Scottish politics: some observations
Donald Trump keeps raising the bar for what's dramatic enough to hit the headlines: some stories it's worth noting before they pass by
Watching politics is in part an exercise in filtration: news comes at us more and more quickly and more indiscriminately, and now we have to undertake for ourselves a lot of editorial decisions we used to entrust to a much smaller number of media outlets across far fewer platforms. When Margaret Thatcher was ousted in November 1990, for example, we had four terrestrial television channels, on which BBC News and ITN had a duopoly, and the disruptive challenge from Sky News, although it forged a strong reputation early on, had only launched in February 1989, less than two years before.
One of the problems with politics is the distinction between urgency and importance. News editors and the viewing public have to decide where to focus their attention, and it is not always obvious what is dramatic and gripping, and what will turn out over months and years to be important: this is where journalism and history meet, in a sense, an issue I looked at in December. Politicians with an instinct for the show, like President Trump, make the judgement even more difficult. The past two or three weeks have been hectic and lurching, although I think the underlying shifts in American attitudes to the world, to alliances and to its traditional links with Europe will prove to resonate. Sometimes, though, it’s worth making an effort just to step off the treadmill for a moment, look around at the rest of the scenery, and devote some thought and analysis to what’s happening away from the main stage.
Wha for Scotland’s king and law/Freedom’s sword will strongly draw
In December last year I noted briefly that the Permanent Secretary to the Scottish Government, J.P. Marks, had been chosen to replace Sir Jim Harra as Permanent Secretary and Chief Executive of His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. Marks had only taken up the post in Edinburgh, the Scottish Government’s rough equivalent of the Cabinet Secretary, at the beginning of 2022, so he will only have served a little over three years. He is a Whitehall civil servant by background, holding positions in HM Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions, so heading HM Revenue and Customs is a kind of homecoming.
At the time, I observed that the new Permanent Secretary would be taking over with the prospect of a fraught few years in Scottish politics, with Scottish Parliament elections scheduled in May 2026 and a then-ailing and worn-out SNP administration. I also wondered what sort of official would be chosen. The first two Permanent Secretaries to the Scottish Government, Sir Muir Russell (1998-2003) and Sir John Elvidge (2003-10), were essential Whitehall warriors steeped in the culture of the old Scottish Office, while the third, Sir Peter Housden (2010-15) had been a teacher and worked in local government before joining the Department for Education and Skills and then serving as Permanent Secretary to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and its successor, the Department for Communities and Local Government. Leslie Evans (2015-21) had started in local authorities then joined the Scottish Government (then called the Scottish Executive) in 2000, shortly after its establishment. J.P. Marks, as I said above, is largely a mainstream Whitehall official.
It has now been announced that the new Permanent Secretary will be Joe Griffin, currently Director General, Strategy and External Affairs, in the Scottish Government. He will assume his new responsibilities on 7 April. Griffin is a modern history graduate of Wadham College, Oxford, though quirkily spent a year of his degree at Vassar College in New York, originally an all-female institution (there is a witticism probably apocryphally attributed to Dorothy Parker, one variation of which is “If all the girls at Vassar were laid end to end, I shouldn’t be in the least bit surprised”). He joined the Scottish Government in 2004, so has long experience across a number of areas including justice, early learning and childcare, employment and community safety.
One notable factor is that he was Principal Private Secretary to the First Minister during the late Alex Salmond’s tenure, and consequently appeared as a witness in Salmond’s 2020 trial at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh charged with attempted rape, sexual assault, indecent assault and breach of the peace. Salmond was found not guilty on 12 of the charges and a further charge was not proven, and he had claimed that there had been a conspiracy within the government to oust him, destroy his career and have him sent to prison. The Scottish Parliament established the Committee on the Scottish Government Handling of Harassment Complaints, and its report in March 2021 concluded that there had been both corporate and individual failings in the Scottish Government’s management of the complaints. It also accused Salmond’s successor as First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, of misleading the Committee. Leslie Evans was singled out for criticism.
Griffin admitted in his evidence that, as head of Salmond’s private office, he had been one of the people responsible for an unofficial policy introduced in late 2013 whereby female officials were not left alone with Salmond after 7.00 pm or 8.00 pm. It was a response to an accusation from a senior female civil servant that Salmond had forced himself on top of her on a bed in Bute House, the First Minister’s official residence.
