Ten priorities for a future Scottish government

St Andrew’s House, home of the Scottish government (Kim Traynor CC BY-SA 2.0)

The next Holyrood election is in 2026. It’s not too soon to start thinking about what people would want a new government to achieve. Here’s list of things I’d like to see. It’s not comprehensive, it’s not a manifesto, it’s certainly not an election winner. It’s just part of what I think could help government focus on what is important. Enjoy (if you can) and feel free to comment.

• Seek with other political parties a review of the operation of the Scottish parliament with the aim of improving its effectiveness and efficiency, to include reviewing and reinforcing its scrutiny function, potentially introducing an outside element.
• Limit the number of ministerial posts in government to a set number in strict alignment with devolved responsibilities and with a maximum number of MSPs to hold government office, perhaps to 20% of all MSPs.
• Abolish the constitution, external affairs and culture cabinet secretary post. Reconstitute the responsibility for culture at ministerial level with an appropriate budget.
• Identify Scottish government agencies that add little value to what is achievable using UK bodies and negotiate the delivery of the services on an integrated or agency basis. Examples might include Food Standards Scotland and Social Security Scotland.
• Review Scottish government representation abroad with the aim of restricting the role to trade promotion and reducing or removing posts that are not effective in that role.
• Over the life of the next parliament move towards a system in which no charity receives more than 75% of its annual funding from the Scottish government, with the longer term aim of reducing any individual charity’s government funding to under 50%.
• Identify sectors of the Scottish economy with major growth potential and confine state support to those sectors.
• Introduce a more rigorous method of improvement in education, to include better measurement of outcomes and a reinforced system of inspection.
• Review universal benefits within the control of the Scottish parliament to ensure that they are directed towards those in greatest need, to include the ‘baby box’ scheme.
• Unless otherwise stated, direct any savings from these proposals towards education and health provision.

Unanswered questions

I ask this question of the world generally on my Twitter profile. The ability to provide evidence for a factual claim is fundamental to rational debate. And there’s scarcely a political party that hasn’t claimed at some time that it believes in ‘evidence-based policy’.

Unfortunately, the political world is awash with parties and individuals who make factual claims without providing the evidence for them. It doesn’t need a long academic treatise, just a link to where evidence for a claim can be found, the small print ‘Source: …’ you often, and should, see underneath a statistic or a graph. Where that basic safeguard is missing, even after a polite enquiry has sought it, we have the right to be suspicious. It’s why I ask my question.

As a result of my question, I have quite a collection of organisations and individuals who decline to provide evidence for their claims. Here is a small selection, focusing mainly on nationalist parties and their senior representatives, but with a few examples of undoubtedly intelligent people who should know better, and the much larger number of random, often anonymous, accounts who make even wilder claims based only on their own naivety or fantasy.

Enjoy.

From Twitter accounts who declare, or obviously have, a party affiliation

SNP MP Douglas Chapman claimed ‘Over the next 5 years the UK will suck £80bn directly out of the Scottish economy. Labour want to spend it on giving English taxpayers a council tax cut.’

I asked ‘Have you got a link to a reliable source for that £80bn figure …? I’m sure you’ll agree the facts and truth are important in politics. Many thanks.’

Answer came there none.

The SNP said ‘Scotland is bearing the brunt of a broken Brexit Britain, with UK car insurance skyrocketing by up to 43.1%. Car insurance inflation remains low within the EU.’

I asked ‘Do you have a source for those figures and their connection to Brexit? Thanks. BTW It’s good practice to include a source on a meme if you want to be taken seriously.’

Answer came there none.

SNP MP Stephen Flynn said ‘The values of this place [“Westminster”], they aren’t Scotland’s values’

I said ‘If he hadn’t blocked me on Twitter … I might have asked him what I reasonably ask of many people making factual claims.’ [Mr Flynn is my MP]

Unsurprisingly Answer came there none.

The ALBA party said ‘In 2014, we were told that North Sea Oil and Gas was about to run out.’

