Excuses only go so far – especially when you’ve been given other options.
The way Scottish political life is framed right now, with constitutional as much as ideological considerations shading every position, it can be quite hard to chart a course through what are dangerous waters.
Like other big debates of our age, positions have become polarised and all nuance bleached and battered out of what passes for discourse.
So, it becomes impossible to criticise the Scottish Government. Because if you do, you’re siding with Westminster. Worse, you’re siding with Westminster Tories. Not much worse than that.
But if you don’t criticise the Scottish Government over areas where it explicitly needs holding to account, you can (often correctly) be accused of at best quietism, or at worst making excuses for an administration which has been drifting rightwards for years now.
As is often the case and as is often lost, the truth often lies somewhere between these positions. And this is why people working in areas of public policy cannot let the Scottish Government get an easy ride. On anything. It is the government, for heaven’s sake. Governments need opposition, and the best opposition comes from informed analysis and criticism.
This is where excuses come in. Again, there are strands of truth running through the Scottish Government’s claims that it is hampered in doing anything about the country’s disgracefully high drug deaths figures (pages six to ten) as drugs policy is reserved to Westminster.
Just as there is truth in claims that Holyrood is constrained in what it can do to fight the cost of living crisis because… well, Westminster.
But you cannot govern based on excuses. You have to find ways and means of providing and doing everything you can – while at the same time making the point that Scotland’s national question has to be resolved.
Previous Holyrood administrations found some ways of doing this – mitigating for the Bedroom Tax for example. Why can’t this one? If the biggest brains in the country really are found at Charlotte Street Partners, then Nicola Sturgeon is in luck.
But I suspect they’re not. Rather, an over-reliance on corporate advisors (see the Growth Commission) has set in chain a sort of de-radicalising effect which sits well with an administration which has become really rather comfortable with power.
But there are other ways, other solutions. Bold, redistributive ones such as shaking up the tax system among them. And remember the Scottish energy company plans? Just the thing for a global fuel crisis, you’d have thought.
And there are the multitude of solutions and suggestions coming every day from the lived experience of Scotland’s voluntary sector and civil society – a real repository of practical and well as transformative practice. On drugs, for example, the voluntary sector is leading the way. Fund us and learn from us. Lives will actually be saved.
However, the Scottish Government has shown little inclination to listen to the sector over the past few years – and even its warm words/little substance approach on multi-year funding is beginning to sound grudged.
A real test will be in the how much the sector is listened to during the creation of the National Care Service (pages 16 to 18).
We need to shout loud here during the ‘co-design’ process.
No excuses from us if we don’t, and no excuses from Holyrood if it doesn’t listen.
Graham Martin is editor of TFN.