There is no suggestion (so far as I’m aware) that Griffin was seriously at fault or seen as engaged in any kind of plot. Salmond’s unexpected death last October (I wrote an obituary for City A.M.) takes some of the heat and immediacy out of this unhappy saga. I would simply observe that Scottish politics can be vicious, tribal and unforgiving in a way that would make Il Cosa Nostra seem easygoing and happy-go-lucky; it is no surprise that Griffin’s appearance at Salmond’s trial is the main content of the story about his appointment in The Daily Record and The Scottish Daily Express. It is a connection which may linger ina murky recess of the more suspicious minds of Edinburgh politicos.
More generally, it is worth noting that Griffin’s current role, Director General, Strategy and External Affairs, deals with intergovernmental affairs, oversight of cross-cutting strategic issues, external affairs including relations with the European Union and constitutional matters. That broad canvas will be a useful preparation for leading the whole Scottish civil service and working with not only the UK Government in London but the other devolved administrations in Wales and Northern Ireland. The constitution and external affairs have formed the main part of Angus Robertson’s ministerial portfolio since 2021, and this has been controversial: after all, the constitution, foreign affairs and defence are all areas which are explicitly reserved to Westminster by the Scotland Act 1998 which established the devolved administration and assembly.
Griffin’s own statement on his appointment is rather weighed down by jargon and faintly emetic, though of course he has to be constrained by the mood music of his political masters.
My focus will be on working with colleagues and partners to drive progress and deliver the government’s four priorities; eradicating child poverty, growing the economy, tackling the climate emergency, and ensuring high quality and sustainable public services. I look forward to leading the organisation as we deliver in the service of Scotland.
There is little in that which is in essence objectionable in policy terms (though “driving progress”, “delivering priorities” and “growing the economy” are all well beyond trite now). There have been some faint notes of caution that Griffin’s selection represents playing it safe. One SNP MSP felt there was a need for change:
The place needs a really good shake up. Is he the guy to do that? Not really, more likely he will make things easier for ministers. And I’m not sure that’s what we need at the moment.
It is surprising to hear an MSP from the governing party disparage a tendency to “make things easier for ministers”, but the sentiment goes to the heart of something deeper. By the time of the next Scottish parliamentary elections, the SNP will have been in government, whether alone or as part of a coalition, as a minority and a majority administration, for 19 years. That is longer than the Conservative Party managed under Margaret Thatcher and John Major; indeed, to find a longer stint by any political party (excepting the Ulster Unionist Party’s death-grip on the Parliament of Northern Ireland), you have to look back to the Tories’ long run from 1783 to 1830, before the Great Reform Act.
Labour has also been in power in Wales since 1999, and the signs of metal fatigue are becoming more and more obvious. Likewise, institutionally and ideologically, the SNP is exhausted; three of the eleven members of the Scottish Cabinet were elected to the first Scottish Parliament in 1999; a fourth, Angus Robertson, was first elected to Westminster in 2001.
What will be interesting and will, while Griffin is of course an impartial official, affect the ecosystem in which he operates, is the fate of the SNP and, on the other side of the equation, the other parties over the next 18 months. Less than a year ago, the SNP was taking on water and sinking fast: Nicola Sturgeon resigned unexpectedly as First Minister in February 2023, the leadership contest to replace her was not especially good-humoured or congenial; the lacklustre, accident-prone but self-important Humza Yousaf was chosen as the next First Minister; his rival for the post, Kate Forbes, one of the SNP’s most plausible and steady performers, decided to return to the backbenches; Yousaf fell out with the Scottish Greens and terminated the Bute House Agreement, the coalition deal which had given the Government its parliamentary majority; he then resigned after barely 13 months as First Minister; and the SNP, determined to avoid hard decisions, replaced him unopposed with the irredeemably grey long-time Deputy First Minister John Swinney, who had first been leader of the SNP in 2000-04.
The SNP were roughly handled at last July’s UK general election, losing 39 of the 48 seats in the House of Commons and seeing their share of the vote drop from 45 per cent to 30 per cent. Scottish Labour, meanwhile, added 36 seats to their previous single MP (the redoubtable Ian Murray in Edinburgh South, of whom more later) and increased their vote share by nearly 17 per cent. With Holyrood elections on the horizon, a less-than-dynamic leader in Swinney and the sheer grind of having been in government for som long, the future did not look especially bright.
