When I started writing this column seven years ago, an early (and continuing) contention of mine was that, as a useful prism through which to see Scotland’s constitution position, and its weaknesses therein, Scotland’s farming industry is unrivalled.
That belief only strengthened last week with the launch of NFU Scotland’s manifesto ahead of the 2024 General Election, during which President Martin Kennedy called for commitments from the next UK Government and the full support of all prospective MPs in Scotland who he said should all be championing Scotland’s farmers and growers.
He then went on to lay out the union’s priority areas, including better access to skilled workers and protections in domestic food production in future trade deals. He also noted that, while agriculture is devolved to Holyrood, key drivers like powers over trade and migration are not.
And there’s the rub. We have powers over policy, but not the levers we really need to deliver it. And that’s no criticism of the union. Like any lobbying organisation, you deal with the world as it is – not how you might like it to be. But governments – our own included – don’t have that caveat.
I’ll come to that.
But there’s quite a lot to unpack here, starting with a couple of key priorities that the NFUS identified.
Take the one about skilled workers. One of the small tragedies of Brexit was the loss of access to a skilled European Union workforce which meant the removal of – in some cases – decades of experience and deep knowledge in a sector that Westminster dismissed as unskilled. The ongoing difficulties in Scotland’s soft fruit and vegetable sectors have their roots entirely in a Brexit that Scotland overwhelming rejected. And of course, as Mr Kennedy rightly points out, immigration is entirely reserved to Westminster. A Westminster obsessed with Stopping The Boats. It occurs that asking these people to cut you some slack over visas is akin to pleading with an arsonist to put out the same house fire that he himself started.
And in terms of protecting food production and standards in future trade deals? Sometimes your supporters can be found in the most unlikely places – like Somerset. Google Neil Parish and you’ll be met by the embarrassing details of his departure from frontline politics, but during the post-Brexit discussions the then MP for Tiverton and Honiton – and active farmer – tabled an amendment to the Brexit Bill that, if adopted, would have guaranteed that food standards in a post-Brexit UK would be at least equal to those pre-departure. Quite a few Conservative MPs actually voted for the amendment. But as for the six Tory MPs in Scotland’s strongly rural areas? Take a wild guess.
We can’t have it both ways. In terms of a Scottish food and drink industry that plans to increase its output from £18bn per annum currently to £30bn by 2030, we need to ask: it it easier to achieve this with all the powers to do so, or without them?
And within this is a wider truth about Scotland as a whole. This year, Scotland’s economy is forecasted to grow by 0.7%, and others predict even lower growth. Of course, under the limitations of the Scotland Act and the damaging effects of Tory austerity, it’s hard for any Scottish government to reverse these trends. Which is precisely the point. What if we did what the farming sector is doing and announce plans to grow the economy by, say, three percent? Unionists would say we aren’t allowed to borrow, but what would happen, as George Kerevan argued recently, is that at least we’d shift the debate onto the reality of the here and now. We’d be confronted by the reality that we cannot do anything remotely significant to make our lives better without genuine control of the powers that actually change the game.
Self-determination is ultimately about agency – who has it, and who is denied it. It feels like we talk about independence during those short windows when there’s an electoral process happening – which feels performative and virtue signalling – and then revert to trying to govern within the narrow parameters we’ve always put up with, and within which we’re set up for a failure that we will be told we are to blame.
And in a sense we will be.
Because independence should always be front and centre of any discussion of Scotland’s future, not as an end in itself but as a mechanism.
It isn’t independence or recovery. It’s independence for recovery. Because talking about – demanding – independence isn’t ignoring the “real” issues but the first step to solving them.
Slainte people. I’ll meet you further on up the road.
