In Scotland we used to be engineers and now we’re disaster archeologists. It is our (new) nature – we only explore towering edifices of policy claims and promises after they’ve fallen down. It’s like when something comes along (anything) we internalise ‘well this isn’t going to work’ and then we wait for our predictions to come true.
Everyone has an opinion on why something failed, but few of those opinions are raised in advance of the failure. It’s like we are contractually obliged to give politicians the benefit of the doubt and stay silent on the off chance they don’t blow it this time. Which takes me to Sturgeon’s admission that she didn’t realise closing the educational attainment gap is difficult.
All I want to show here is that it was easier to know this than to not know it, since everyone who knows anything knew it all along. I want to show that there are supposed to be layers of corrective to political hubris and in Scotland they’ve gone. And I want to leave you asking ‘why don’t we ever demand success via a proper plan, carefully considered?’.
When Sturgeon first made her vain-glorious claim that she was going to close the attainment gap in what was a crazy-short period of time, I immediately picked up the phone to someone who knows about public policy. "Have you seen this?" I said. "This is mental. There is zero chance she’s going to pull this off. What’s she playing at?"
To begin with, let me show you why if I was running a course on public policy, my day-one introductory lecture would be about closing the educational attainment gap. It is exactly because it is the result of such a complex and deeply embedded set of problems that the honest way to see a closed attainment gap is as the result of having already fixed everything else.
Setting aside that Sturgeon was the Shadow Education Minister and ought to know this stuff, if she didn’t, how hard is it to find out? This was my test – what could I find with a single web search that I could put together in five minutes using none of my prior knowledge (I studied educational sociology at university) and no AI? Here is the task list I found:
"End child poverty, fix substandard housing, tackle systematic economic and social inequality, ensure economic empowerment of the families of children, make sure healthcare and nutrition are ensured, have an effective early years development programme, improve teacher quality and supply, make sure the curriculum and educational philosophy are inclusive, make sure pupils have access to physical resources (like home computers), target in-school support at disadvantaged students, target out-of-school tutoring and mentoring for disadvantaged pupils, prevent absenteeism, provide fast mental health support, develop after-school programmes, put in place parental and community engagement."
When a politician in Scotland makes a policy claim they have no way of meeting, it is a guaranteed pay day for the agencies, quangos and charities
How on earth did a First Minister not know this? Why didn’t anyone tell her? Did no-one say ‘OK, you’re going to need a new economic model and a full-on housing revolution – for starters’? The failure that concerns me is that she was all-but unchallenged on this nonsense. I want to show you the three layers in which this should have happened but didn’t, and to explain the reasons.
Layer one is the media. It was as easy for them to find out the above (if they didn’t know, and they should have) as it was for me and so should have been for Sturgeon. At the press conference I’d have opened with ‘every credible policy source says you need to end poverty first – what is your plan?’.
Sadly the media was in their mesmerised state and instead gawped and cooed at what a bold and visionary politician she was for saying things she couldn’t deliver. I mean, I know that journalists knew she wouldn’t pull this off because I spoke to one. "Why didn’t you challenge her?" I asked. "It’ll be a better story when she fails" was the basic answer.
But that’s only the first layer. While politicians chatter away, there is an entire army of people to deliver and facilitate education. Where were they? Why were they not raising concerns that expectations were being raised unduly? I knew, as everyone else knew, that people in the field of education were all rolling their eyes at this.
And yet what they did was shut up and engage in positive reinforcement. Why? Because when a politician in Scotland makes a policy claim they have no way of meeting, it is a guaranteed pay day for the agencies, quangos and charities. In a system driven by real, meaningful outcomes, the experts should have been saying ‘don’t waste money on things that don’t work’.
What they actually said was ‘post us the cheque and we’ll try and sort you out some stats for First Minister’s questions and we’ve got a bunch of photo ops lined up for you’. In the US right now there is shock that bribery and kickbacks are openly forming the basis of public policy. In Scotland that has been the normal way of doing business in the devolution era, just the other way round.
The third layer of corrective in a functioning democracy should be what I’ll call its ‘intellectual sphere’, particularly academia and think tanks and the like. Unfortunately, modern Scotland is anti-intellectual. We don’t encourage free thinking, we suppress it.
Shockingly, that includes our universities. Right now in a Scottish university, brand image and business imperatives come way before intellectual rigour or actual academic theory. Every bit as bad, Scotland’s universities seem acutely disinterested in Scotland.
So there we go, that’s the chain. Politician makes unsupported claim/promise, media is under-resourced and following ‘gotcha’ news values, practitioners are required by their organisations to be supportive in return for money and good favour, and academics are too busy filling in paperwork or being told that their research will damage the university.
Of course, this is only a very rough sketch. There were questions raised in the media, many in the practitioner sector made coded statements that indicated their lack of belief in this and there was some academic debate about the validity of the claims, if you went and looked for it.
But where this should be front and centre in public debate, here it is all boutique stuff. Yet again, like Trump’s US, in Scotland the exercise of raw power has taken precedence. I mean literally. I head journalists say things not dissimilar to ‘it’s really impressive – she’s telling lies and getting away with it. What a politician!’
We don’t think, then plan, then announce, then deliver. We announce and gawp and fail
I really do believe we have a complete lack of seriousness. Or even worse, the cosy relationships of the devolution era have redefined serious as ‘serious people don’t challenge government, they work at the edges to make small changes’. So we have this whole industry of conferences and seminars and meetings and websites and publications and they are all predicated on ‘taking government completely at face value, what can we get out of this?’.
Sturgeon’s vanity is only a side story here. As well as the education gap failure we have her education reforms (collapsed), National Energy Company (never got on the drawing board never mind off it), Deposit return scheme (illegal), gender reforms (illegal), National Care Service (collapsed at great cost before it existed), claim to make Scotland a leader in 5G (utterly farcical), ferries (eh…), dualling of the A9 (a decade behind time) and so on.
Then again, this is equally true of some of the big ideas of the devolution era, perhaps none more so than the evidence-free, unmeasured, unaddressed disaster which is Foreign Direct Investment. Common Weal shows again and again that this is a policy that is undermining Scotland, but public debate coos at the press releases.
In lots of these cases everyone knew what was going to happen. In fact in most, Common Weal and I have been narrating the coming failure in real time. People keep saying to us ‘we know you’re right and we’re glad you’re saying this because we can’t’. Why? Why can’t informed, capable experts explain that a policy is doomed to fail?
It sure as hell isn’t healthy to democracy and we’re all paying a price for this. We don’t think, then plan, then announce, then deliver. We announce and gawp and fail.
It really ought to be embarrassing for a politician of Sturgeon’s experience to say ‘I didn’t realise my flagship policy was difficult to do’. But it equally ought to be embarrassing for the rest of us that no-one told her, or that if she wouldn’t listen no coalitions of experts stepped forward to set out what needed to be done, with the challenge to do it or withdraw the statement.
And so we wait for what we know will happen (failure) and we sift through the ruins, partly to pretend we’re not complicit (see, I always knew this would fail!), partly to make it look like we’re not collectively failing (if everyone learns these lessons, it won’t happen again).
Engineers make things stand up. Archeologists dig through things that have fallen down. We no longer make things stand up, so we have nothing to do but dig. And it’s a collective failure.