The first thing to be noted about yesterday’s modest reshuffle of his ministerial team by Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, is the sheer selective parochialism of its reporting by BBC Scotland.
The media
The attention has been – and shallowly – on Deputy First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon’s move out of the Health portfolio she has held since the SNP came to power in the minority administration of 2007.
Of course this is interesting – but so are other ministerial changes that have gone by default.
In terms of BBC Scotland, it compounded its scattershot coverage by producing a list of who’s now in what it calls ‘the cabinet’ when, in its inclusiveness, what it really means is ‘in the government’ or ‘in the ministerial team’.
That list also lacks the necessary schematic consistency. The ministerial career of some minsters is given – but not of others who have also had such a career. The responsibilities of the posts held by some ministers is given – but ignored in the case of others.
And the depth of endemic parochiality was evident in Brian Tayalor’s blog, It is impossible not to like what one sees of Brian Taylor but these guys live in the politicians camp to the point of losing track of stable core values.
Taylor’s comment on Nicola Sturgeon’s exchange of portfolios with Alex Neil was that, at Health, Neil ‘… can be expected to match, if not exceed, her for combative chamber rebuttals.’
Who cares?
It did not occur to Taylor to consider how Neil might do the job at Health – just how he might perform in the chamber games at Holyrood.
The changes
Bruce Crawford, Cabinet Minister for Parliamentary Business, is stepping down for personal reasons and is being replaced, seemingly outside the Cabinet, by Joe Fitzpatrick – hardly a household name. Fitzpatrick has a background in student politics and then in local government in Dundee. He seems to have little experience of any other working life but will certainly know his way around the block in doing deals.
Stewart Stevenson has also gone from government but no one seems to have noticed except RSPB and us. He has been replaced at Environment and Climate Change by Paul Wheelhouse, a new entrant to Holyrood in 2011 as List MSP for South Scotland. As we showed in an earlier article today, the potted CV for Mr Wheelhouse on the SNP website shows a man with a substantial case to be anywhere but environment. He is an economist with an MBA but also does not appear to have had any substantial working life outside politics.
Keith Brown, whose brief was the less than logical Transport, Housing and Veterans, has shed Housing to Margaret Burgess, a new 2011 entrant to parliament whose Ministerial brief reasonably includes Welfare with Housing. She has experience of senior responsibilities at the Citizens Advice Bureau and has been in local government – the former a particularly good fit for her new brief.
Humza Yousaf seems also to be a new entrant to government in 2011, as a junior minister in Cabinet Secretary Fiona Hyslop’s department for Culture and External Affairs. 27 years old, he too has had no real job outside politics.
Fergus Ewing appears to be Minister for Energy, Enterprise and Tourism. Last heard, he was Minister for Community Safety which is now in Roseanna Cunningham’s brief along with the rather vague ‘Legal Affairs’. It seems that Mr Ewing has actually had his current post for a while. The erratic BBC listing says of his job: ‘The ministerial brief covers energy and energy consents, the voluntary sector and the social economy. The role also covers overseeing Scottish Enterprise matters and the Registers of Scotland.’ All we can say is that this does not quite square with what we would expect of an enterprise and tourism brief. The shift of the notion of ‘enterprise’ into the realm of ‘social enterprise’ is not one that is going to take a potentially independent Scotland very far in serious economic development.
The strategy
The key move here is, of course, that of Nicola Sturgeon, Deputy First Minister, leaving the Health brief for the first time and for Infrastructure and Capital Spending.
A minor immediate curiosity is the renaming of this portfolio from ‘Capital Investment’ to ‘Capital Spending’.
It was ‘Capital Investment’ under Alex Neil – and also under John Swinney before it was shifted over to Neil when he entered both government and Cabinet after the 2011 Scottish election,
Now it’s ‘Spending’, which is more upfront in populist terms but sounds less serious than ‘Investment’. There may be a reason for this subtle downgrading – discussed obliquely below.
However, the key purpose in this move is the final preparation of Sturgeon for her potential succession to Alex Salmond.
Whether or not the SNP Government wins the Independence Referendum coming in 2014, Sturgeon is formally the heiress apparent.
If the vote is for an independent Scotland, Salmond will stay until he becomes Scotland’s first Prime Minister but not necessarily for any great time after that.
