Secrecy is a virus that courses through the SNP and is spreading to every corner of the government it runs.
The long-term dominance of a single party, the top-down nature of that party’s political culture and the flawed structures of devolved government are all vectors which transmit the pathogen. But the origins are the same in Scotland as the world over: political elites like power but not the accountability that comes with it.
The SNP strain is especially aggressive and, between the party’s internal affairs and its administration of Holyrood, Scottish politics is witnessing an epidemic of secrecy in which a small ruling caste decides who gets to know what, when and under what circumstances. Unsurprisingly, this elite cadre prefers to keep the business of government opaque. What the public doesn’t know can’t hurt the people who do.
Whether it is seeding Covid into care homes or withholding the facts about a cancer screening scandal, curtailing freedom of information or misusing statistics, there is a contagion of cover-up inside the SNP government, one produced by turning over the levers of government to a party with a secretive, unaccountable culture.
That culture is under the spotlight after Police Scotland launched an investigation into the SNP’s finances. Detectives are acting on complaints from seven individuals about the fate of almost £700,000 in donations which was supposed to have gone towards campaigning for another independence referendum. Beginning in 2017, the SNP amassed £666,953 in fundraising drives via its ref.scot website, meant to arm the party financially for the next independence battle.
However, the tin-rattling appeal was called off in the wake of the 2017 general election, when the party lost 21 seats, despite having raised only half (£482,000) of its £1m target. The most recently available statements, covering the end of 2019, show the party with less than £97,000 in its bank account. Yet, according to SNP accounts, just £51,760 has been expended on indyref2 campaigning. The question, then, is where did the rest of the money go?
Last December Douglas Chapman, the MP for Dunfermline and West Fife, ousted Colin Beattie as national treasurer of the SNP, a role held by the Midlothian North and Musselburgh MSP since 2004. However, Chapman resigned five months later, claiming that 'despite having a resounding mandate from members to introduce more transparency into the party’s finances', he had not received 'the support or financial information to carry out the fiduciary duties' of the role.
His colleague Joanna Cherry stood down from the party's ruling national executive committee the following day, alleging 'a number of factors' had 'prevented me from fulfilling the mandate party members gave me to improve transparency'.
Beattie, who returned to the post after Chapman's departure, has tried to address questions about the donations in two ways. First, he says that 'amounts equivalent to the sums raised will be spent for the intended purpose', an indirect admission that the sums raised, or part of them, were already spent for reasons other than the intended purpose. Second, and more creatively, he argues that: 'The SNP is the party of independence and, as such, every penny we spend — directly or indirectly — is in support of winning independence.'
It's a cute line, though by this logic Labour could raise funds to help it campaign for more workplace rights but spend the money on something else entirely, on the basis that it is the party of trade unions and therefore every item of spending in its budget indirectly supports better workplace conditions.
Moreover, pledges to spend 'amounts equivalent to the sums raised' appear to be at odds with previous statements that made clear the cash was protected and only able to be used for the particular purpose of preparing for another referendum. The fundraising effort was billed as the 'Referendum Appeal Fund'. In June 2017, an SNP spokesperson said: 'Money raised on ref.scot is ringfenced for the purpose stated on the website'.
In October 2020, with questions being raised within the nationalist camp, Beattie emailed donors to assure them that 'any such donations are woven through the overall income figures each year' and that 'the Referendum Appeal Fund has a current balance of £593,501 and we can fully deploy those funds instantaneously'. In February 2021, SNP strategist Ross Colquhoun announced on Twitter that '£600,000 ring-fenced by the SNP will be spent on independence referendum preparations this financial year'.
The veil of secrecy in this matter, one so heavy it allegedly prevented the treasurer of the SNP from learning about the finances of the SNP, is what we have come to expect from a party which prefers backrooms and closed doors to the democratic glare of sunlight.
It is also what guides their approach to government.
Ministers face the possibility of being found in contempt of court after failing to release the report into allegations against Alex Salmond despite a ruling from the Scottish Information Commissioner. When journalists requested a copy of the document, which led to the Scottish government’s investigation being found ‘unlawful’, ‘procedurally unfair’ and ‘tainted by apparent bias’ by the Court of Session, ministers first claimed legal privilege — then tried to argue that the report did not exist.
