I honestly can’t remember the last time I read a rebuff couched in such unvarnished, brutal terms. “Task force proposals do not provide a sound basis . . . don’t deliver a business model that would be good either for Diageo or Scotland .. . no workable alternatives . . . embed inefficiencies . . . Diageo now regards the dialogue as closed.”
Ouch! It was painful stuff, but entirely unsurprising. I remember being invited out to the Diageo offices on the outskirts of Edinburgh a few weeks ago for a chat with a couple of the company bigwigs, and coming away after a polite but frosty encounter convinced that they were not for turning.
As one senior politician put it to me privately: “You are dealing here with people who earn ten times what a Government minister earns. They really don’t see why they should take advice from the likes of us on how to run their business.”
Then there was the clever way the company quietly pitted Ayrshire and Glasgow against Fife, where they announced expansion plans. Obvious divide and rule stuff which kept Fife politicians of all parties quiet while their West Coast colleagues teamed up for the big showdown with the drinks conglomerate.
And now, inevitably, we get the political fall-out and recrimination. Until yesterday John Swinney was chairing a cross-party task force. Today, according to Labour, he is the Finance Secretary of a Scottish Government that has “let down the workforce at all of Diageo’s Scottish plants” (although Fife workers might feel differently).
And surely Fife Labour MSP John Park, speaking as economy and skills spokesman, must have had his teeth gritted when he issued his condemnation of the “Scottish Government’s failure to put together a set of proposals that Diageo were willing to accept.”
The truth is that the Scottish Government, or the cross-party task force which John Swinney convened, was never likely to budge Diageo, whose mind was made up from day one, who were dismissive throughout of the blandishments of Government money for which they had never asked, and who, frankly, think they have a better grasp of what it takes to be a ruthless multi-national player than do politicians.
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