When she agreed to become Nicola Sturgeon's finance secretary, Kate Forbes may not have read the small print about serving as a human shield.
Forbes has been shoved in front of the TV cameras over the past few days to try to explain the two unfinished ferries the Scottish Government has so far paid £250m for, a deal that even Audit Scotland can't get to the bottom of.
Of course, the reason Forbes has been sent out to take the heat is because she wasn't a minister back in 2015, when the contracts in question were signed. In fact, she hadn't even been elected to the Scottish Parliament at that point. So, when journalists ask her who signed off on the agreements, she can't possibly tell them because she wasn't there.
The woman who was there, who was and still is head of the Scottish Government, does not wish to be drawn on such questions. Sturgeon likes the office, the title, the power, and plenty else about being First Minister but she's never been keen on the accountability.
Accountability is sorely needed. Who decided the contracts should go to Ferguson Marine and why? What role did an impending SNP conference and the need for positive headlines play in the decision? Why did the Scottish Government disregard the advice of its own ferry corporation? Why weren't the contracts voided when, after just one month, Ferguson Marine admitted it couldn't meet its obligation to guarantee taxpayers a full refund?
Jim McColl, the pro-independence billionaire who bought Ferguson's in 2014, told a Sunday newspaper the Audit Scotland report showed Ferguson Marine was 'given the contract for political purposes' and that 'everything was about the optics and timing the announcements for political gain'.
The Tories say McColl's comments suggest Sturgeon misled the Scottish Parliament but she’s too clever for that. Here is how the Official Report, Holyrood’s answer to Hansard, records her exchanges with Douglas Ross at last week’s First Minister’s Questions.
The Scottish Tory leader asked: ’Which minister gave the green light for the contract — against expert advice?’ The First Minister replied: ‘To turn briefly to Douglas Ross’s specific question about who was transport minister at the time, I note that that is, of course, a matter of public record. It was Derek Mackay.’
As you can see, Sturgeon didn’t answer Ross’s question directly: she changed it and then answered her version of the question. She didn’t claim Mackay ‘gave the green light for the contract’; she just stated the plain fact that he was the transport minister back then.
Ross had a second go: ‘Let me ask again. She is saying that the transport minister took that decision. What input did the First Minister have in that decision, through the government that she leads?’ This prompted Sturgeon to respond: ‘I am genuinely not sure whether Douglas Ross listened to a single word that I said. He asked who the individual minister was; I did not volunteer the information. It is a matter of public record who the transport minister was at the time of the decision; it is a matter of public record that it was Derek Mackay.’
In fairness to the First Minister, there’s no quibbling with that reply. She openly states that she isn’t answering Ross’s question and is simply saying who the transport minister was in 2015.
Of course, a drover’s dog knows that Sturgeon was still being evasive. Dropping the name of a controversial former minister was intended to move the story on from questions about her role in approving the contracts to a Holyrood insider story about the First Minister shifting the blame to Derek Mackay.
In this regard, she is doubly clever. Wasting the equivalent of the annual budget of NHS Border? That makes the average punter sit up and take notice. Yet another ‘he said, she said’ political row? That makes the average punter flip even faster to the racing page.
The Holyrood opposition walks into these Sturgeon traps every time and for once it should be more nimble of foot. The charge of misleading parliament is a dead end. The focus should be on the Nixon questions: what did the First Minister know and when did she know it?
These are the questions you pursue if your goal is accountability. Readers often write to share their views and among the laments for how nationalism has divided Scotland and the frustrations of those who now regret voting for a Scottish Parliament, there are countless emails from people who just want someone to take responsibility.
They are fed up with 'it wisnae me', 'a big boy did it and ran away' and all the other juvenile excuses that pour forth from the front bench at Holyrood. They are not so unreasonable that they expect ministers to get everything right or never to preside over mistakes or oversights. They just want ministers to hold their hands up, acknowledge the problem, then set about fixing it. As Edwin Morgan wrote in the poem that still adorns the Holyrood foyer: 'We give you our consent to govern, don’t pocket it and ride away.'
There has been a lot of pocketing public consent then riding away since the SNP came to power. Few within the party question it because, well, there's independence to think about.
I think the United Kingdom should remain united but I recognise the principled case for Scotland to secede. This case has been prosecuted most honourably, in my estimation, by people like Jim Sillars and the late Margo MacDonald, Winnie Ewing and the late Gordon Wilson. These men and women hail from right across the spectrum of nationalism and have disagreed fiercely over the years about the means and ends of sovereignty.
What they have in common, though, is this: they believe in independence but believe in it enough to be honest about Scotland’s problems. They are not in it for mere power or to be the amen chorus in a personality cult. They want to better Scotland and they understand the importance of good government to that aim. They do not try to smother every concern and complaint in the folds of a flag.
I wish more nationalists were like this. One of the most dismaying features of Scottish political scandals is what I call Reflexive Westminster Whataboutery Syndrome, the condition that causes many nationalists to respond to any news of SNP error, incompetence or malfeasance with a variation of ‘What about Westminster and X?’ X can be almost anything. Brexit. Downing Street parties. Dubious Tory donations. Wasteful public contracts. The wallpaper in the Prime Minister’s flat. The Iraq War. The Highland Clearances. The list is as endless as the grievances of Scottish nationalists are varied.
It is an instinctive reaction driven by the purity with which nationalists associate their cause and the venality they assign to their opponents. So certain are they of their own virtue — and their opponents' wickedness — that they struggle to process evidence that might upset this happy little morality play.
It's not that the particular whataboutery in question is always without merit. There is, after all, plenty the UK Government does that warrants criticism, to say nothing of bafflement, despair and prolonged internal screaming. It's simply that, to a certain sort of nationalist, Westminster not only must be worse, its being worse is enough to excuse anything the Scottish Government might do.
I have a radical proposal: Let's be better than less worse. Let's set our sights a little higher than one inch above where someone else lands. Let's ask that we be governed well, not governed just enough better than elsewhere to suit the needs of SNP spin doctors. It should be no consolation when Scottish ministers waste millions that UK ministers waste billions or when Holyrood fails to meet waiting times targets that Westminster fails to meet them by a wider margin. Those are matters of scale, not substance.
Whether Scotland continues as part of the United Kingdom or goes it alone with independence, it cannot and will not be enough to rely on lower standards or lesser outcomes elsewhere. We have to want Scotland to be better for its own sake — for our sake — and because a country that is properly governed is a worthwhile end in itself. That is why the ferries fiasco matters and why we must determine how it came about. We deserve to be governed not just better than elsewhere but better than we are right now.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on March 28, 2022.