I asked ‘Can you produce evidence for that statement about 2014? A link to a reliable source will do. It’s not something I remember.’

Answer came there none.

SNP MP Dave Doogan said ’When the people of Scotland vote for independence, the rest of the UK will have to buy our energy resources.’

I asked ‘What proportion of the rest of the UK’s energy needs are met by Scottish resources at present? It’s a simple factual question and I’m happy with a link to a reliable source of the information. Thank you.’

Answer came there none.

Alex Gill (‘SNP member … former Constituency Assistant to SNP MP David Linden) said ‘A majority of those aged 54 and under support Independence. Younger folk much more likely. If you feel Independence isn’t coming fast enough, don’t feel down. Demographics are destiny. The clock is ticking down on union, and they know it.’ [He had attached part of an unsourced table as ‘evidence’]

I asked ‘Here’s the latest poll on What Scotland Thinks … Somewhat different from yours, where you also omit those >64. Now tell us your source …’

Answer came there none.

Celtchar [‘SNP member’) said ‘Scotland’s Seabed was changed by Tony Blair’s Govt. the NIGHT BEFORE Scottish Devolution in 1999 – it’s a matter of Public Record – FACT! England secretly took 6,000 MILES of the North Sea bed – the Right-wing MSM Buried that Information – FACT HISTORICAL FACTS are FACTS!.’

I asked ‘Do you have a reliable source for that claim? A link will do. Thanks.’

Answer came there none.

Christopher McEleny, ALBA party general secretary, said ‘Scotland is on course to deliver a whopping 46% of Europe’s actual offshore energy by 2035.’

I asked ‘Have you got a source for that forecast please? A link will do. Thanks.’

Answer came there none.

From people who should know better

Craig Murray, former British ambassador and now well-known Scottish nationalist said ‘If England wishes to be the sole successor state [to the UK] and retain the seat on the UN Security Council, it has to take responsibility for the total UK national debt.’

I asked ‘Have you got an authoritative source for that? A simple link will do. Thanks.’

Answer came there none.

James Smith (‘Vice Principal & Professor at Edinburgh University’} said ‘About a quarter to a third of people in the UK believe colonies were better off under the Empire, are proud of it, and wish we still had it.’

[This tweet creeps in as Smith was responding to a statement about a nationalist-supporting Scottish actor returning his Order of the British Empire medal because he had discovered the British empire was ‘toxic’]

I said ‘Interesting. Do you have a source for that statistic? Thanks.’

Answer came there none.

@ProfJWR (‘Retired Professor of Media Politics‘ John W Robertson) said ‘Native Scots are strongly in favour of independence’ and linked his tweet to his blog post of the same name, in which he included an unattributed map showing ‘where the English-born electorate lives in Scotland.’

I said ‘What’s the source of the map showing “where the English-born electorate lives in Scotland”? It can’t show the “electorate”. No one has ever measured the electorate by place of birth. If it’s total population from the census it’s at least 11 years old.’

Answer came there none.

Unfortunately, he has removed the map from his blog post, though the text remains.

A few examples of the far more numerous, often anonymous, accounts that make sometimes wild unsubstantiated claims

Bob Scott @xrpbobscott said ‘Pmsl* why is Broken Britain who haven’t balanced the books since ww2 so keen to keep scotland? Because they are bankrupt without it.’ [* Pmsl – a social media abbreviation for ‘pissing myself laughing’]

I asked ‘Have you got a source for the claim that Britain would be bankrupt without Scotland? A link would do. Thanks.’

Answer came there none.

Jollyman56 @jollyman56 claimed ‘Our economic performance is determined by England’s parliament. Currently, we give our revenues to WM. They return 50% via Barnett. Only when England requires more spending do we get consequentials. It doesn’t work in reverse. That’s imbalance.’

I asked ‘Do you have a reliable source for that 50% statistic? A link will do. Thanks!’

Answer came there none.

