By David Jessop (Executive Director of the Caribbean Council for Europe)
A little over a week ago Caribbean High Com-missioners to the United Kingdom paid a formal first visit to the Scottish Parliament which is located in Edinburgh. This initiative came in response to an invitation extended by Lord George Foulkes, a long-time friend of the Caribbean who sits in both the upper house of the UK Parliament and in the Scottish Parliament.
In Scotland, the seven-strong group from the Caribbean met with a wide range of senior figures from the ruling Scottish National Party (SNP) including the First Minister Alex Salmond and his Minister for Europe and External Affairs Linda Fabiani. They also held discussions with members of the Parliament’s Economy, En-ergy and Tourism Committee, representatives of the SNP, their counterparts from the Conservative and Labour opposition as well as with the Presiding Officer (Speaker) and officials. Subsequent meetings enabled the diplomats to meet with Scottish business to discuss the possibilities for investment and trade with the Caribbean.
The issues covered were wide ranging and included Scottish devolution, improving relations between the Caribbean and Scotland, the possible establishment of a cross-party group on the Caribbean in the Scottish Parliament (there is already one on Cuba), improving relations through the appointment of honorary consuls, and the development of an annual exchange.
Speaking afterwards about the visit in his capacity as a Member of the Scottish Parliament, George Foulkes observed that the Caribbean, Britain and Scotland shared the closest of historical ties, and that he looked forward to finding new areas for co-operation, particularly in the field of trade and investment.
The visit is an interesting indication of the region being able to think forward should Scotland ever seek and obtain a greater degree of autonomy from the rest of the United Kingdom. However, more immediately and realistically it was an ideal precursor for Caribbean ministerial visits linked to investment and an opportunity to identify where the Scottish model, a significant modern advance on that of the United Kingdom as a whole, might have relevance to the region.
Scotland has a population of around five million people and although much wealthier than almost all Caribbean nations it has some interesting similarities with the region in its economy in as much as it relies heavily on tourism, financial services and exports of alcohol (whisky) as well as on oil and offshore services and life sciences.
It has an outward looking policy that supports Scottish business seeking to trade abroad, seeks to attract foreign investment and defends its interest in Brussels, but while the commonalties largely stop there the message does not.
Its strategy is to manage Scotland’s reputation as “a distinctive global identity and an independent minded and responsible nation at home and abroad confident of its place in the world.” This framework provides a rationale for its international activities and has led to the publication of plans that detail how it is seeking to engage with its neighbours in the European Union, with China, India and North America.
As a part of its approach it has established integrated programmes that promote Scotland internationally as a destination for tourism and the site of world class cultural events, and is targeting a fifty per cent rise in revenue from these sources by 2015. It is also promoting ‘Creative Scotland’ by championing its creative industries in areas such as the design and manufacture of computer games. Unusually it is also promoting population growth to achieve the skills it needs and to support its international activities.
In the area of tourism the Caribbean could learn a lot from Scotland. It recognises that the industry is competing against some two hundred other nations and therefore needs to support its industry’s marketing efforts not least because it recognises that the impression each visitor gains has an influence on wider views about investment and trade. It therefore promotes with the industry Scotland’s cultural identity and heritage, its people, its natural environment, its history and iconic buildings and a range of ‘signature’ events such as Edinburgh International Fes-tival – a globally known mix of cultural events – and its golf.
It also recognises that the Scottish diaspora across the world can play a significant part in supporting and promoting its interests and has a ‘Global Scots’ programme and is planning ‘a year of homecoming’ in 2009 in part in order to harness this latent force for development.
It has identified nations that it sees as its comparators to aspire to. These are the Scandinavian nations of Norway, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark as well as Ireland. And unusually, despite its status as a devolved part of the United Kingdom it has created development programmes and has a particularly strong relationship with Malawi.
These policies are of course being pursued by the Scottish National Party as a way of creating a close to sovereign identity for Scotland in the world. However, they do have a resonance with Caribbean thinking and suggest an interesting model for nations in a region that at times seems unclear about where they are seeking to position themselves and their economic interests.
But above all it is Scotland’s social ethos and style of government that would seem to offer much to the Caribbean if it is to find new ways of thinking about governance. Visiting the Parliament in Edinburgh is a strikingly different experience to visiting Westminster. The Scottish Parliament is unusually accessible and transparent to the Scottish people; it is socially driven and has a membership that is almost one third female. Its members do not have the remoteness or for the most part the confrontational political style that Westminster has. Its chamber is u-shaped and the process is more given to consensus. The language of Parliament is not archaic and it is strikingly family friendly, with large numbers of school children visiting and sitting in the public galleries of the chamber.
For the anglophone Caribbean locked into the Westminster model with all of its formality, confrontational style, arcane practice and its implied remoteness from the people, Scotland’s parliamentary system and style offers a model worth studying, not least to see whether there might be ways in which the adoption of best practice could rejuvenate Caribbean parliamentary democracy.
Clearly Scotland is not the Caribbean, but if the high commissioners’ visit to Scotland indicated anything, it was that there are important devolved and modern consensual and socially oriented models of governance in the United Kingdom that any nation which has inherited the British model might usefully learn more from.
Previous columns can be found at www.caribbean-council.org
