SELECT COMMITTEE ON ECONOMIC AFFAIRS - Parliament

Professor Gavin McCrone—Oral evidence (QQ 117–187)
Q173 Lord Smith of Clifton: Do you think there might be a flight of highly skilled labour
from Scotland, either south of the border or elsewhere? Will there be another outflow of
migration from Scotland?
Professor McCrone: I think that would only happen if conditions in Scotland were bad and
people went elsewhere to find work.
Q174 Lord Smith of Clifton: But if the turbulence that is created with the possibility of
that—it has happened in Ireland now again with the downturn.
Professor McCrone: Yes, of course, but that is because of what has happened to the Irish
economy. If the Scottish economy went through some crisis of that kind, then the same kind
of thing would happen. But equally, if the Scottish economy happened to do very well, then I
think it would attract more people back, just as Ireland was doing. Ireland’s flow was inward
rather than outward for a number of years when the Irish economy was doing well.
Lord Smith of Clifton: During the Celtic tiger times.
Professor McCrone: There are quite a lot of people who would probably like to go back to
Scotland and work there if the jobs were available. It really depends how they are doing.
Q175 Lord Hollick: You mentioned—and, indeed, other witnesses have done the
same—that Scotland rather underperforms in some respects on the level of economic
growth and development that it possibly should be achieving. You have also made the point
that Denmark and Norway, two other independent countries with their own currencies,
have done rather well. What is it about those countries, and what lessons can you learn
from those countries, which could be applied to Scotland? Does Scotland need to be
independent to take advantage of those lessons, or can it do it as part of the United
Kingdom?
Professor McCrone: I think probably the latter. Has Scotland been doing badly? A lot of
people say yes. The present Scottish Government says its performance has been
unsatisfactory for a long time, but actually if you look at GDP per head, that is not true. I
wrote a paper in 1974, which I think may have been circulated. On reading it again, what
struck me about it was how much better off, relatively, Scotland is now than it was then. We
now have a GDP per head that is approximately the UK average, above that of the north of
England, Wales and Northern Ireland and even the north-west of England—in fact above all
the other English regions except the south-east. We have unemployment at the British
average. When I joined the Scottish Office in 1970, Scottish unemployment was way above
the British average and at one time had been double the British average. In those respects,
there has been considerable improvement in Scotland’s relative position. Going back to that
paper that I wrote in 1974, I was rather struck by the fact that there had been a big
improvement since then, relatively speaking. Scotland’s rate of economic growth has not
been as high as the UK’s, but then its population has not grown as much as the UK’s. You
have a GDP per head that has actually been able to improve in relation to the UK average
over those years. Yes, in some respects it is not satisfactory and could have been better, but
it is not as bad as a lot of people make out.
As for learning lessons from other countries, I am all in favour of that but I think you need to
study the particular circumstances that have enabled them to do what they do. I think
Scotland was very much dragged down by the decline of the older heavy industries for a long
time, and that did not apply for a country like Denmark in the same way. We were
tremendously dependent on coal, steel, shipbuilding, heavy engineering and textiles, and all of
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