I know who you think is running Scotland. You think the Scottish Government is running Scotland. But is it? In fact, does the Scottish Government itself know who is running Scotland, or how they’re going about it? I find these questions difficult to answer subsequent to the Chair of Historic Environment Scotland’s evidence to a parliamentary committee.
I should start by making clear that I’m extremely busy just now (sorry if you’re awaiting a reply to an email – I’m doing my best…). This means that I didn’t listen to the evidence session and I’m only working from the reporting.
That it only takes two pieces of information revealed at the session to have me scratching my head is I think fairly revealing in itself. Piece of information number one is that Historic Environment Scotland has ‘corruption files’ that have been submitted to it – and they’ve reached ‘volume five’. It’s not even the corruption bit that gets me, it’s the ‘volume five’ bit. I’ll come back to that.
The second piece of information is that the relevant Government Minister has been handing over the lions’ share of £100 million to this organisation for years and years yet hasn’t met the Board governing the body spending this money for over four of them. Again, it’s the number that is jumping out at me as much as what the number is counting – four fucking years?
I just don’t know how to respond to any of this rationally. Like everyone else, I’ve been following this from behind the sofa where, like a kid ducking the scary bits of Doctor Who, I’m finding it difficult to observe without flinching. It’s not even the twerking (that too I’ll come back to), it’s the racism.
I have been thinking and thinking about this and I cannot work out how someone who described waiting staff of Indian origin, out loud and in public, as ‘chocolates’ is still in employment. I’m not a P45-happy kind of guy. I deplore much of the puritanical cancel culture attitude of no forgiveness ever. People make mistakes. It is patterns of behaviour that give reasons for zero-tolerance, not so much one-off mistakes.
So I keep asking myself whether my first instinct (that this person shouldn’t be in post) is right. Is it just an error? What would I have done if I was his boss? I just keep returning to the same question – in what world could that comment have been acceptable? It doesn’t seem to me so much a mistake as a significant breach of professional behaviour. I don’t think we’d be on ‘three strikes and you’re out’ if he’d used the N-word about people of African heritage.
As a general rule, if you are in a position of power and you use it to gain access to a service an ordinary person couldn’t access, or at a cost much less than an ordinary person would be paid, there is a problem
Then there is what seems like the misuse of power and position to secure private benefit deriving from public duty. A private lunch in a historic building served and waited on for the price of a pub lunch? That isn’t right. I once used coffee card points I’d built up during work meetings for a personal coffee, felt guilty and didn’t do it again.
As a general rule, if you are in a position of power and you use it to gain access to a service an ordinary person couldn’t access, or at a cost much less than an ordinary person would be paid, there is a problem. If you’re thinking ‘but it’s not a big deal’, you’re wrong. Either you take a zero-tolerance attitude to corruption or there is no end point.
So by the time we get to the twerking I’m exasperated but not as angry. Let’s be clear; getting drunk at a work is always inappropriate (I’m going to come back to that too) and embarrassing a guest with overt sexual approaches is miles on the other side of ‘the sort of thing that ought to happen’, but I feel more forgiving about this. It is too easy to misjudge your state of inebriation.
So my view is (or was) that the ‘chocolates’ guy should probably be fired, the private dinner woman should receive a formal warning but the twerker should only be taken aside and warned that this is behaviour that cannot be accepted and must not be repeated. If I was the boss, I might have referred the racist comment to the Board for adjudication to be safe.
But all of that would have represented some shoddy leadership. It is the corruption files that has my head bent out of shape. For me, having been pretty well alone on writing on systemic corruption in Scottish public life, it was almost an affirmation to see the word corruption used. I’ve been trying to explain for a while that we have started treating corruption as ‘only something which is illegal’ and that is a mistaken understanding of corruption.
In Scotland most corruption is procedural (for example, ignoring tree preservation orders because the land under the tree is work a lot more than the fine) or legalised (the ability to create lucrative golden goodbye payments for yourself from public money without having to consult with anyone and yet still being adjudged not to have broken the law, or any rules for that matter).
We never talk about corruption. The fact that the senior staff at HES have used a fiddle to create a new salary structure which gave them all 20 per cent pay rises isn’t even being taken as a major part of the problem. Make no mistake, half of Scotland’s senior public sector leaders have their arses clenched hoping no-one really starts to look at the issue of self-directed remuneration too closely.
Which brings my back to my core questions – how on earth did ‘corruption files volume one’ not trigger a root-and-branch review, how on earth has this happened with what seems like no active political oversight, and consequently who is actually running things? Is Scotland being run by racists, jakeys, sex-obsessed senior staff and pocket-stuffing chancers?
Is there any sense at all that the politicians are in charge of this? It doesn’t seem to be very clear that they even know what’s going on. Is this what ‘arm’s-length’ was for – to keep your nose far enough away from the stink?
We need guidelines which make clear when corruption is too much corruption, and it’s certainly not ‘volume five’
I can’t reach any conclusion other than that we need a very much more significant and significantly-policed code of conduct which is consistent across all public organisations. It bothers me that every public authority seems to have its own ethics team, it’s own diversity team, its own HR rules.
Why are the rules in one part of the public sector not the same as the rules in another part? Is it for their own benefit that every agency is free to write and police its own rules? Is this in itself a corruption of the system? And why does it all seem to be so out of control at HES?
I started out in journalism when liquid lunches were just dying out, and yet once had to go home from work because a ‘lunch’ with a lobby journalist turned out to be five pints of Stella (when it was still strong) and a packet of crisps. That stuff really wasn’t appropriate then and it sure as hell isn’t now. A glass of wine? Fine. But it’s your jobs to stay professional when you’re on work duty.
Why is that not being drilled into people? Taking advantage of your position for discounts or freebies? Nope. Unless it’s a free branded plastic pen or something trivial, you should always just say no. It’s not right. There needs to be some clear statement of how much racism is too much racism (can’t believe I’m writing that).
There most certainly needs to be much, much (actually, can I add another much) stricter rules on the oversight of senior executives setting their own pay and conditions. I think it is time we had a rigid, non-negotiable national pay structure for public employes. This current unsupervised free-for-all is an absolute disgrace.
And somehow, some way, we need guidelines which make clear when corruption is too much corruption, and it’s certainly not ‘volume five’.
I’m genuinely shocked by this affair, and the more I hear the more shocked I am. Someone told me that when trying to seek funding for a project which would have resulted in a book about Scotland’s built heritage they were told it didn’t pass the ‘scented candle test’. Apparently any book HES funds must (as in must) increase the likelihood that gift shops will sell more scented candles.
If that is the view of the people running Historic Environment Scotland then they shouldn’t be running Historic Environment Scotland.
But in the end the responsibility for all of this all falls very clearly on the shoulders of one person. The person this ‘arm’s-length’ quango is arm’s-length from is the Cabinet Secretary for Constitution, External Affairs and Culture, and arm’s-length is meant to mean ‘still having a grip but at arm’s-length’ not ‘sit an arm’s-length away and do fuck all for four years’.
Like I say, I’m not a P45-happy kind of guy. If you call for the resignation of everyone who makes mistakes, the labour market would be chaos. But once all this gets to wherever it is going to get to, we’ll be left with the reality that the buck for this stops with one man. He is quire clearly derelict in his duties. This is is a serious matter. There should be serious consequences.