The now ‘nasty reality’ of how Scotland is run
The Scottish Government is not eager to facilitate the Holyrood Committee inquiry into its doomed legal action against Alex Salmond. This is a regime that deletes inconvenient e-mails, loses correspondence and suddenly remembers long-denied meetings, just before being required to give evidence under oath.
Apiece with all that, it is hardly surprising they have intimated that relevant documents may be withheld, citing “exceptional circumstances”. The Committee’s willingness to have rings run round it is already on trial.
But what is the “Scottish Government”? On that question, I defer to Robin Mcalpine, writing on the Common Weal web-site. Mr Mcalpine’s political perspective is different from mine but that makes his indictment all the more relevant, not least because he knows his way round the internal machinations of our Nationalist rulers.
Mr Mcalpine has concluded that Scotland now has “a hacked-together Presidential system forcibly imposed on top of a democracy which is not designed for it” in which “everything is calibrated primarily to the interests of a First Minister who behaves like a President” – but without the checks and balances. In policy terms, the resultant outcomes have been “dire” while the civil servants know “they will always be protected if they work in the interests of the First Minister”.
Thus, senior levels of the Scottish Civil Service are interlocked with the politicians in a way that simply is not supposed to happen and is deeply unhealthy. I commend Mr Mcalpine’s essay to anyone who cares about Scotland’s current direction, regardless of constitutional views. I particularly commend it to Holyrood’s Salmond Committee who will be in the front-line of either addressing or ignoring the very nasty realities of how Scotland is now run.