UK Covid Inquiry: Scotland deserves better than SNP's scheming, secretive cabal – Brian Wilson

Evidence presented to UK Covid Inquiry shows there is a pressing need to re-establish civil service independence and for government to be open and transparent

At First Minister’s Questions, Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross referred to “senior SNP government figures discussing the travel ban to Spain in July 2020”. If Spain was not exempted, one email warned darkly, “there is a real possibility they will never approve EU membership for an independent Scotland as a result”.

If the context was not so serious – in July 2020, Scotland was chalking up 650 Covid deaths a week – it would be bizarre comedy. One has the image of an elderly Madrid bureaucrat, in 20-something or other, dusting down the ledger of past affronts before solemnly pronouncing: “No pásaran.”

However, Humza Yousaf had the answer, even if he can never get anything quite right. “Douglas Ross said that the email came from a senior SNP official,” he misquoted triumphantly, “but it came from a Scottish Government civil servant.”

Civil service impartiality seems to have been eroded since Donald Dewar, pictured left on the staircase of Bute House, became Scotland's first First Minister (Picture: Jane Barlow/PA)

It had seemingly not occurred to Mr Yousaf that this made matters worse rather than better. One might understand an obsessive SNP politician or adviser introducing a deeply hypothetical independence debating point into a discussion about controlling pandemic transmission. For a civil servant to do so was incomprehensible, unprofessional – and obviously routine. Did anyone bat an eyelid?

Sixteen years of SNP hegemony

The pretty obvious reality is that implications for the independence objective run through everything a nationalist government does and no exception was made for a pandemic. It would have been naïve – or simply trusting – ever to think otherwise, like asking a priest to suspend his religious belief.

With that confirmed, it is time to address the wider questions it gives rise to and which the inquiry evidence, however fragmentary, reinforced. How is Scotland actually run after more than 16 years of nationalist hegemony? To what extent does the demand for loyalty to “the cause” disfigure decision-making and the integrity of government? Can devolution ever work in the hands of people whose permanent aim is to discredit it?

The UK Covid Inquiry has a long way to run and the Scottish one hasn’t got into first gear. It will be a long time before there are formal conclusions or recommendations by which time most politicians involved will have withdrawn gracefully or otherwise. That does not mean there are no immediate lessons to act upon or individuals who should be called to account.

For starters, there are fundamental issues to be addressed about the Scottish civil service. If we didn’t know before, we know now that safeguards which are necessary in any government to maintain a safe distance between politicians and those who serve them have been eroded in Edinburgh to the point of non-existence.

‘Plausible deniability’

The civil service exists to offer impartial, informed advice, whether or not it is what their masters want to hear. Who can believe this culture has been protected, far less encouraged, within the Scottish Government where political complicity appears to have been a prerequisite for career advancement?

They were all in it together – ministers, advisers, civil servants – when it came to wiping the WhatsApp records and circumventing Freedom of Information requests. “Plausible deniability are my middle names,” quipped Ken Thomson, then director-general for strategy and external affairs within the Scottish Government, a very senior position.

Mr Thomson had been a civil servant since 1990. He was Donald Dewar’s principal private secretary at the time of devolution. Donald would have recoiled at crossing any lines which compromised civil service independence or inveigled officials into partisan politics. So when did the culture change and why was it allowed to happen without intervention from the top?

Will any action be taken now in the light of what emerged at the inquiry? Will national clinical director Jason Leitch stay in his post? Or are exchanges with Mr Yousaf in which confidences about private conversations were breached and insults about opposition politicians merrily shared to be ignored while we wait for the next inquiry? All par for the Scottish Government course?

A threshold crossed

Opposition parties, from their different perspectives, have to codify all this into a narrative which persuades the electorate of the pressing need for change. Scotland is not well served by there always being at least one eye on an agenda which drives difference and division while no civil servant has the courage to say: “You can’t do that."

There comes a point when the offer to voters needs to be more than just a different government but a different type of government. That threshold has apparently been crossed in the United Kingdom as a whole, just as it was in the 1990s. It is not only individual policies that the Tories are being punished for but the whole ethos of how government has been conducted.

Labour in particular, as the party of devolution, has to make a similar case in Scotland in the run-up to a Holyrood election. The week-to-week temptation is to call out failings on health, education, ferries or whatever has caught the headlines. Heaven knows, there is plenty of material to work with.

Open and transparent government

But they also have to present a wider vision of how Scotland can be better than this and why the governance whole is greater than the sum of policy parts. They need to remind people that the idea of devolution was to have two governments cooperating with each other and respecting difference where it arises, rather than being locked in permanent, destructive conflict.

There should be very clear statements of principle about re-establishing civil service independence as a prerequisite for honest government. Surely there are many within the Scottish civil service who would welcome this? There should be a commitment to open and transparent government in total contrast to the secretive cabal which has developed.

In other words, a programme for better government should be underpinned by a commitment to radically higher standards of how government is run. The past week has confirmed how urgently Scotland needs both.