By Alasdair Galloway

I sent this letter to the Herald over the weekend. It was published today.

THE recent article by Tom Gordon was headlined “Humza Yousaf: voters don’t see independence as relevant to daily life” (The Herald, October 14). Certainly independence comes well down the list of the perceived importance of current issues in many polls, so it seems difficult to disagree. If you are unemployed or can’t get quick access to NHS treatment, a comparison with independence is unlikely to loom large. However, this misses out that independence and unemployment (for instance) are not identical types of issue.

In the early 1970s at Glasgow University, I took Professor Sir Laurence Hunter’s course on labour economics and industrial relations which, among much else, introduced me to the distinction between substantive and procedural issues.

An example of the former would be the annual percentage wage rise, the outcome of a negotiation between an employer and employees (often trade unions). The latter concerns the process put in place to negotiate and make that decision.

Thus, substantive issues would include the conditions employees would have at work, but procedural issues concern the process through which those conditions are agreed. How the NHS is run, the level of employment, price level and so on are decisions of government, and thus substantive, but independence is procedural – the process by which government takes (or not) decisions that attempt to influence the level of employment, for instance.

So, independence of and by itself does nothing directly – its significance is its influence on the quality and effectiveness of the substantive decisions that shape, for example, the safety net that is welfare, or the level of redistribution from taxation. But procedurally, the issue we face is whether decision-making continues to be shared between governments, increasingly of different minds, at Holyrood and Westminster? Or would it better if full power over decision-making were restored to Scotland as an independent nation, with no direct authority for any other nation?

However, it needs to be understood that how decisions are taken is a procedural matter, and thus different from the substantive issues taken within this process, of how best to run or support the NHS, education, or housing. Independence itself will not create a better, fairer Scotland, but it can be a positive environment for it to happen.

Alasdair Galloway, Dumbarton

It was published today with the headline “Independence alone will not create a better Scotland”, which I think is a distortion of my argument. At the risk of being repetitive, my point was that independence and, for instance, healthcare were so different as not to be comparable. Independence is a procedural issue – HOW decisions are taken (eg with or without Westminster’s influence) – but healthcare is substantive being a consequence to some extent of the procedure that has been followed.

Thus to suggest that “Independence alone will not create a better Scotland” could be misleading. What I did suggest was that a decision about independence was procedural and that for decisions to be taken reflecting only Scotland’s interests that process should be sovereign – ie we should be independent. How effective the decisions taken during that process are, is a different question.

However, to expect a somewhat abstruse issue like independence to be deemed more important than “do I have a job?”, or “what can I do about the cost of living” is not a like-for-like comparison. The issue is not how do they compare – they don’t because they’re different,

But think of this, by being able to produce data like this, even if it isn’t meaningful, have the Herald already achieved their aim?

I’ve sent this asking for a clarification. 

Thank you for publishing my letter this morning. However, I am writing to say that I consider the headline (“Independence alone will not create a better Scotland) could be quite misleading.

My letter asserted the categorical difference between procedural (how decisions are taken – through devolution or independence for instance) and substantive issues (access to the NHS, level of taxation etc).  A comparison of the procedural with the substantive is therefore not a like-for-like comparison. Substantive issues are likely to be more noticeable as they are the stuff of everyday life.

Thus, a comparison of the significance of each to voters tells us little. The substantive (e.g. good healthcare) is the aim but the procedural is the form of the decision-making process, so is it possible to produce better substantive decisions (on healthcare) if we used a different procedure (eg independence)?