Matters look very different now. The Labour government, despite its strong performance at the general election, has plummeted in popularity across the UK and it seems to be dragging Scottish Labour down with it. In late June 2024, after years of solid poll leads for the SNP, Labour nosed ahead in a handful of results, admittedly small margins from one per cent to four per cent. But if added to a dominant electoral performance at Westminster only two or three weeks later, a possible narrative was obvious, that Labour was beginning to pull ahead. In fact the party’s popularity has fallen substantially, but not to the noticeable direct advantage of the SNP, which has climbed from low- to mid-30 per cent. The striking beneficiary has been Reform UK, which barely registered as a factor in Holyrood opinion polls a year ago but is now scoring 10-14 per cent regularly.
It is very hard to predict how this will play out. A recent survey predicted the SNP would top the poll with 55 seats in the Scottish Parliament, 10 short of a bare majority, Scottish Labour in second with 25 seats, then the Conservatives (16), Reform UK (13) and the Scottish Greens and the Liberal Democrats each winning 10 seats. Under those conditions, the SNP resurrecting their alliance with the Greens would just put the combination over the finishing line, but the disintegration of the coalition in April 2024 was deeply acrimonious and has left a lot of bad blood.
On the other hand, what other outcomes are possible? Even an improbably Unionist coalition of Labour/Conservative/Reform/Liberal Democrats would fall short of an overall majority. Alex Salmond’s first term as First Minister was a minority government with only 47 MSPs, but he signed a “cooperation agreement” with the Greens by which they supported SNP ministerial nominations in exchange for being consulted on major policy issues. That, however, was 2007, almost 20 years ago and a different world.
It might be after the election in May 2026, then, that Joe Griffin really earns his salary not only as the chief policy adviser to the First Minister but with a wider responsibility to and for the democratic system. After the UK general election of 2010, when the Labour government lost 91 seats but the Conservatives did not win enough to form a government on their own, the then-Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, was relatively active in at least facilitating the negotiations which led swiftly to the coalition agreement between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Challenging electoral arithmetic of the kind suggested by that recent poll might require gentle involvement from officials, if only as facilitators, in a kind of reverse version of the way senior civil servants created the “separate space” arrangements for the last year of the Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition in Edinburgh in 2006/07.
Wha’s like us? Damn few, and they’re aw deid
A brief coda, remaining in Scotland but looking from Holyrood to Westminster. On Friday, Ian Murray, the Secretary of State for Scotland, gave a speech at the University of Edinburgh on “driving economic growth in Scotland” (that ghastly phrase again). I want to pick out just a few points from the speech, because they do, it seems to me, represent many of the worst aspects of we currently conduct politics, and in particular how Sir Keir Starmer’s government conducts politics.
One abiding sin is hopeless vagueness sprinkled with enough positive words to distract from the fact that absolutely nothing has been said. Consider, for example, how Murray treats artificial intelligence.
1963—the same year that Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, delivered his “white heat of technology” speech. And that speech could be delivered today given the pace of technological change and the huge opportunities with AI. Of course, this university, with the passion and expertise of Christina [Boswell, Vice-Principal of Research and Enterprise] and her colleagues are driving this agenda.
This university will be at the heart of the government’s AI strategy. The implications for industry, our economy, government, services and society are unlimited and we must grab this with both hands. I’ve just visited the robotics lab downstairs and it’s mindblowing.
Harold Wilson, of course, warned his audience that if the country was to prosper a “new Britain” would need to be forged in the “white heat” of this “scientific revolution”. History is indeed repeating itself. The AI revolution is happening as we enter a golden age of opportunity. And Scotland should and will be at the heart of it.
Setting aside the heavy reliance on one phrase by Harold Wilson more than 60 years ago, partially but serially misquoted ever since, what do these words tell is about government policy on artificial intelligence? That the opportunities of AI are huge, later upgraded to unlimited and then a golden age; that they apply to the economy, government, services and society; and that Scotland “should and will” be at the heart of this golden age. This is the rhetorical equivalent of empty calories. It says nothing.
