero and to bring investor intelligence to policy and regulatory development early in the process.’

All of which sounds like SNP window dressing.

One of the problems with trying to come up with a coherent economic strategy for Scotland is the jungle of policy groups already in place as one SNP administration after another has created new talking shops as a substitute for action. The Fraser of Allander Institute highlighted this issue in 2018, a decade after Alex Salmond had first brought the SNP to power.

At that point, across the Scottish government and its agencies there was an Economic Strategy, Digital Strategy, Energy Strategy, Circular Economy Strategy, Climate Change Plan, Trade and Investment Strategy, Labour Market Strategy, Social Enterprise Strategy, Hydro Nation Strategy, Strategy Action Plan for Women in Enterprise, STEM Strategy, Manufacturing Action Plan, Youth Employment Strategy, an Innovation Action Plan, a National Islands Plan, an Agenda for Cities, and an Arctic Strategy.

Alongside these were numerous sector specific strategies covering, for example, life sciences. And then there was local authorities and their economic development plans. All of this was overseen by a vast number of government departments and agencies, which were informed by an even vaster number of advisory boards, ranging from the Council of Economic Advisers to the Advisory Panel on the Collaborative Economy.

If the Scottish economy was fuelled by policy discussion then it would have the world’s highest GDP-per-capita.

This problem of talk over action has only gotten worse over the last four years as the list of advisory forums and policy groups has grown further. The Scottish government's latest initiative looks set to add to that morass instead of cutting through it. The result, ultimately, will be inaction and an economy stifled from reaching its full potential.

It's no wonder Kate Forbes was reluctant to engage with the press at this week’s launch event. She's probably as fed up with the pretence of it all as the rest of us.