Information commissioner Darren Fitzhenry ordered them to fulfil the request by July 12, but they have missed that deadline. Under the rules, Fitzhenry can ‘certify to the Court of Session that the ministers have failed to comply’ and the court ‘may deal with the ministers as if they had committed a contempt of court’.
Nor is it the first time the Scottish state has shown its contempt for freedom of information laws. Last September, National Records of Scotland (NRS) refused freedom of information requests from journalists seeking figures of Covid-19 deaths by care home. The reporters appealed to the Commissioner, who found NRS has acted unlawfully, and by February the records body faced a new deadline for handing over the information.
Earlier this month, the Scotsman reported the existence of emails which it said proved ‘Scottish Government officials intervened as the figures were set to be published in February’ and that ‘discussions’ involving then Cabinet Secretary Fiona Hyslop and her officials ‘directly lead to the delay’. Internal communications detailed how NRS decided to ‘progress Ms Hyslop’s suggestion on seeking further advice from Law Officers’, while an email between NRS and the Scottish government queried whether ‘to seek routes… to prevent publication of this information’.
Concerns have been raised in the past about the involvement of partisan special advisers in the processing of freedom of information requests and Scotland had the dubious honour of being the first country in the world in which the government gave Covid-19 as a pretext for knocking back such a request.
These are mere hints at a growing problem in government in Scotland: a cover-up culture in which the public's right to know is only as valid as ministers' willingness to let them know. There are mounting signs that the actions not only of government itself but of supposedly independent public bodies are guided by the preferences and interests of the current Scottish government rather than any notions of transparency and accountability. This is not necessarily — or at least not straightforwardly — a matter of politics with a capital P, but it reflects a level of deference to the executive far in excess of anything seen at Westminster.
Cover-up culture was at work in the decision by NHS Scotland and the Scottish government to withhold the cervical screening scandal from parliament and the women involved until after the election. Health boards learned in December 2020 that women — so far it is believed to number 400 — were wrongly told they did not require cervical smears after undergoing partial hysterectomies. One woman is known to have died as a result.
Yet, even though ministers learned of the fiasco on March 9, they did not disclose the truth to Holyrood or the public for another 107 days — until after the election. Labour’s health spokeswoman Jackie Baillie accused them of ‘playing politics with people’s health’ while the Lib Dems’ Alex Cole-Hamilton termed it ‘a cynical abuse of power’.
Women’s health minister Maree Todd explained the delay by saying it was ‘absolutely vital that the NHS took the time to accurately understand each person’s circumstances’, yet as she did so, she acknowledged a further 500 women who might also have been affected. One need not be a cynic to wonder if what was absolutely vital was taking the time to understand the Scottish government’s political circumstances.
The cervical screening scandal followed another row about transparency, this time involving Public Health Scotland. The nominally independent agency was last year tasked with investigating the Scottish government’s decision to transfer untested and even Covid-infected patients from hospital wards to residential care facilities. PHS concluded that a link between transfers and subsequent outbreaks in care homes could not be established, a finding that was touted by Nicola Sturgeon.
However, in June we learned the agency has a ‘communications framework’ which pledges it to ‘reducing the potential impact of the risk on the reputation and credibility’ of organisations including the Scottish government. Its conclusions were subsequently challenged by the Office for Statistics Regulation, which said available data was ‘consistent with a causal relationship between positivity and outbreak’.
The organisation tasked with marking the Scottish government’s homework was tasked at the same time with making the Scottish government look good, and it required a group of statisticians in London to point out that there was something awry at work.
Covid-19 took centre stage in another example of cover-up culture. On March 3, 2020, SNP ministers were told of an outbreak connected to an international Nike conference in the centre of Edinburgh but did not make the information public. Indeed, the fact that Covid-19 was present in Scotland’s capital and its second-largest city remained under wraps for the next 69 days until it was uncovered by a BBC investigation. Firms connected to the event or to those who came into contact with it later reported employees suffering the symptoms of Covid-19. However, they were not allowed to know that their staff had been put at risk.
This pattern of behaviour is consistent with the Scottish government’s refusal to disclose its legal advice on a separate Scotland’s position vis-a-vis the European Union; its referendum-era secret paper outlining concerns about pensions in the event of independence; and even its handling of the Alex Salmond inquiry, which saw ministers refuse to comply with witness requests from the parliamentary committee and spend public money preparing civil servants to appear before MSPs. There is an obsessive control-freakery to how the SNP conducts itself in government. The party that once railed against the Tories and Labour for a lack of transparency has made opaqueness and obstruction the central features of its governing philosophy.