He has been around a long time. His moment came late in the day. He is tired. His political and imaginative arteries are hardened. There is no inspiration and there are fewer new initiatives than wheezes. Little excites him these days. But the party wisdom is that he has earned his place if the opportunity comes – and no one would dare to suggest to him that bis time is up. It is wilfully blinkered not to acknowledge that the bully is a part of his make up.
If the vote is to stay with the Union, there will be no new address to independence for more time than Salmond would want to hang around.
So Sturgeon has an apprenticeship to complete which needs to start now – and yesterday it did.
She has been notably competent at Health – steady, calm, seemingly purposive. But a First Minister, to be credible, needs experience in or related to economic development.
The marriage of responsibility for infrastructure and capital ‘spending’ is a constructive challenge and a good opportunity.
The Argyll challenges to Infrastructure and Capital Spending
From Argyll’s perspective, Ms Sturgeon’s move to this post will be an interesting one.
She will inherit the decoy study-and-chat-show that Alex Neil, with local MSP Michael Russell, weakly set up to throw a dummy at the bawling Dunoon-Gourock Ferries Action Group. As Deputy First Minister and with the additional responsibility for Constitutional Affairs [which the BBC Scotland listing does not even mention] will Sturgeon have much time for this conversation piece?
The most immediate Argyll-related infrastructural issue she will confront is what to do with the Public Service Obligation [PSO] between Transport Scotland and Loganair for the air service between Glasgow and Campbeltown. This current PSO expires in April 2013. At the moment Transport Scotland is considering terms for a contract renewal or extension. It will be finalizing its recommendations to Ministers in the next few weeks.
This must not be the recipe as before.
The current contract provides for two return flights a day, on weekdays only. It includes no requirement for weekend services. Campbeltown is the only HIAL airport that does not have weekend services; and in so remote a town, otherwise served only by the A83 – prone to closure through landslides, the air service is crucial.
The Infrastructure Secretary also inherits what will be unabating pressure for a permanent solution to the unreliability of the A83, the semi-trunk road whose vulnerability to landslides is a running economic disability for Argyll and the Isles. The other half of her economic brief – spending – certainly comes into urgent play on this matter.
The west coast challenges
In the bigger picture, Sturgeon will face the challenge of coming up with some sort of economic development strategy for the highland west coast and islands – which must be infrastructure led.
To date, this administration, having been in power since 2007, has not begun even to sketch in an outline for such a strategy, which could hardly be more necessary. Independent or not, Scotland cannot afford to carry the financial cost of a west coast unable to earn its keep.
That brings us to the elephant in the room – the tendering of the Clyde and Hebridean Ferry Services which ought to be in the immediate offing, begun with the promised government policy statement in the Scottish Ferries Review, unsurprisingly delayed.
We have already published – and will again – on the Government’s short termist and damaging thinking on this matter. The RMT union is meeting today – 6th September 2012, with Transport Minister, Keith Brown – specifically to discuss, at his instigation, the consequence of the break up of the CalMac franchise.
When the government’s notion ['thinking' would be an extravagant term] becomes public, it will be a political flame thrower at a level the government does not get.
For this reason, our bet is that Sturgeon will be made the agent through whom ‘the Dunoon card’ is played yet again.
This administration eyeballed Dunoon and blatantly postponed the political fireball of contracting the Gourock-Dunoon passenger ferry service until after the 2011 Scottish Election.
The likelihood has to be the extending of CalMac’s contract for eighteen months from September 2013, taking it beyond the crucial Autumn 2014 Independence Referendum – after which they won’t care, either way.
The politics
Just because Ms Sturgeon is Mr Salmond’s anointed heiress, it does not guarantee her automatic succession.
There has been authoritative talk of tensions amongst the inner elite in the cabinet and there have been signs one can only interpret as the start of jostling for position amongst some who would be her rivals for the succession.
If the Scottish Government wins the Independence Referendum, her future elevation will be unchallengeable. Her new role in charge of constitutional affairs puts her in the driving seat of shaping the framework and guiding the legal implementation of independence.
If the government loses the referendum, the Deputy First Minister’s position will be very different.
In the event of such an outcome in 2014, there are senior and rising politicians who are clearly already engaged in position making.
The tensions we refer to as already existing within the inner hierarchy of the SNP cabinet are of particular import because they are said to be between Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Employment and Sustainable Growth, John Swinney and the Deputy First Minister, whom he sees as interfering in his responsibilities. Ms Sturgeon is now Cabinet Secretary – not for Health – but for Infrastructure and Capital Spending. Hmmm.