Ken @outofunion claimed ‘… Scotland’s NHS budget is DEPENDENT on what the British Government allocates to England’s NHS …’

I asked ‘Can you tweet a link to a reliable source that confirms Scotland’s NHS budget is dependent on what the UK government allocates to the English NHS? Thanks.’

Answer came there none.

And so it goes, interminably. In every example I cite the perpetrators provided no proof of the claims made. In many cases, others have countered with evidence proving the claims are false. Very rarely do any of the nationalist accounts who make unsubstantiated claims respond positively to my polite request for evidence. Of those who do, I cannot remember a single case where their response provided definitive proof of their claim. Most link to a source already discredited or evidence that at the very best is ambiguous.

Quite frequently I have to point out to hostile respondents that it’s not my job to search for the evidence I believe is important: you make the claim, the onus is on you to substantiate it. As I say above, it’s the way rational debate works.

Others take a more robust view on the subject than me, asserting that anyone unwilling to provide evidence for their claim is almost certain to be lying, and should be treated as a liar. I have some sympathy with that point of view but there are also naïve or ignorant people who do not understand the nature of facts and evidence. And of course, some only tune in to what supports their views.

Worst in this are the two political parties, SNP and ALBA, and their elected representatives. They set the tone for fellow separatists and will know what they’re doing.

Me? I’ll keep plodding away with my polite question and drawing my own conclusion when silence (or occasionally abuse) ensues. It may seem wasted effort. But the perpetrators of unsubstantiated claims discredit themselves and their cause. They’re nearly always found out and will suffer as a result.

A note on sources. As someone who tries always to give sources for my own claims, let me pre-empt any criticism that I’ve not done so in this post. All I’ve done is quote verbatim what others have said on Twitter. All the examples here date from late 2022 at the earliest. I found them all by searching on Twitter for ‘@rogerlwhite: sources’ and you could do the same. In many cases the name or Twitter handle of the account concerned will lead you to the claim. Finally, and perhaps most effectively, you can also do a simple search on the quoted words the account used.

Shovelling sh*t: the Herculean task facing any SNP leader

Less than 24 hours after writing this post there was an update to record, and more are being added almost every day. See end of post.

Forgive the infelicity. It’s not my normal style. But sometimes needs must.

My disguised-yet-not-disguised title for this blog post is a reference, arcane if you will, to the twelve labours of Hercules, the son of Zeus, king of the Gods in Greek mythology.

As punishment for killing his wife and children, Hercules is set a series of tasks that would be impossible for any mortal. One is to clean the stables of King Augeas (hence the saying ‘clearing out the Augean stables’}. No ordinary steading, the stables house over a thousand divine cattle and haven’t been cleaned for over thirty years, hence accumulating a vast amount of, er, dung. Not quite best animal husbandry practice, but there you go, different times, different mores.

While you and I might resign ourselves to years of labour with a wheelbarrow and shovel, Hercules was made of more divine stuff. Using his huge strength, he knocked a hole in the stable walls and diverted two rivers so they flowed through the stables, flushing out three decades’ worth of bovine ordure to leave them tickety-boo spotless. (It occurs to me there might be a message lurking in the diversion of the rivers for those nationalists who believe ‘England needs our water’ but that’s another story)

You can probably see where this is going. With new revelations almost every day it’s easy to view the SNP as those stables, with an accumulation of dung that needs clearing out, not perhaps thirty-years’ worth, but certainly sixteen, since they came to power at Holyrood.

