Ultimate Marketing Challenge?
Today Grayling sponsored a special Scotsman Conference on whether new tax powers proposed for Scotland are the right ones for the country. I dutifully attended and came back with more questions than answers.
We had some of the sharpest thinkers from all sides of the debate around the table and the discussions looked at the whole range of proposals on fiscal policy.
What astonished me was how comprehensively a piece of legislation could be unpicked. I recall with alacrity the speech by Prof. Andrew Hughes Hallett, one of the pre-eminent economists on the planet, who elegantly demolished the case for the Scotland Bill with statistics, basic economic theory and examples from other countries his main choice of ammunition. Public Policy analyst Tom Miers also made some fascinating points about whether the proposed new powers are actually necessary at all.
That’s why the Scotland Bill so favours the SNP, the ruling party in Scotland. They want complete independence in Scotland and this Bill, which proposes more fiscal responsibility in Scotland, naturally pushes any debate down the road towards whether a fully independent Scotland is right for the UK as a whole.
I was also struck by how little engagement there had been by Government amongst businesses likely to be affected. The whole crux of the debate seems to rest on stakeholders’ best guess for whether corporation tax levels in Scotland will increase or decrease, simply because it seems nobody really understands the other raft of effects of the Bill. There’s just too much theory at the moment, so businesses are never going to really engage if they don’t know what the practical realities are.
Imagine, then, what a marketing campaign for a fully ratified Scotland Bill might look like. How would you get businesses to engage in such a long term issue whose effects are at best theoretical? It’s not an easy one. In fact, it could represent the ultimate marketing challenge when it comes to public information campaigns.