We are then told that “the power of education to tear down societal barriers should never be underestimated”, that “education and training are the biggest and best investments we can make in our economy and our society” and that the failure to close attainment gaps in Scotland “translates directly into the waste of human talent and denial of opportunity that currently holds Scotland back”. I don’t think any sane person would disagree with any of that. It is too platitudinous to invite disagreement.
Specifics hove into view when Murray turns to the government’s Plan for Change, and how it “has already started to work: the biggest upgrade in workers’ rights in a generation, an industrial strategy to make sure we can take advantage of the jobs of the future: GB Energy, publicly owned, headquartered here in Scotland”.
At the risk of seeming negative, the upgrade in workers’ rights comes in the form of the Employment Rights Bill, which has just finished its Committee Stage in the House of Commons. It still has Report Stage and Third Reading to complete, then it must be agreed by the House of Lords before receiving Royal Assent, so to say it has “already started to work” is a bold claim.
Likewise, the Industrial Strategy has been sketched out in a Green Paper and a public consultation has been carried out, but the final strategy itself will not be published until “spring 2025”. An Industrial Strategy Advisory Council was set up in December last year, but it is only a placeholder for a statutory Industrial Strategy Council which will be established “when Parliamentary time allows”.
As for Great British Energy, this will be established under the Great British Energy Bill which has just finished its passage through the House of Lords and will now come back to the House of Commons for the Lords Amendments to be considered. In other words, the legislation to establish Great British Energy is not yet on the statute book. An interim CEO, Dan McGrail, has been appointed, as have five non-executive directors and a Chair, Juergen Maier, but to imply that the organisation is anything like fully fledged is simply dishonest.
This, I am increasingly noticing, is a Starmerite trait. The Prime Minister and many of his colleagues elide announcements and action so comprehensively that they are presented as identical, which is profoundly misleading. I don’t seek to be too critical, and I acknowledge that Labour has only been in office for eight months, but I have seen on several occasions ministers challenged on what the government has so far achieved, and often they have responded with actions or policies which have been announced but not implemented. At best, that is a shoddy act of political legerdemain, but it hints at a more worrying possibility that ministers simply do not see the difference. In this speech—bearing in mind this is a text over which Murray had full control, rather than improvised answers to spontaneous questions—he volunteers examples of where the Plan for Change has “started to work”, and chooses to begin by citing three areas where work is still very much in progress.
There is impressive spin on some other issues. Murray claims that Belfast shipbuilder “Harland and Wolff [was] saved thanks to a deal brokered by the UK Government”. What he does not mention is that the business has been “saved” through acquisition by Spanish state-owned marine engineering concern Navantia, having been forced into administration in September 2024. That was partly due to a decision by the Business and Trade Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, not to grant Harland and Wolff a £200 million loan guarantee in July. The guarantee, which would have allowed the company to restructure its debts and reduce the cost of repayment, and UK Export Finance had agreed the deal in principle in December 2023 under the Conservative administration. Reynolds rejected it on the grounds that “HM Government funding would not necessarily secure our objectives and there is a very substantial risk that taxpayer money would be lost”.
Murray is right when he says that the deal for Navantia to buy Harland and Wolff was “brokered” by the government. The Spanish firm will not take on liability for Harland and Wolff’s debts, and the government has refused to reveal the full details of its agreement with Navantia, but it is believed that a precondition of the sale was that the Ministry of Defence would improve the financial terms of the existing £1.6 billion contract with Harland and Wolff and Navantia to deliver the Fleet Solid Support Ship Programme of three vessels for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary to provide underway replenishment of dry stores to the Royal Navy. When Reynolds refused the loan guarantee in July last year, he told the House of Commons that “the Government believe, in this instance, that the market is best placed to resolve the commercial matters faced by Harland and Wolff”. But we should mark that we have gone from the government standing guarantor for a loan to a British shipbuilding company, at potentially no cost, to the government paying an additional undisclosed sum of money for an existing contract to see the British company pass into foreign ownership. By any measure, it is hardly a commercial triumph.