Setting aside any record in actual government, woes beset the party on every side – an apparently secure leader and FM resigning both positions unexpectedly for a reason (too knackered) that just didn’t ring true; the resignation in short order of the party’s comms chief and the CEO, her husband, because the membership turned out to be 30% lower than claimed only weeks earlier, and also turned out to have been falling for some time; a subsequent bitter leadership contest that the winner only scraped through with 52% of votes on a second round of voting; the arrest and then release without charge of the CEO, while his and his wife’s house was searched by the police, complete with police gazebo parked on the front lawn; the removal of a £110k motorhome (supposedly an election ‘battle bus’) that had been parked in the CEO’s elderly mother’s driveway and never apparently used; the financial mess the party may or may not be in but certainly encompasses the questions of where £600k raised for an indyref2 has gone and a curious £100k loan the CEO made to the party; the perhaps related resignation of the party’s long-standing external auditors, not revealed until six months after they left; and the inability, or perhaps indifference, to find a replacement auditor, with the party’s latest annual accounts due to be lodged with the Electoral Commission by July.

All this without mentioning the resignation of members a while ago from the SNP national executive committee (NEC), including MP Joanna Cherry and a national treasurer who complained that he couldn’t get the information he needed to fulfil his role (video has just emerged of Ms Sturgeon telling that same NEC to lay off with questions about the party’s finances – everything was fine). Oh, and to finish off with some more initials, deep splits about GRR (Gender Recognition Reform), DRS (Deposit Return Scheme) and the SGP (Scottish Green Party).

WTF, as many a member has probably said in private.

Although most of this – and you’ll probably know there’s more – will be familiar to many readers, it’s worth setting down in one place to emphasise the crisis facing the party. It’s a staggering litany, and all self-inflicted.

Dealing with this faecal mountain is going to need a herculean effort. Who can do it? Certainly not the old guard who oversaw and perhaps partook in the mess and until the last few days have been fulsome in their praise of the previous regime – some still seem to be in denial about what is happening. As for new leader and FM H Yousaf (that’s H for Humza not Hercules), his track record in ministerial office and performance since he became leader confirm he’s certainly not the person for the job. Is the narrowly defeated leadership candidate Kate Forbes lurking in the wings ready to pounce should Yousaf resign? Hmm, difficult to see for all sorts of reasons. As for the rest, the talent pool is shallow and/or marooned over the water (that’s the water of the River Tweed) in Westminster.

I don’t pretend to see a way through all this for the party without much bloodletting, a diminution in numbers of MPs/MSPs in the next Westminster and Holyrood elections, and perhaps some sort of split. Many leading nationalists within and outwith the party have already gone on record with the view that the situation has set their cause (independence/separation, as you prefer) back many years. Let’s hope so.

But let’s also not be complacent. After so many years in power at Holyrood, the SNP probably need a period in opposition anyhow. And other parties can’t rely on nationalist disarray to guarantee their own futures. They need the policies and the presentation to ensure electoral success and help Scotland get back to the more normal left-centre-right way of doing politics in western democracies.

Nicola Sturgeon is of course not the only nationalist idol to fall suddenly from grace. The previous incumbent of that role, one A Salmond, once wrote ‘The dream shall never die’. It may never for some but let’s hope that fewer and fewer Scots are prone to that particular dream as time goes on.

Updates

18 April 2023 – long-term SNP treasurer and MSP Colin Beattie arrested, taken into custody and being questioned by detectives. Remember, arrest is not the same as being charged with any offence. People are innocent until proven guilty. Later released without charge. Even so …

19 April 2023 – Beattie resigns (is ‘stepping back from’) the role of SNP national treasurer.

20 April 2023 – Humza Yousaf announces that 22 months after Peter Murrell loaned the SNP £107,620 in June 2021 they have still not paid it all back. About half had been paid by October 2021, i.e. about £53,810, equivalent to a rate of about £13,500 a month. There is no word on how much is outstanding 15 months later, or why.

22 April 2023 – SNP MP Stuart McDonald is appointed as the party’s new treasurer. Good luck Stuart, you’ll need it.

22 April 2023 – there are online and some media rumblings about Angus Robertson MSP, both the funding of the Progress Scotland polling outfit he founded a while ago, and a ‘secret’ salary supplement he is said to have received when he was leader of the SNP’s Westminster group. Whether they come to anything, we shall see.

