ANYWHERE EXCEPT SCOTLAND
Another foreign jolly for a First Minister with no international remit. Seems she’d rather be...
THEY perched on a pine bench at one end of the elongated picnic table the Governor of California keeps in his office for big meetings. There was no Stars and Stripes backdrop, no grandiose fireplace, not even a Press gaggle to record the treaty signing. Instead, lurking in the background of the publicity shots handed out by the Scottish Government was a solitary pot plant and a soulless window pane.
If the plan was to tickle the folks back home with the spectacle of our leader strutting the world stage and signing important documents with heads of state, this lacked something in the wow department.
The only state Jerry Brown is head of is the state of California. The treaty they signed in a corner of his office was more correctly a memorandum of understanding on climate change – and, even then, no one was quite sure how a devolved Scottish Government and an American state could commit together to anything.
Still, Miss Sturgeon wasted no time in bringing news of Monday’s ‘joint agreement’ in Sacramento to her Twitter followers. Governor Brown’s account, followed by 1.1million, made no mention of it.
All week the First Minister has striven to be the visiting stateswoman – ostensibly intent on strengthening economic ties with the US but primarily focused on presenting herself as the leader of a want-away nation which does not answer to Prime Minister Theresa May.
But stateswoman, she has found, is a difficult look to carry off if you are not meeting anyone from federal government. Strutting the world stage looks more like tourism if you see no world leaders.
And, with mates like MPs Joanna Cherry and Tasmina Ahmed Sheikh showing up for the New York leg of the jolly, it looks more like a tourist party. The expenses forms will be fascinating.
Miss Sturgeon, of course, has no greater desire to meet President Donald Trump’s people than they have interest in meeting her. It was she who stripped Mr Trump of his ‘Global Scot’ ambassador status in 2015 on the grounds he was a ‘bigot’ – never thinking he would one day occupy the White House.
The First Minister’s stateside adventure culminated, almost inevitably, with a backstage selfie with Trump’s defeated rival Hillary Clinton. ‘I’ve got to be careful I don’t act like a fangirl,’ admitted Miss Sturgeon before they met.
The contrast between this encounter in a dressing room somewhere in the bowels of the Lincoln Center and Theresa May’s welcome at the White House, where she was the first foreign premier to meet the new president, could hardly be more stark.
All of which made this week’s hotchpotch of US engagements a singularly unedifying spectacle in the estimation of many critics – a cobbled together, independence oriented PR stunt which bore no scrutiny and failed to represent the interests of most Scots.
A huge waste of taxpayers’ money too, they said – although, as we shall see, there is little prospect of knowing how much was wasted.
Was it also a crude deception? ‘American firms invest £6.3million in Scotland’ trumpeted a Scottish Government press release on day one of the visit. By day three it was clear only that £1.5million of taxpayers’ money was being handed to US companies by Scottish Enterprise and no one was saying what it was being spent on.
Certainly the suggestion Miss Sturgeon had somehow ‘netted’ the deal on touchdown in California was the stuff of fantasy. Interestingly, the First Minister’s last visit to the US in 2015 began in identical fashion. ‘First announcement on my trip to the US,’ she had tweeted then. ‘Jobs created at Jabil in Livingston.’
The expansion of the company’s West Lothian branch was supported by another Scottish Enterprise grant – and the deal brokered well before Miss Sturgeon travelled to its New York HQ.
There was, however, a crucial difference between this latest American jaunt and her 2015 visit. Back then, somewhat embarrassingly, it was the Foreign Office which opened the diplomatic doors for her, setting up meetings with highranking US Government officials.
It was only thanks to the ‘personal intervention’ of Sir Peter Westmacott, Britain’s ambassador to the US, that Miss Sturgeon was given face time in Washington DC with Tony Blinken, then US Deputy Secretary of State.
INDEED, emails released under the Freedom of Information Act find Miss Sturgeon’s staff thanking Sir Peter and his team profusely for helping to make that visit such a success. ‘We simply could not have delivered such a successful programme without you,’ wrote a Scottish Government official in tones somewhat at odds with the nationalist rhetoric heard on the visit.
The documents also show Foreign Office officials had sent Miss Sturgeon’s delegation a list of recommended hotels in Manhattan and offered to chase up a request to meet Carmen Farina, the New York City Schools Chancellor, when the Scottish Government got no response.
This week’s visit brought a different kind of embarrassment – that of witnessing the extent of the Scottish Government’s influence when organising its own itinerary.
If Governor Brown seemed less excited about tweeting his meeting with Miss Sturgeon than vice versa it may be worth remembering his state is home to almost eight times as many people as Scotland. It was, to be sure, much bigger news here than there.
Besides, the picture is more complex than the artless publicity shot suggests. Governor Brown may be a critic of President Donald Trump; he may even be up for signing a meaningless piece of paper with an overseas politician on climate change, but he and Miss Sturgeon are hardly cut from the same cloth. A one-time radio host and boyfriend of singer Linda Ronstadt, he steadfastly refuses to take a stand against fracking in his home state.
