Politicians’ insatiable appetite for our money

SAGE advice is given to every list MSP on day one at Holyrood: ‘Do not stare out of the window in the morning – you’ll have nothing to do in the afternoon.’ There’s a kernel of truth there. What do most of our politicians, of every hue and at every level, actually do?

Yes, there are honourable exceptions, selfless Stakhanovites devoted to the betterment of constituents.

But for every star, there are ten passengers who think there is no point having a position if you can’t abuse it.

We Scots do not lack representation, with community councillors, regional councillors, MSPs, list MSPs, MEPs, MPs and the Lords.

Yet voters struggle to name their MP – and who can identify their list MSP?

Were the denizens of the Lothians left with a democratic deficit when Kezia Dugdale lit out to eat unmentionables on I’m a Celebrity…? Hardly.

I mentioned to four friends – family men with full-time jobs outwith the media/political bubble – the name ‘Patrick Harvie’. Four blank looks.

Now the Green Party leader is about to force income tax rises on us all, yet no one voted for him directly (he is a topup list MSP) and his visibility seems, according to my modest poll, to be nil.

The issue is Shona Syndrome, named for ineffectual Health Secretary Shona Robison who, like Mr Harvie, thinks the public simply want ever-more cash spent. Not so. We don’t, for instance, want £1.5million for locum anaesthetists at the Galloway Community Hospital, Stranraer. What’s wanted there and across rural Scotland is fulltime cover for less than seven figures per annum. We also don’t want more cash thrown at, say, a duff IT system – we want less spent on one that works.

Politics, politicians and their publicsector handmaidens are a self-licking ice cream. Nasa, looking at its bureaucracy, coined the phrase to describe a selfperpetuating system with no purpose but to sustain itself.

It’s the perfect analogy for a Scotland in which layer upon layer of authority fights only to ensure its own survival.

How is it possible that we have 32 councils, with 32 duplicate directors of this, that and the other; 129 MSPs at Holyrood; 59 MPs; six MEPs and yet the schools are still poor and a £1.35billion bridge shuts within weeks of opening?

OUR population is about the same as that of Yorkshire. How do the Tykes survive without our expansive (and expensive) civic system? The answer is, of course, just fine. More tax rises are round the corner, largely for public-sector wages with little service improvement.

Finance Secretary Derek Mackay wails that you cannot have tax cuts and increase public spending. Well spotted, Derek, but you reveal how far out of your depth you are with your assumption that the public want spending to rise.

Instead, let’s cut our councils to eight, using the geographic template of the old regional police forces. Let’s axe list MSPs at midnight on Hogmanay.

And let’s put extra pressure on the Commons to sort the wheat from the Johnson/Wishart/MacNeil/Cherry.

More, more, more? Give us less waste, less expense – and far fewer politicians.