That’s bad news

DEMoCrACY depends on a delicate balance between the Government and the governed. This week it emerged that in Scotland that balance has been shifted – and shifted radically – in favour of our politicians.

The number of publiclyfunded press officers, whose job is to spread the good news about how great the Scottish Government is, has increased by more than 40 per cent in the past three years, at a time when the rest of the country has been tightening its belt because of the devastating impact of coronavirus on the economy.

The recruitment drive means that Bute House is now in charge of the biggest media organisation in the country, outstripping any single newspaper – and even the BBC.

And it’s not just the number of press officers that taxpayers’ generosity has funded: it’s also the amounts paid.

official figures show that Scottish Government press officers’ salaries ranged from a modest £26,155-a-year to a more generous – some might say enviable – £76,574a-year, with more than ten full-time equivalent post-holders taking home more than £50,000-a-year.

For the first time ever, the gamekeepers now outnumber the poachers.

As media organisations – broadcasters and newspapers – shed jobs and other personnel in response to the harsh challenges posed by the internet, the clout of the official gatekeepers, those who decide what information the public get and in what form, is growing.

Just think about that. The relationship between the media and any government has always been fraught – and it should be, because very often politicians don’t want to give the public the information we want.

That’s why we rely on journalists to ask the right questions – the more difficult, the better.

But now the biggest media operation in Scotland is not the BBC or any other news organisation; it’s the Scottish Government.

And the job of these numerin ous apparatchiks is not to increase the flow of useful information from ministers to the public.

It is not to improve the dreadful response rate to submitted Freedom of Information inquiries – although that would be a welcome investment few journalists would complain about.

No, the job of all of these new press officers is not to tell us, the people who pay their wages, what’s going on. It is to actively promote whatever ministers are doing and whatever their message is.

You have to hand it to the SNP: they know how to use the levers of the state to help their political aims.

To be fair, the vast resources ploughed into promoting the First Minister… sorry, I mean issuing essential advice to the Scottish public, has had a mixed record of success.

Agenda

Many won’t even be able to recall the FACTS slogan so beloved of Nicola Sturgeon that she mentioned it at almost all of her live addresses to the nation.

In case you were unaware, FACTS stands for Face coverings, Avoid crowds, Clean hands, Two metres (social distancing) and Self-isolate.

This mnemonic was devised to help us understand the extent to which the Scottish Government was controlling every aspect of our lives.

But now it’s been dropped, perhaps because a review by civil servants concluded that most Scots didn’t know what the letters stood for.

What is fascinating is the civil service’s own justification for its recent empire-building in the media world.

‘We are operating a wider range of responsibilities than ever before, dealing with key priorities such as the response to the pandemic, EU exit work and change projects including the development of the Social Security Agency, while continuing to protect public services and deliver value for money. It is important that we communicate with the people of Scotland about this work.’

Fair enough. But hang on a minute… back up a bit.

‘We are operating a wider range of responsibilities than ever before’…?

I thought it was an article of nationalist faith that the British Government was forever ‘undermining’ the devolution settlement? Isn’t every UK-based initiative that includes Scotland condemned as a ‘power grab’?

Weren’t predictions of new powers for the Scottish parliament post-Brexit derided by nationalists, both grassroots and elected, as nonsense?

So where are all these new responsibilities coming from?

Could it be that Holyrood has indeed got more responsibilities than at any time in the history of devolution?

And that instead of admitting as much, SNP ministers would rather say nothing publicly and instead spend more of our cash on sending out their preferred propaganda lines to the media?

We should bear in mind that these new, well-paid press officers don’t actually work for the SNP. However, in a way that’s worse.

They may not be employed by Europe’s most successful nationalist party and they may not be paid by them – but every press release, every media inquiry answered, every piece of advice they offer to ministers has the same result: the advancement of the SNP’s political agenda.

There has already been much concern expressed about the alleged politicisation of the Scottish civil service – which is still, officially at least, part of the UK civil service – since the SNP took over the reins of power 14 years ago.

At the start of this year, during the dramatic Scottish parliamentary inquiries into the First Minister’s actions regarding her predecessor, Alex Salmond’s, behaviour while in office, we saw how the most senior civil servant Scotland became, willingly or unwillingly, part of the SNP’s defence.

Leslie Evans, it was disclosed, had failed to keep any notes during a meeting in 2017 with Nicola Sturgeon to discuss allegations of sexual misconduct against Salmond.

This proved massively beneficial to the First Minister’s defence against claims that she misled parliament over when she first heard about the allegations.

Now the same ‘neutral’ civil service is strengthening its public communications efforts – and it is doing so at an important time for the SNP and the Scottish Government.

There is much impatience and unhappiness among party activists about the party leadership’s apparent inaction on independence – which is, after all, the only policy SNP activists care about.

Powerful

If Boris Johnson’s government does what Miss Sturgeon wants it to do and transfers the power to hold another independence referendum to Edinburgh, then – as happened in 2014 – the civil service will be authorised to promote independence as the official policy of the Scottish Government.

And SNP ministers will have at their disposal the largest, most powerful media set-up in the history of Scottish government, either preor post-devolution.

Many of these press officers would be recruited to write an update on the most expensive publicly-funded political leaflet of all time – the 2013 ‘White Paper’ on independence, ‘Scotland’s Future’.

of course, if Johnson doesn’t do what the First Minister demands of him, then she’s back to square one, with an army of government press officers restricted to issuing press releases about health service waiting lists, the number of potholes on the roads and school exam (or assessment) results.

Either way, there’s no doubt who holds all the cards when it comes to press management in Scotland.

And when politicians, not journalists, are in the driving seat when it comes to the reporting of what our leaders are up to, that is bad news for everyone.