23 April 2023 – SNP deputy leader Keith Brown MSP says, ‘We are a more transparent … party than any other party in Scotland’. So there you have it. Ignore everything you’ve read here and in innumerable other commentaries. All is right in the world of Scottish nationalism. File under Self-delusion of the grandest order.

24 April 2023 – the SNP’s apparent inability to replace their accountants who resigned last year could affect not only the party itself, but also their Westminster group of MPs. They receive so-called Short money, granted to opposition parties to help defray their expenses. If they do not file their accounts by 31 May (only five weeks away) they stand to lose £1,2 million. Westminster leader Stephen Flynn is quoted as saying ‘I thought it would be a relatively straight forward process to secure new auditors but that’s proven not to be the case’. Hmm, I wonder why.

25 April 2003 – a bonus today. Two updates to add. 1. Ex-SNP treasurer Colin Beattie (see 18 and 19 April above) has clarified when he first found out the party had bought a motorhome. ‘He was asked by journalists whether he knew about and had signed off the purchase. “No, I didn’t know about that,” he said [similar vans are said to retail for over £100,000]. He later said although he did not know about the transaction at the time of purchase, he found out about it in the 2021 annual accounts.’ 2. Nicola Sturgeon has broken her recent silence with what looks like an impromptu press conference (for which read rammy) in a Holyrood corridor. She said ‘the police investigation into the party’s finances did not influence her decision to stand down as first minister’. So now you know. The same article records that the party’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn only knew about the motorhome ‘when it was printed on the front of a newspaper’ and that Humza Yousaf only discovered the party owned the motorhome when he saw a warrant outlining property that the police wanted to confiscate. It’s beginning to look as if never was so little known about something by so many.

Why I voted No in 2014

I’ve just seen someone on Twitter (@putey_pute here) explain why he voted No in 2014 and ask:

What made you decide, if you had to decide at all?

In some ways, it seems a curious question to ask after all this time. But we’re stuck in a sort of political stasis with recent opinion polls showing exactly the same appetite for independence as in 2014 – No 55%, Yes 45%. And this after 17 years of SNP government. Mr Pute’s getting some interesting answers to his question. With the SNP down on their uppers perhaps it is a good time nearly a decade later to revisit the question and consider what if anything has changed.

So here are my reasons in no particular order, from memory refreshed by occasional reference back to my blog.

Sentiment

Don’t underplay sentiment in determining people’s views. Judging by what was said and done at the time, it certainly seemed to drive much of the mood for separation in 2014 with frequent references by leading separatists to ‘destiny’ and the ‘sovereign will of the Scottish people’, not to mention the whole panoply of Scottish accessories – tartan, pipes, tammies, saltires and the rest. It all sat uneasily with the desperate attempt to persuade waverers and the non-committed that it was really all about civic nationalism (see for example Destiny and civic nationalism).

Well, as I and many others had reinforced at the time, there’s another sort of sentiment – that of shared family, friends, experience and culture across Britain. For me, that played strongly in 2014 and still does.

Charlatans, chancers and frankly unpleasant people

Even in the run-up to the 2014 referendum I could see too many nationalists who just didn’t strike the right tone to convince me. Here are a few examples.

First, a graphic produced by Yes Scotland that put simply says ‘We’re decent folks. Here are the mainstream Brits lined up with some dodgy types including racists and fascists’:

If not in a legal sense, the association was certainly defamatory in common parlance. And guess who retweeted it with Yes Scotland’s caption ‘Look who lines up for Yes. And who lines up for No. #indyref #voteYes #Scotland.’ Correct, Nicola Sturgeon (see On the relevance of fellow travellers).

Then there were the spurious ‘Xyz for Yes’ groups that emerged from nowhere, most if not all the offspring of the Yes Scotland campaign, heavily dominated by the SNP, and all designed to give the sense of a movement broader and deeper than it ever was. Lawyers for Yes was a classic example, with a glance at the leading lights telling you all you needed to know. One of them was quoted as addressing a meeting of property developers with the memorable justification for separation that ‘setting up of the mechanisms of a new state will provide a huge boost to the corporate and commercial property sector.’  You knew it, Office Developers for Yes.