When he turns to the need for economic growth in Scotland, Murray indulges in a rhetorical device which is becoming a common form of argumentation but of which I am extremely sceptical. Referring to the fact that Scotland’s economic performance has lagged behind that of the rest of the United Kingdom, he argues “if Scottish growth had simply matched the sluggish UK growth in the last decade our economy would be nearly £10 billion larger”. The relevance or persuasiveness for politicians of the formula “if A had been B, then the result would be C” does not convince me. It is no doubt true, on a simplistic numerical level, and if you think about it as a proposition—if Scotland had had a higher rate of economic growth than it did, its economy would be larger than it is—it shows itself to be blindingly obvious. But so what? It didn’t, so it isn’t. It puts me in mind of the aphorism that if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle. It is true but irrelevant. What matters is understanding, to stretch the analogy, why my aunt does not have balls. Scotland’s lower economic growth was not an act of God but a result of policy action or inaction combined with global circumstances.
Murray uses the device again later:
From 2014 to 2022 the Greater Manchester economy grew by almost 50 per cent. If the Glasgow City Region had achieved that same level of growth, it would be £7.7 billion larger today. That’s an awful lot of jobs and opportunities lost.
But they are not jobs and opportunities lost, they never existed. He is almost transforming what could have been into what was, and then further into something that was lost. It is building castles in the air.
The meat of Murray’s speech is the reorientation of the Scotland Office and a redefinition of its role. He sees it as “the UK Government’s delivery arm for Scotland and Scotland’s window to Whitehall”, and it “will deliver economic growth”. He has set four new strategic priorities: economic growth, green energy, Brand Scotland and tackling poverty, and is reconvening the Scottish Business Growth Group under his chairmanship and that of the Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Kate Forbes.
This duality of purpose for the Scotland Office, both an arm of the UK government in Scotland and a representative of Scotland in the cabinet, is not at all new. In 1991, Richard Parry, a lecturer in social policy at the University of Edinburgh, wrote of the pre-devolution Scottish Office as “a territorial interest group” and an institution which “exercises a lobbying and advocacy role inside central government on behalf of Scottish interests”, calling its role “the adaptation of British policy to fit Scottish circumstances”. The Janus-like role of the Secretary of State, London’s man in Scotland but also Scotland’s man in London, was familiar to generations of holders of the office. It had been taken as read, with greater or lesser emphasis, ever since the establishment of the Scottish Office under the Secretary for Scotland Act 1885, and preserved through the elevation of the post by the Secretaries of State Act 1926 and the reshaping of the department under the Reorganisation of Offices (Scotland) Act 1928 and the Reorganisation of Offices (Scotland) Act 1939.
It is not simply Murray’s conception of his role which harks back to the era before devolution. His description of the approach to economic growth reeks of the corporatism and dirigisme of the 1950s and 1960s, the belief that politicians, not private enterprise, generate wealth. The Secretary of State says that his department “will deliver economic growth”. That is a bold proposition. It is even bolder when one considers that, in 2023/24, the Scotland Office, the Office of the Advocate General for Scotland and the Boundary Commission for Scotland collectively comprised four ministers, four special advisers and 133 civil servants.
The Scottish Business Growth Group is a “forum… to engage directly with business, employer and employee representative organisations” which originally met twice a year. It is distinct from Scottish Enterprise, “Scotland’s national economic development agency” which exists to “help ambitious businesses to innovate and scale” and “attract inward investment and enable Scottish companies to export and enter new markets”. Scottish Enterprise is the successor of the Scottish Development Agency (1975-91), while its specialist regional counterpart, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, replaced the Highlands and Islands Development Board (1965-91). They have a recent sibling in the 2020 South of Scotland Enterprise.
The Scottish Development Agency was itself the replacement for the Scottish Industrial Estates Corporation, the Small Industries Council for the Rural Areas of Scotland and part of the Scottish Development Department, a division of the Scottish Office created in 1962. From 1973 to 1983, the Scottish Office also had a Scottish Economic Planning Department. Since 2022, the Scottish Government has had a National Strategy for Economic Transformation based on “focused interventions, working in collaboration with businesses and other partners”, drawn up by an Advisory Council for Economic Transformation created the preceding year and replacing the Council of Economic Advisers (2007-21).
Murray’s underlying proposition seems to be that Scotland’s economic growth has been lower than it could be because the UK and Scottish Governments have not yet found the right kind of forums, councils and bureaucratic machinery. If he is right, maybe the Scotland Office has finally been reloaded with a silver bullet. It is more likely, I think, that the choice of weapons is the wrong one.