Why does Scotland have no advanced seaports?Why do all of our exports and imports go through English ports? Listen to Prof Alf Baird on the Internal Colonial Model.
“So Freeports are not new. It’s a Tory reaction to economic collapse, if you like, economic. Just zero growth, the economy is doing. And also the enormous trade imbalance in England, particularly.
“But essentially, they’re just implementing a Tory policy here and adding a spin to it with the green-washing aspect, which is totally irrelevant.
“What Edinburgh should be doing is developing a ports policy to develop port infrastructure in Scotland, which is geared to developing trade. So this is what we don’t have. It still means that most of Scotland’s economy is dependent on seaports in the south of England. Most of Scotland’s trade goes there, and it goes back to also the function of Scotland.
“Much of our trade is supplying England, as it were, or the rest of the UK, and that includes renewable energy, oil and gas, other goods, aggregates, and most of the whisky goes south as well, to get exported from there.
“And I’ve calculated that that’s quite a significant value. It could be, it should be in excess of £100 billion a year, quite soon. And our import logistics activities all come in through England’s supply chains.
“So Scotland is served practically entirely by London business, if you like. London corporate entities, and all its exports are drained out at relatively low value, as our exports are taken out the country at low prices.
“Whether that’s renewable energy, we don’t see any value. Oil and gas, we don’t see any value, really. Whisky, we see, we get quoted some figures, but actually, the resale value, the retail value of whisky, is probably five or six times what we hear it is, what the export data is.
“And then we have a whole range of other things that are supplied to London based industries, like the retailers, the supermarkets and so on. And then everything coming into Scotland, practically retail spend, comes in through, as I said, England’s logistics centres, England’s ports.
“So we are kind of held captive in that economic environment, whereas we would have enormous advantage in Scotland if we could control these assets and actually sell these goods to the wider market as well, at better prices, and also to source goods in from the wider market directly into Scottish ports, from international markets at lower prices.
“Our problem, in Scotland particularly, is we don’t have advanced seaports. And I think this is where free ports around the world are linked to new, modern, sophisticated, competitive national seaports.
“So you’ll see this in African countries and Middle-East countries, in Asian countries and Caribbean islands, and so on. Freeports are generally connected and created to support the development of new port infrastructure. Now, this is what Scotland is NOT getting.
“It’s NOT getting new port infrastructure to serve international markets.
“This is why I would link perhaps a Freeport to something like the Scapa Flow Container Terminal. If that was a trans-shipment port serving 20 countries around Northern Europe, handling big ships as well as feeder ships, and bringing in new trade, that might be attractive.
“But essentially, what the Scottish government, the British government, are trying to do in the UK, is not the same thing. And it didn’t work before, and I don’t think it will work again, and that’s pretty much it.
“But going back to port privatization in the UK, back in the early 1990s. I did quite a lot of research on that, which was also used by the World bank and UN agencies such as UNCTAD and ECLAC. And it’s important to recognize that the UK went further than any other country.
“Usually ports just concession out the cargo handling operations. So you bring in somebody like AP Møller or DP World to invest in the terminal, cranes, the equipment, some infrastructure run the terminal, but you retain a public Port Authority, but the state regulate the port, the state invest in the infrastructure.
“So the private sector coming in, maybe buying or installing the cranes, the superstructure. So there’s a divide between infrastructure and superstructure. And this is the common concession model globally, throughout the EU and globally.
“And what the UK did was different in two respects. It sold not just the cargo handling function, it sold the property rights, the land, and it sold the port authority as well. So it gave the regulator to the new private company.
“So what we have in the UK is these Port Estuaries are run by private groups that are now owned by offshore consortiums. It’s got all the land, it’s got all the regulation, it’s got a whole monopoly. So what the Tories did back in the Eighties and Nineties was in transport generally, is they sold off all the property rights.
“The problem we have in Scotland is these property rights, under the Claim of Right, the Common Good, are held by. Well, in the ‘common good’, they’re held by the people. So there’s a question whether they have the right to do this.
“And also, going back, previous regimes, it took off, took the ports. Say, for example, on the Forth, there’s maybe ten different ports. These were owned by the Burghs at one time.
“They were owned by the communities, and this is the same as the ‘continental model’, even today. The communities own the ports. France is a bit different, because the central state has authority. But on the north continent in general, and Scandinavia, you’ll find that mostly it’s the municipalities, the cities, Hamburg, so on, Rotterdam, that control the port.
“And this is where London policy basically transferred the rights of the port owners, being the burghs, first of all, to trust ports, which are basically a semi-corporate entity, a kind of, it was an English kind of model, and then subsequently to privatization.
“So I think we need to focus much more on the governance of these port infrastructures, which we’ve seen lack of investment in. We don’t have a port policy in Scotland, and now we have a Freeport policy imposed that’s very poorly thought out, and isn’t really sensible. It’s been re-branded ‘Green’ for obviously simplistic and inadequate reasons. So it’s not a workable thing.
“What needs to be done? Well, I think Scotland really needs a maritime policy. Any country with a coastline and ports needs a maritime policy, because it’s basically a trade policy.
“And without good quality, competitive international seaports, you can’t develop your trade. What all the former colonies did was re-orientate the trade away from London. “And that’s not just Ireland. That also included Canada, Australia. They had to focus their trade on Asia, the Middle-East, the Africa, globally. And they had to stop sending everything through London. Because all their goods were going to London cheap, and all their goods were coming back from London, expensive.
“And this is what makes a colonial model, or the internal colonial model, dysfunctional. It leaves an economy uncompetitive, lacking development, and its people can’t move out of the rut they’re in. And this is what explains Scotland’s lack of development, economic growth, for so long.”
Professor Alf Baird speaking with @MarkMmcnaught1 on ‘Freeports: A Clear and Present Danger to Scotland‘. Watch the full broadcast:
peteryoung.dk 