Brian Wilson: Holyrood must be held to account

A session on ferries, for example, would be a guaranteed sell-out. I’ll even volunteer to chair it. An essential panellist would be Nicola Sturgeon , a professed festival-goer, who could be held accountable for the chicanery and photo-opportunities which have culminated in the two Port Glasgow hulks running five years late and resultant economic misery for the communities which have been failed.

Alongside her could be Erik Østergaard, who presided over the CMAL procurement quango throughout the Ferguson debacle and now chairs Caledonian MacBrayne. When I met Mr Østergaard a couple of weeks ago, he was in self-exculpatory mode, anxious to pin responsibility precisely where it belongs. The prospect of some Danish bean-spilling on a public stage would have them queuing up the Royal Mile.

The civil servant with responsibility for both CMAL and CalMac, Frances Pacitti, is another whose insights would be of huge public interest. She could explain, for example, why her department, Transport Scotland, has just clawed back £3.5 million from CalMac while its services collapse. Obviously, a civil servant cannot be held accountable for policy but a sophisticated festival audience would surely be interested in process.

Ms Pacitti also presided over the appointment process which translated Mr Østergaard from one role to the next. So maybe she could hang around for the next session in our Festival of Accountability which will be about Scotland’s public appointments system that miraculously shuffles a small repertory company of trusties from one quango to the next, just as long as they keep their mouths shut and cause no trouble.

So you get the idea and also a clue to why it won’t happen. But then again…. why not? Should devolution not be about bringing government closer to the people? Should that not involve direct public access to decision-makers – who might listen and learn – rather than everything being filtered through processes which protect politicians, reinforce the remoteness of government and are designed to obfuscate and dilute the power of inconvenient messages?

Our Festival of Accountability need not be contained to Edinburgh in August. It could offer a year-round change of culture that takes Scottish politics out of Holyrood’s stilted superficialities and into the nitty-gritty of Scotland’s communities and the disparate issues that they face. I can sense ministers and civil servants trembling at the very thought. Meeting people with first-hand experience face to face? Certainly not.

The unfortunate truth is that Holyrood politics is at least as remote from people’s lives as Westminster’s ever was. There is just more of it. More ministers, more civil servants, more press officers, more pots of largesse to be distributed from the centre with Saltires all over them.

Far from powers being devolved downwards from Holyrood, the relentless trend is in the other direction towards centralisation and tight Edinburgh control of both policy and purse-strings. The proposed National Care Service is the latest example of this mentality while the relentless cuts to council funding over the past 15 years have seen Scotland’s local democracy wither rather than flourish. Ditto the decline of our regional development agencies.

Some of this territory is addressed in the paper launched last week by Anas Sarwar which calls for a sweeping review of how Holyrood operates. “For too many years,” he wrote, “a dangerous form of Scottish exceptionalism has dominated our constitutional debate. It pretends that only democratic institutions elsewhere in the UK are broken and in need of change, and that there is no change necessary here in Scotland. Nothing could be further from the truth”.

While Holyrood was meant to achieve higher standards of transparency and accountability, no such thing has happened. Sarwar argues that “while more powers have accrued in the hands of Scottish Ministers, the power of our Parliament and the tools available to the public to scrutinise them have fallen behind….sweeping reform of the parliament’s processes, functions and structure is needed”.

The paper points out that between 2013 and 2021, there was a 52.3 per cent increase in the number of full-time equivalent, directly-employed staff working for the Scottish Government. Even taking account of increased powers, this is an extraordinary reinforcement of the centre which has not been matched either by the Parliament’s resources to hold it to account or in any of the agencies which formerly created checks and balances around Scotland. Quite the reverse.

While powers and money have accrued to Edinburgh, this has accompanied by a cynical lack of transparency about how they are used. When Covid relief funding came to Scotland, I wrote that this time there should be a clear balance sheet of how much came in and, to the last penny, how it was allocated. Nothing could be further from the reality and yet again, while they demand more, the question remains unanswered: “Where did the money go”?

Words like “transparency” and “accountability” rarely feature in election campaigns and, in the meantime, opposition parties cannot do much to deliver them. However, Labour and other parties are right to raise these matters constantly in the hope of feeding into an awareness that something systemic has gone far wrong in the way devolution is delivered and is contributing to the dilution of Scottish democracy rather than its enhancement.

My Festival of Accountability certainly isn’t going to happen under current management but neither should it be dismissed as unattainable. When power eventually changes hands, the message should be remembered. The politicians worthy of respect are those who are prepared to face the public and answer for their shortcomings as well as claiming their successes.