Finally, or at least in terms of what determined my vote in 2014, there was the whole fringe of frankly weird and sometimes hate-filled groups and individuals that appeared on the streets and in your face, not just on a pretend football pitch – the cosplayers, the Scottish Resistance, the fascist Seed of the Gael, and the producer of the so-called Wee Blue Book.

It’s the economy, stupid

Oil at $113 a barrel will save the nation (paraphrase from ‘Scotland’s Future’). The most ludicrous example of the fantasy economics that drove the Yes campaign. There was a lot more of course, even unto the claimed share of UK assets a separate Scotland would inherit and the cost and speed of setting up shop separately after the purported independence day (24 March 2016 since you asked). All well documented at the time. Nine years on that all-time expensive oil has been replaced by the nirvana of renewable energy and the lie that the EU are gagging to have us back.

On the day of the referendum, my gut feeling that my No vote was the right one was reinforced by what I saw around me – on the media the sight of naïve Yes voters being led by a piper, Hamelin-style, towards a polling station in Glasgow; a clapped-out estate car covered in Yes tat at the nearest distance it could get to my polling station without being hauled away; and bumping into my elderly neighbour who was so worried that the vote would go the other way. And after, more nastiness, from Salmond and Sturgeon’s refusal to attend the subsequent service of reconciliation, to the continuing drip-drip of defamation, like the online abuse of my then-local former Labour MP Anne Begg, and of course much more until the present day.

So sentiment, the unpleasantness of many separatists and the economy. Has anything improved in the case for independence that would make change my mind? Mark me down as unrepentant.

Note for any passing unsympathetic nationalist. If you read my blog you’ll realise this is not a case for Scotland remaining as part of the UK. It only seeks to answer the question of what made me vote the way I did in 2014. No whataboutery in response, thanks.

Celebrating the UK: No. 8 in an occasional series – the Nation Brands Index 2022. UK in Top 6

Facts matter. Perceptions do too.

Here’s an annual survey that asks no fewer than 60,000 adults in twenty ‘major advanced and emerging economies’ what they think of the top sixty nations in the world, selected for their political and/or economic importance. It’s called the Nation Brands Index (NBI) and has been running in one form or another since 2012.

People are asked about their views of a country based on six factors, its:

• exports
• governance
• culture
• people
• tourism, and
• immigration and investment.

From the answers, a single score is calculated for each country and they are ranked from one to sixty. There’s a lot more to the detail of the survey and you can find the full report of the result for the latest survey carried out in 2022 here.

And here are the results for the top 10 nations for 2021 and 2022:

You’ll see the UK is in the top 6, though it has slipped one place since 2021. Even in the top 10, its score is still above that of Switzerland, the USA, Sweden, and Australia.

The authors point out that this is the first time in the history of the NBI that the UK has been out of the top five nations. They say this is because of perceived weaknesses in its people and governance indices, where it received lower marks on the welcoming nature of its people and having a competent and honest government. Let’s concede this doesn’t look good, whatever your politics, although uniquely 2022 saw the turmoil associated with having no fewer than three prime ministers in a few months. But, hey, 6^th out of 60 while that was going on is not bad at all.

A parochial point and curiously, for this reader at least, is the fact that of all the sovereign states in the survey, the UK is the only one to have any individual parts separately identified, scored and ranked – Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. This led The National newspaper to headline on 10 February:

Scotland’s global reputation at highest level, international survey reveals.

Allowing for the headline-writer’s usual hyperbole, that’s true insofar as it goes. And it does allow a comparison between the UK overall and three of its component parts. Here are those results for the devolved parts of the UK:

To put an equally valid gloss on the newspaper’s headline:

Scotland’s global ranking nine places below the UK’s, international survey reveals.

