The civic Scotland gravy train has finally made it to Bute House. If you listen very carefully, you can hear it rumble over the tracks as it moves on to the next stop on its Tamany Hall tour. “We’re taking the piss; we’re taking the piss; we’re taking the piss. Choo-choo.”
Having looked longingly at the massive pay-offs falling to departing, unelected council officials, it was only a matter of time, I suppose before John Swinney began agitating for a large slice of the action. Even so, the weekend revelation that this unprincipled, supine man wants to award the most underperforming administration in the devolved era a £20k pay increase across the board was still rather breath-taking.
Perhaps an argument could be made for awarding such a large wedge along the lines of “we haven’t had any sort of pay increase for several years”. If so, the First Minister obviously had little faith in it. On being contacted by the journalist who first learned of his largesse, Mr Swinney cancelled his own increase.
Read more
- Kevin McKenna: A glimpse into the darkness at the heart of the Scottish Government
- Kevin McKenna: How the SNP and Labour killed off left-wing politics
In that swollen cohort of policy analysts, lobbyists and advisers who gather around Holyrood to scavenge on its endless financial reserves there are those who think our elected politicians should be paid significantly more than the £72k (plus eye-watering expenses and emoluments). It’s argued that they’re engaged in work of such monumental importance to the nation that their wage packet should reflect this.
The people making this argument are usually lobbyists whose per diem value to their client roster depends on them attaching their tongues to the fundaments of those who award the big public sector contracts.
This only works though, if the public was confident that the Scottish Government and the main opposition parties were striving at all times to recruit the best people available to them.
And look, I get that politics is tribal and that preference will always be given to those who, you know, actually believe in the party’s core principles. And that there probably ought to be room for honest scufflers as a reward for hard work on the doorsteps in all weathers.
It’s just that the SNP doesn’t even do tribal well. The main party of independence has now effectively dropped any pretence of advocating for self-determination. Instead, its main purpose has become entirely self-serving. It’s to keep power and influence within an anointed cadre of the elect and to ensure that when its own supporters finally become aware of the confidence trick that’s been played on them their pensions will have become reassuringly vast.
Even then, you wouldn’t mind so much if men and women of proven ability were being recruited. In the Swinney/Sturgeon era though, an insidious regime promoting "anti-excellence" now proliferates at all levels of the Scottish Government.
The daughter of a family friend recently asked me for advice in applying for a civil service job in the Scottish Government. I checked over her excellent CV and it easily met what was required for the position as advertised.
Her personal statement was concise and elegantly written and required only the odd nip and tuck. “It’s not enough though,” I told her. “You’ll have to get yourself a pair of pronouns if you want to make it through the door.” Like me, she rejects the sinister way that pronouns have been used by impostors to identify and root out social dissidents, especially women. But attaching the they/them, she/her folderol to your bio seemed a small dissimulation we can all live with.
Pronouns are the new freemasonry of Scottish public life, often used by mediocre bottom-feeders to get a leg up in politics, law and the media. I was tempted also to suggest that including her local church voluntary work might not go down well for a job in an administration which is hostile to Christian belief. In her family, though – as in mine – renouncing your Catholicism is still considered a line you simply cannot cross.
We all thought that being good at your job would be enough in modern, progressive Scotland. Being the smartest and most able politician in her party though, wasn’t enough to protect Kate Forbes from a fusillade of bullying and intimidation from people in her own party, including from her own boss, who had the gall even to question her Christianity.
At ministerial level in the Scottish Government the priority given to weakness and spinelessness at the expense of proven ability has been ruinous. As this is Holy Week, I’m inclined not to target individual Cabinet members for criticism. You only require to glance at the long list of manifest failures in every sector stretching over many years though, to know that the SNP prizes ineptitude over ability.
In yesterday’s moonbeams and unicorns stunt at Bute House, Mr Swinney insisted that the rate of child poverty in Scotland was lower than in England. It’s just that his party has been in power for nearly two decades and has yet to make a significant dent in it. The abject failures in addressing the educational attainment gap and curbing the huge numbers of poor Scots who die each year of drug and alcohol addiction tell you that the underlying currents contributing to child poverty will continue.
Annemarie Ward, CEO of FAVOR (Faces and Voices of Recovery) has condemned the Scottish Government’s callousness in its attitudes towards these people. In a recent article, Ms Ward wrote: “What began as a response to a crisis has mutated into a full-time employment scheme for ‘stakeholders’ who speak fluent jargon but couldn’t tell you the difference between detox and decaf. While this lot shuffles paper, real people are dying. Every day.”
Several of those responsible for this are among those whom John Swinney wants to reward with an extra 20 big ones. The same attitudes prevail in education, health, prisons and policing. All of them have replaced the need to care for vulnerable people with a sinister obsession allowing predatory men to self-identify into women’s spaces. Those ministers Mr Swinney wants to enrich have fostered this ruinous lie. Further, they have threatened to criminalise families who refuse to subscribe to it.
If you can talk about “optimising deliverables with an organic growth paradigm at the organic/sustainability interface to create inclusive synergies” with a straight face then you’ll get a job in Mr Swinney’s cabinet at more than 150k a year. Mr Swinney just needs to ensure no-one representing Grangemouth or the East End of Glasgow gets promoted to that sort of money.
Kevin McKenna is a Herald writer and columnist. This year is his 40th in newspapers. Among his paltry list of professional achievements is that he’s never been approached by any political party or lobbying firm to be on their payroll.
Share