The consequences
There are three areas where the consequences of yesterday’s rearrangements may prove problematic – Health; Ms Sturgeon’s own survival; and the destabilisation of what has been the steady-running engine room of the SNP project.
Health
Mr Neil is not Ms Sturgeon.
She has not micromanaged but has paid hard working attention to detail. She has, in her school mistressy way, not been afraid to confront difficult issues and has had her substantial successes. One has been the reduction in the scandalous incidence of hospital acquired infections. Another has been her handling of the swine flu crisis where her calm authority and her apparent openness with information made Scotland’s management of the matter much more capable than was the case south of the border.
Ne Neil is less of a detail, more of a deals man. Capable as Ms Sturgeon has been at Health, it would be naive to see this sector as one which is in anyone’s particular control. The public sentiment about the NHS which politicians fan cheaply into flame when needs be, is dangerously misleading. We have a health service. It is better than nothing but it is not worth what it costs, Our doctors and nurses, at all levels, are not universally the sacred icons we are taught to revere.
Sturgeon had not the weight to take on this massive collection of vested interests – it will someday take an entire government to do that – but she held the ring. Neil is not the dedicated worker that Sturgeon is and more will escape his grasp.
The poisoned chalice
Try this scenario. Supposing Sturgeon can’t do the new job.
Transport Scotland is known to be the most politicised department of government. The constant attention paid to media rebuttals distracts from jobs getting done. Civil service leadership in the department is weak so there is no one showing the Minister, Keith Brown, where some of his plans are flawed.
There is a recent history of significant ministerial interference in another part of the overall responsibilities of the new Cabinet Secretary for Infrastructure and Capital Spending – the David MacBrayne group. This is the corporate envelope for most of the supposed ‘arms’ length’ state-owned companies concerned with ferry service delivery. Its Group CEO, only days ago, has had no choice but to step down after losing a prolonged battle with his companies’ owner, the Scottish Government, to convince it not to break up the west coast ferry franchise.
The group’s only substantial company is Caledonian Ferries Limited - CalMac – whose contract to deliver the lifeline Clyde and Hebridean ferry services lapses in just under a year’s time, on 20th September 2013.
The group, its constituent members, and the separate asset holding company, Caledonian Maritime Assets Limited – CMAL – are publicly owned. Their single shareholder is the collective of Scottish Ministers. Of this collective, the significant shareholder is the responsible Cabinet Secretary – for Infrastructure and Capital Spending, Ms Sturgeon.
Morale in the MacBrayne group is in bad shape. One might say that they have been deliberately weakened in a series of Government moves designed to see the end of them. One constituent company has already gone – NorthLink Ferries Limited, with the contract it was created to deliver – the Northern Isles services, given to a well known private sector supplier of services to governments, Serco – with no real experience of ferry operation.
Another member company, Argyll Ferries, brought into being to deliver a service – the Gourock-Dunoon one, has been openly left prey to unfounded local sabotage of its reputation. Ms Sturgeon is about to become regularly acquainted with the chorus of retributive mourners of the previous service there. She faces am experiential learning curve in an irrational situation few would chose and one her populist colleague, Michael Russell, with the aid of her predecessor in this new post, Alex Neil, have respectively fuelled and humoured.
Then there is the big one, in all possible respects: CalMac and the imminent tendering of the Clyde and Hebridean Ferry Services.
Ms Sturgeon will either carry through the government’s clear intention to hand these services to a single or multiple private sector operators – with Serco a likely shoe in; or she will implement its Plan B – kick the tender into touch until after the Independence Referendum.
She is coming into this devil’s brew of a very complex job just as the west coast ferries are due to go to tender and just as the HIAL contract at Campbeltown Airport is coming up for renewal or revision.
She will have no time to get to grips with the complex detail and establish a genuinely informed and independent personal view before she signs off on what her Transport Minister will propose to her.
She may be seen to be the agent of decisions seriously detrimental to the entire west coast and to the economically fragile Kintyre peninsula – or, at heart, to be a willing member of the old-stage political macchiavells.
Supposing Ms Sturgeon in this job becomes a lightning conductor for storms provoked by others?
Which of her ambitious colleagues will mourn such a – likely – eventuality?
Then if the Independence Referendum fails to deliver the core purpose of the SNP – which is already politically probable, will the blame for that be laid at Ms Sturgeon’s door, with her new constitutional and campaign responsibilites?