Yes, perceptions are important.

Here are links to previous articles in this series.

Celebrating the UK: No. 1 in an occasional series – the El Salvadorean guerrilla

Celebrating the UK: No. 2 in an occasional series – the Mexican cosmologist

Celebrating the UK: No. 3 in an occasional series – attitudes to immigration and diversity

Celebrating the UK: No. 4 in an occasional series – what the world thinks of us

Celebrating the UK: No. 5 in an occasional series – the case of the Hongkongers who want to come here

Celebrating the UK: No. 6 in an occasional series – one of the happiest countries in the world (yes, really)

Celebrating the UK: No. 7 in an occasional series – I’ve been (almost) everywhere man

Nicolamandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said – “Two vast and powerless boats of steel

Stand by a river … Near them, on the quay,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on a pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Nicola, Queen of Queens;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of those colossal Wrecks, boundless and bare

The lone and hilly coasts stretch far away.”

– with apologies to Percy Bysse Shelley and Ozymandias

In which I venture (delicately) into the area of Scottish trans issues

Many years ago BBC’s Radio 4 show The Food Programme had a feature on a new way to preserve and enhance the flavour of herbs. It included a visit their reporter made to a Dutch company that used an innovative process of, I think, exposing the herbs to some sort of radiation that was entirely safe. The details don’t matter. The important point was that the process, as described by the company, was carried out under laboratory conditions with no chance of contamination of any kind.

The reporter, presumably kitted out in some sort of safety gear, was taken into the production area which featured a vat of clear liquid (radioactive in some way?) over which the herbs were passed. The reporter commented to his guide that there seemed to be a piece of wood floating in the vat. The response of the guide was along the lines of, ‘No, that’s not possible’. There then ensued a to-and-fro in which the reporter more than once pointed out that ‘Look, it’s there’, to which the invariable response was ‘No, there is no contamination of any kind’.

The story can be boiled down to the simple exchange

‘There seems to be a problem’

‘No there isn’t’

[Repeat ad nauseum]

This seems, to me, to be the situation that much of the Scottish parliament has got itself locked into over its Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. The proponents are adamant that its measures are not only needed but are entirely benign. Many (and I mean many) women and women’s organisations keep saying ‘There are problems with this’ and keep getting ignored.

To say that the debate is at times toxic is an understatement, but that seems to be par for the course over the issue of trans rights generally, in which I take only a passing interest and into which I do not intend to get sucked beyond this particular post.

I say that much of the Scottish parliament seems to have got itself into a ‘Yes there is/No there isn’t’ situation over the Bill because support for it (although not opposition – step forward the Greens) seems to be spread to a greater or lesser across all parties. The detail is of course more nuanced with individual MSPs supporting the main thrust of the principles involved while expressing concern about individual proposals.

There is a special role for leadership in all this.

A wise leader would recognise what seems blindingly obvious to me – the widespread concern expressed by women about the proposals needs to be addressed in some way while ensuring the rights of trans people.

If wisdom is a first essential criterion of leadership, it is a hurdle at which our first minister seems to have fallen on this issue. Instead of seeking to negotiate a way between two apparently contradictory strongly-held (and non-political party) views, she has dug herself further into a trench marked ‘No problems! Full steam ahead!’.

It’s one thing to ignore much of your domestic audience on such a challenging subject. It’s another to cast aside the views of a senior United Nations official, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls. Reem Alsalem. She wrote a reasoned, nine-page long letter to Nicola Sturgeon, concluding:

I share the concern that such proposals [of the bill] would potentially open the door for violent males who identify as men to abuse the process of acquiring a gender certificate and the rights that are associated with it. This presents potential risks to the safety of women in all their diversity (including women born female, transwomen, and gender non-conforming women).

