Scotland on Sunday Union Debate Speech

Friday, 19th January 2007

Good evening – and happy anniversary!

Let me begin with my vision for Scotland.

By 2020 my children will be 14, and all going well, they will be starting to plan for their futures.

I hope the country they inherit will be outward looking, fair- minded, and multi-cultured. They will be proud of their past but feel citizens of Scotland, Britain, Europe and the world.

They will know about Scottish history.
They will have read about the great Scots heroes of our past, Wallace, Burns, Carnegie. I will have told them about Keir Hardie, John Maxton, John Smith and since their father is English it will fall to their grandfather to tell them about Scottish footballing heroes –

And that is all I intend to say about football tonight!

They will be instinctively tolerant of every class, race and creed. They will also know about the not so ‘great’ wars and the lives laid down for great ideals.

We will have left all traces of dependency or a lack of self confidence behind having overcome a chippiness that was always more firmly rooted in our minds than based on Britain’s borders

And I hope they never hear about how the SNP tried to engineer the end of the United Kingdom. About a Scottish people who were persuaded to elevate what divides us over what unites us.

Ladies and Gentlemen.
Scotland faces a stark choice.

But that choice is not between the present we have in the Union and the future we will have under independence. It is between the future we might have under independence and the future we might have in the Union.

They are contrasting visions.

Yesterday when I was thinking about this debate , I did something I have never done – I went to the Donald Dewar library in the Scottish Parliament to work.

And as I sat there surrounded by Donald books, I considered what the Union meant to him –

Donald, like most Scots, never believed we were too small, too poor or too
stupid to go it alone. That’s always been a slur.

For Donald and for most of us, the Union is about social, cultural and political relationships as much as economic ones.

Any impetus for independence is not social.

We are more integrated than ever more than half of us now have family in the rest of the UK.

Nor is our culture under threat – after 300 years of the Union our distinctive culture is thriving.

Our political union may have had its tensions – but these differences have always been amicably resolved.

In Scotland then, the case for ending the Union is rarely made in terms of nationality, or culture or even politics. Here the cry to break the Union, is about an economic aspiration or an economic grievance – depending on how you choose to see it. In short we would be better off if we go it alone.

We need to weigh those competing economic prospectuses tonight. But there
is so much more to consider…..

I believe the case for the Union lies in our answer to this question: what do we want our generation of Scots to be remembered for?

History shows that Scotland is at its best when it looks outwards – engaging not simply with the issues of the nation, but with the issues of the age – take our intellectual contribution to the enlightenment, our role as workshop to the world and our contemporary reputation as a hotbed of scientific discovery.

I doubt that many of those across the world who know of Scotland’s educational, scientific, or medical successes could tell you the first thing about the timing or rationale for the Union of 1707. Therein lies a lesson for us today.

This May we can either put our constitutional status – centre stage – and meet with international indifference, or we can employ our energies and our ambitions, as we have done before, on the global challenges of our day.

For me three global challenges stand out: globalisation; poverty and climate change.

Rising to the challenge of globalisation. It means equipping each and every Scot to meeting the competitive challenge from India and China.

Today one in four workers have low skilled jobs. In ten years our economy will require only one tenth of that number.

Over half a million Scots need to find new secure employment – quick.That is why the First Minister has made education – the centrepiece of Labour’s election programme. Scotland once again the best educated nation in the world -

Global poverty is another challenge our generation must tackle.

I am proud that , it was a Scot from Fife, Gordon Brown, through his seat at the G8 top table persuaded the world’s leaders to end the indebtedness of the world’s poorest nations and who is determined to send every child in the world to primary school.

A Scot, born of the first nation to have a school in every parish, taking that Scottish insight to the rest of the world – and in so doing making the biggest assault on poverty this world has ever seen.

And there is a third global challenge we must rise to.

In the week that Al Gore came to Scotland let us recognise the greatest challenge of them all – climate change – within a generation unless we act 300k people are forecast to die each year because of the effects ofclimate change, and 1m species at risk of extinction within 50 years.

And our children will ask – where were you? What were your priorities?

Scotland has a special opportunity to rise to the climate change challenge.
Just as in the first decades of the industrial revolution we in Scotland could pioneer the technologies that will help the world tackle climate change – cleaning the coal in the world’s power stations, pioneering carbon capture in the North Sea, turning energy from wave power from a dream into a reality, reviving agriculture around biofuels, there are more technologies blowing in the wind.

All that possible through a partnership between Scotland, Britain and private sector leaders bringing these technologies to the market.

Scotland, potentially, providing the world with the technologies it needs to meet the challenge of combating climate change. That is our opportunity

So my argument tonight is a simple one.

Thatthere are better national purposes for a progressive, farsighted nation like Scotland than putting our efforts and energies into securing our own
sovereignty:

Educational leadership at home,
global leadership on poverty and
technological leadership on climate change.

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I am not arguing that our Union is perfect. Nor am I arguing that it is set in aspic.

Devolution is a process.

So if you favour more powers that is fine – you can still be a committed unionist.

And if the last decade teaches us anything – it is that you do not need to tear up the Union to reform it.

The SNP’s rationale for independence is typically economic – first it was oil, then independence in Europe, and today it is about being small – like Norway or Ireland.

But if the key to economic success is being small – then why has every large state not splintered?

And if the key to economic success is independence how do you account for the growth of Florida, Utah, Colorado, Rhone-Alps for example?

Economic success has little to do with countries being big or small and everything to do with their resources and their strategy. I hope we get the chance to debate those competing strategies tonight.

Scotland is not the agricultural economy of Norway 100 years ago, or Ireland 80 years ago. That’s when those countries sought their independence.

That was a different pre-War, pre-welfare state world.

Today we live in a complex, highly integrated post-industrial society.

I don’t have a crystal ball. I can’t prove whether independence would be a success or a disaster or something in between, but it would be a highly dangerous gamble that we’d be taking.

But what I can tell you is that after 300 years this would be no velvet divorce and it would take up a huge amount time, effort and money. The process of separation would be all-consuming, not for a few months or even a couple of years but for much, much longer

Years, perhaps decades when improving education, poverty alleviation and tackling climate change become second order priorities to setting up institutions and haggling over share of resources. A boom time for bureaucrats and constitutional lawyers and a tragically missed opportunity for our children and for our environment.

Let me conclude

This Union is about much more than competing economic visions.

It stands for an agreement to live and work in partnership.

Tearing that partnership asunder would send a signal.

Not the confident one claimed by my nationalist opponents.

Instead I believe it would declare to the world that Scotland can no longer live with others on one island.

Overnight we would cease to be one of the world’s major economies and would be diminished in power and influence.

In the eyes of the world, we are definitely stronger together and weaker apart.

Far better I believe that as Scots we live up to our best traditions.

That we turn our minds to those global challenges I spoke of earlier – devoting ourselves to a progressive purpose for this generation and the next.

A confident, prosperous Scotland in 2020 that can echo Donald Dewar in recalling “the shout of the welder, the speak of the Mearns, and the wild cry of Great Pipes – but is finally freed from the “whining of the Nats”.