Has she actually been set up for a fall? She could simply have taken over all of Bruce Crawford’s role, which would have married well with the attention she will undoubtedly turn to the independence issue. If she fouls up the infrastructure and capital spending brief while playing with the independence project, she will see Scotland incapable of moving forwards in any political guise.
In the Holyrood encampment, the independence issue is undoubtedly in the ether – but in the real world people mind much more about the roads, ferries and air services their lives are governed by, commercially and personally, on an almost hourly basis.
Me Sturgeon is now in a position where she can get the crucial infrastructure strategy very right – or very wrong. The referendum result will reflect the public’s response to whatever this picture turns out to be.
In the latter scenario, she would not face a contest for the leadership after Salmond’s departure in coherent fighting fettle.
Trouble in the engine room
This third consequence of yesterday’s move for the Deputy First Minister is the potential for the destabilisation of the real engine of this SNP administration’s public standing – John Swinney.
Mr Swinney has already, for some time, been irritated by what he sees as Ms Sturgeon’s interference in his brief.
Now her new job gives her a licence to do just that.
Both infrastructure and capital spending – then capital investment – were a part of John Swinney’s own brief. This was reorganised when Alex Salmond brought old mucker Alex Neil into the heart of government after the 2011 runaway election victory and after Mr Neil had purged himself, as Michael Russell had already done, of the odour of previous rebelliousness.
Mr Swinney knows the brief. He knows what he would do. He may know what needs to be done. He is bound to be irritated and worried if Sturgeon takes different decisions.
The Deputy First Minister has to prove herself in this job in short order and is coming into it in the worst possible circumstances. Because of the existing tensions between them in this very area, she will not be minded to take advice from Mr Swinney.
This is a recipe more rather than less likely to disrupt what has been an apparently untroubled and collaborative trinity at the heart of the project – Salmond, Swinney and Sturgeon.
From the start, in the newly disciplined coherence of the SNP in the run up to its minority Scottish election victory in 2007, they have been the engine room. And Swinney has been the single actual key to the party’s success.
His performance in his job has been the key factor in convincing the Scottish electorate that the SNP could govern Scotland – and it was that confidence rather than any great thirst for independence as such, that produced its unprecedented majority in 2011.
Unlike other of his endlessly publicity seeking colleagues, Swinney is dedicated not to himself but to his job. He is the only really serious politician in Hollyrood and the only fully capable one. The others are game players in varying degree.
After a disastrous four year period as party leader, a job he did not want but had to take following Alex Salmond’s full decampment to London and the race tracks, Swinney settled in easily as Number Two on his former leader’s return. Since then he has single mindedly done the job he wanted to do – managing Scotland’s economy – and with no trace of any problems with his ego.
It has been Swinney’s quiet competence that calmed the horses after the SNP came to power in 2007. It was his steering of the economy that gave Scotland its first taste of what real government was about. The country relaxed and enjoyed a new self confidence.
The performance of some of his colleagues has since weakened that confidence and the worldwide economic crisis provoked by the unregulated banking adventures has been a game changer. ‘Events. dear boy’, as the languid Harold MacMillan used to explain away unexpected failures.
Swinney’s management of the Scottish economy since and during this long and continuing recession has been impeccable. Many of his initiatives have been copied by Westminster, without attribution.
But the ability of a single thumb stuck in a gap in the dyke could not hold back the full torrent of hardship for an indeterminate period. Scotland is now starting to suffer sharply.
This comes at a time when the government as a whole has been for too long distracted by its own core ambition - to achieve independence for Scotland in 2014. They have markedly been less concerned with government and they have been making serious mistakes.
The most recent is the proposal to increase public sector pay, after a few years of freeze.
With the country now into the widespread experience of job losses in the recession, the thought of making the already cushioned public servants even more comfortable while others despair could not be more morally wrong or more politically inept.
This move is itself part of the evidence of a determined thrust for independence at all costs, The government needs to keep the civil servants on side to move its legislative business forward to create the platform for the vote in 2014 – so they are preparing to buy them. The new Scotland, if it comes, will be no different from the old one.
The SNP may not win the 2014 referendum with a stable John Swinney on board but they will certainly lose it if they allow his progress to be destabilised by the in-fighting which may well already be on the slip or on the runway – bringing us back to the coming formative decisions to be made on the west coast ferries and on Campbeltown airport.