Cover-up culture is antithetical to a healthy, open democracy but it is unlikely that such matters weigh heavily on the SNP and, even if they did, there is not a politician alive who has not at some point found themselves rationalising bad decisions or democratically destructive behaviour as essential to the exigencies of the moment. The problem with trying to get ministers to listen to the good angel on their shoulder is that the bad angel on the other shoulder has all the polling data.
There is also little point in scolding the SNP or warning of dire electoral consequences. The party has no need to listen precisely because there are no such consequences. In a dominant-party system, with a highly centralised ruling party, a weak and divided opposition, a sympathetic civil society, and a small media ecosystem, the mechanisms of accountability present in competitive, pluralistic politics are absent. The SNP can continue to govern in an opaque faction and there will be no electoral price to pay, at least in the short term.
A more expedient appeal might be to the very voters the Nationalists target. If an independent Scotland is your chosen destination, is it wise to reach it in an atmosphere of secrecy and fear? A new country needs to learn from its mistakes and to question orthodoxies new and old. Independence is, one would think, about more than which flag flies from which pole. It is supposed to be about self-determination and a country constantly kept in the dark by its government on issues of national importance cannot be said to be fully determining its own future.
The SNP famously espouses the doctrine of popular sovereignty but while it preaches that all political authority emanates from the citizenry, it does not trust them with the truth about how that authority is exercised on their behalf. This is a starkly elitist view of democracy, in which the masses are there to provide the votes for politicians who know better and therefore need not account for themselves.
A new state set up in this atmosphere of towering certainty, in which the populace need know only what the political class deigns to tell it, is a state heading for trouble. Not only will existing errors go uncorrected and past errors be repeated, but an icy shard of cynicism will be driven into the hearts of the voters. Some who voted for separation may begin to question whether it was worth it and whether governmental secrecy and political sharp practice on a smaller scale is really an improvement. There are people in this country prepared to vote for independence at any cost but, if it is ushered in by an untouchable establishment, the cost might be independence itself.
Establishments are not, generally speaking, all that keen on accountability. They are in the business of reinforcing themselves and retaining dominance for as long as possible. Left or right, unionist or nationalist — political complexion doesn’t much matter. Give even the noblest advocates of ethical government a taste of power, and the fear of it being taken away, and they will soon bend their ideals to reflect what they will now call nuances but would once have called hypocrisies.
A government that feels the need to act as the SNP does is one that does not trust the people. For any democratic party to think like this is lamentable enough, but for a nationalist party — a party that purports to represent the nation and its ambitions for itself — it is especially a sin. It is to intimate that the country is, to borrow a phrase, too wee, too poor and too stupid to know the truth.
Cover-up culture is as toxic as it is corrosive, not only eating away at public confidence in government but vindicating every cynical impulse about politics and those who practise it. It tells voters that they may as well suspect the worst of their leaders because they withhold the truth so often, perhaps the truth is that they are all rotten, corrupt and out for themselves.
Of course, the Nationalists might calculate that, even as cover-up culture makes the voters more jaded about politics in general, it will not significantly affect their electoral bottom line. Perhaps, but it undermines the much-vaunted virtue of their movement.
It says the same virus that contaminates the body politic at Westminster via the Tories and Labour has spread to Holyrood via the Nationalists. It is nothing new, merely the SNP variant of the same old disease. Scotland, it seems, is not all that different to the rest of the UK after all.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on July 17, 2021.
Stephen
A very incisive and enlightening article.
It is a significant cause for concern when a government behaves as the SNP are (and have been for several years) towards their electorate.
Especially given that they represent a minority of the Scottish electorate by votes cast in the last election.
You did not mention however a case of secrecy and cover up that is widely rumoured across Scotland, that of the super-injunction Sturgeon has in place that prevents details of her ‘dark self’ being made public via the media. That issue, if the rumours are accurate, contrasts badly with the accusations made, so very publicly, against Salmond. Is there no way of bringing the details of this injunction into the public domain? Especially as other similar (I assume) injunctions put in place by other celebrities have been challenged, overturned or otherwise expired.
Just wondering