For now, Miss Sturgeon refuses to allow it in Scotland and knows that, if she does, she will enrage the Greens on whom so many of her plans rely.
The picture is more complex, too, than that presented to students at California’s Stanford University, where the First Minister found time to talk about rather more than strengthening economic ties.
Scotland, she declared, would one day split from the UK and win the ‘freedom to be an equal partner’ with other nations. Of that, she was sure. She even flew a kite for a legal challenge to Mrs May’s refusal to allow an independence poll until the Brexit process is complete – before taking it down again amid snorts of derision.
Exactly what kind of ‘trade and business’ visit was this, wondered opposition parties. ‘It is a great shame that she has chosen to use her taxpayer-funded trip to America to promote independence, and an unwanted referendum,’ said Scottish Tory Chief Whip John Lamont. ‘Not content with pushing her divisive campaign for a second referendum on independence at home, it now appears it has gone global too.’
Not everyone in the US was falling for the charm offensive. At the United Nations headquarters in New York, where the First Minister was supposed to be promoting women in peacekeeping roles in conflict zones around the world, international security official Mike Croll hit her with this pomposity-pricking inquiry: ‘You come from a
prosperous democracy that enjoys the rule of law, that enjoys human rights, and I’m just wondering how being a good global citizen is compatible with your desire to break up a 300-year-old union?’
He added: ‘This is the United Nations, and your mission appears to be the breaking of nations.’
To her credit Miss Sturgeon responded well, but the intervention raised a key question. Does America really have any sympathy with the career-defining mission of the First Minister? Barack Obama did not. He came out against independence in 2014 at a press conference with David Cameron. Relations between Scotland and the former president’s administration were already strained by the SNP Government’s decision to free the Lockerbie bomber in 2009.
And what of Hillary Clinton, described by Miss Sturgeon this week as ‘utterly amazing’ and a ‘trailblazer for women’? In 2014 she told the BBC a Yes vote would be a ‘loss for both sides’. ‘I would hate to have you lose Scotland,’ she told Jeremy Paxman.
Hardly a ringing endorsement. And yet, if there was one selfie for Miss Sturgeon to bag during her time in the US it was this one. The defeated presidential candidate, said Miss Sturgeon, ‘has made it easier for women like me in politics and for that I and women across the world owe Hillary Clinton a debt of gratitude’. And Theresa May? ‘We both like shoes,’ replied Miss Sturgeon dryly.
What, then, is this Easter recess vanity exercise costing the taxpayer? We will have to wait until the Scottish Government publishes the figures – but previous transparency exercises have proved less than enlightening.
In June 2015 the First Minister and two officials spent four nights in the US, touring the New York TV studios, visiting schools and meeting a roll call of Washington DC’s great and good. And yet, according to the Scottish Government’s account, all this cost the taxpayer was £1,164. If the figure sounds low, it is because it does not include the officials’ travel, overnight and subsistence costs – only those of the First Minister.
And if that sounds like Miss Sturgeon’s ‘transparent’ government is not being as open as it should, then the Scottish Ministerial Code would appear to agree.
It states that, for official overseas visits, details must be provided of ‘the names and designations of those who accompanied the Minister and the final costs of the visit including all flights and travel and subsistence costs’.
Last October Miss Sturgeon and three officials travelled to Iceland, a highly expensive destination, for the Arctic Circle Assembly, causing some to scratch their heads over Scotland’s attendance. ‘Scotland may not geographically be part of the Arctic Circle,’ admitted the politician from temperate Ayrshire, ‘but we are committed to acting on climate change.’
AND the cost of affirming her commitment to an Arctic audience? A mere £333.45 is the figure given in the transparency data. Indeed, the outlay for every foreign trip taken by every minister is recorded in the same way in the official government figures – with no mention of the costs incurred to the taxpayer by the minister’s officials. As a result no meaningful impression of the scale of spending on international travel is given.
For the First Minister alone, that includes trips to Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Srebrenica, Dublin and a four-day trade mission to China in December 2015. She was accompanied by one or more officials on each visit. Why, then, are their costs never recorded?
The Scottish Government would not say. ‘We proactively publish information relating to Ministerial engagements, travel and gifts quarterly on the Scottish Government website,’ said a spokesman.
Any further information would have to be sought through a Freedom of Information request.
Mr Lamont said it was clear ministers were failing to abide by the terms of the code.
‘It’s fanciful that Nicola Sturgeon could travel to one of the world’s most expensive countries in Iceland, yet only incur a pittance of public expense,’ he said.
‘The Scottish Government is meant to be one of the most transparent around, but no one will believe that until these costs are published honestly and in full.’
It was, in many ways, the Poundland state visit. But those were our pounds. How many of them were spent this week we will probably never know.
The question many are finding it easier to answer is in whose interests they were spent.