Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
Steve Career politicians get real
I CONGRATULATE Dundee City Council leader John Alexander for his U-turn on an inquiry into the Olympia scandal.
But this episode is a stark example of the attitude of politicians to criticism, and also a warning why no one should go straight from university into a party political job.
MPs, MSPs and councillors shouldn’t even be on the ballot paper unless they’ve worked 20 years in the real world.
A lot is learned from a demanding workplace culture – being personally responsible for your actions, and having to face mistakes, as well as earning promotion for being good at the job.
Normal people know this. Career politicians do not.
In a real workplace, the response to a mistake is to find it and fix it – when a machine part doesn’t work, a junction box is incorrectly wired, a roof leaks.
This teaches you that realworld situations have real-world repercussions and need realworld remedies.
In politics, by contrast, the difference is the reaction to adversity.
When storms come the first political response is to “mitigate”. That’s their word. It means cover up, deny or blame someone else.
Politics is more complicated than an incorrectly-priced tin of beans, yes. But many problems in the world of industry are highly complex too.
Solutions are found with creativity, intelligence and, most importantly, by tackling the problem head on.
It is different for career politicians moving from university into politics because they’ve never seen genuine accountability in a real workplace.
They learn from their first day – and this comes from the very top of the organisation – that no matter what happens the most important thing is to appear confident, sound sure
about your direction of travel and keep telling everyone what a wonderful job you’re doing.
Career politicians rarely experience the full ramifications – with nowhere to hide – of accounting for their actions.
An election every four or five years is a broad brush matter.
It’s really not the same as a hard-nosed boss pointedly asking: “Why is this particular
figure on this particular spreadsheet wrong?” Then looking you straight in the eye, waiting for an answer.
The politician’s mindset is that any critical comment, on any matter, is a politicallymotivated attack by supporters of other parties. They deflect, or counter-attack another party’s stance.
All parties do this. How many times, reader, have you seen a politician interviewed and thought: “Jeez, just answer the question, eh?”
When shining an accountability light on the Olympia, I suspect there were failures at the design, procurement and construction stages but for years the city’s SNP group claimed no, nothing wrong here when it was blindingly obvious there was.
Here’s the crux, councillors. You approached this like politicians. You didn’t see Olympia as a problem for Dundee’s swimmers, you saw it as a problem for your party’s reputation.
You valued “mitigating” the blame for yourselves and your cronies above doing what was best for Dundee – and you dodged and deflected instead of facing it and fixing it.
When it comes to the inquiry, face it like a worker has to.