If you think ‘cast aside’ is too harsh a judgment, be aware that her response to those concerns was to dismiss Ms Alsalem as ‘the person from the UN’ and say rather smugly that ‘many of these issues have been discussed and addressed already by this parliament …’

Given the widespread concerns many women have expressed, and the specifics of the UN special representative’s criticism, this seems a bizarre corner for the first minister to have to have painted herself into. Remember that she has so often appeared to be, and I’m sure on many occasions genuinely has been, a champion of women’s rights.

If you think I exaggerate the role of the first minister in this, I’d invite you to identify from memory the words of any other senior SNP politician on the subject. Ms Sturgeon is by far the most dominant figure in her party, indeed in Scottish politics. She, perhaps with a small group of colleagues, sets the agenda and she sets the tone.

You’ll notice in the title of this piece that I refer to ‘Scottish trans issues’. This is not about the whole subject of trans rights and trans claims. For what it’s worth I have huge admiration for some trans people (for example, the late Jan Morris and some of the people marching in the ex-service personnel’s LGBTQ group at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday). My views on many of the current over-assertive and sometimes abusive partisans are much less favourable.

Specifically Scottish trans issues, as far as I can see, focus almost wholly on the current gender recognition reform Bill. But don’t worry. You might think there’s a problem. The first minister says there isn’t.

The language I’ve used in this post may not be to everyone’s taste. I haven’t immersed myself in the wider subject and may not be familiar with the words others use or approve of. If you choose to comment on this piece please be mindful that I ask people not to be abusive. Abusive comments will not be published.

Some Scottish electoral statistics for reference

It’s sometimes helpful to look at the detail of electoral statistics to see what they tell us compared with what politicians and others sometimes claim.

It would be foolish to deny that the Conservatives at Westminster (under the first past the post system – FPTP) or the SNP at Holyrood (constituency FPTP system plus a regional list) currently have the right as the largest party in each case to form a government. And, unpalatable as it will be to many, both must be able to pursue the policies they were elected on, providing they do so within the law.

But number of seats won in an election can not justify every claim made by a government or their supporters. In Scotland, for example, we often hear that:

• most people in Scotland need/want/demand or alternatively reject/will not tolerate something
• more starkly, Scotland itself needs/wants/demands or alternatively rejects/will not tolerate the same thing
• Scotland never gets the government it voted for in Westminster
• and recently, I have seen ‘Most people voted SNP’.

To test claims like these it is helpful to look at how many people voted in an election and how they voted, not how many seats any party won.

The results expressed this way of two types of election can help test the validity of the sorts of claim listed above – UK general elections and Scottish parliament elections. Local issues make the results of council elections too complex to be used in this way. The two tables below set out the results of all UK and Scottish parliamentary elections since devolution in 1999:

• they show the percentage of people who voted for each of the four main parties in each election
• for Holyrood elections, only the constituency results are shown as these are the easier test of who electors want to represent them, with the regional list results more of a ‘balancing’ mechanism
• the three pro-UK parties are shown both separately and summarised together, because on the fundamental question of separation/independence they share the same position and that is relevant to some of the claims listed above
• the turnout at each election is shown because this qualifies the sort of statements that are legitimate about what people want. For example, it’s fair to assume that most SNP voters want independence and most Tory/Labour/LibDem voters don’t. It’s not fair, from the results of elections, to assume how many non-voters want independence
• the last column of each table shows which party(-ies) formed the government after each election at Westminster and Holyrood
• finally, not all rows (SNP + Pro-UK parties) add up to 100%, partly because figures are rounded to the nearest whole percentage point, but mainly because the tables excludes minor parties.

UK general elections: percentage of votes gained by each party and turnout in Scotland since devolution

Scottish parliament elections: percentage of constituency votes gained by each party and turnout in Scotland since devolution

The purpose of this post is mainly to leave these figures in the public domain for future reference by myself or others. For example, feel free to link to or cite them in order to counter false claims on social media. But as examples of the sort of truths that can be mined from them, consider four examples.

• Although they’ve come close to it and dominant as their position sometimes seems to be, the SNP have never won a majority of votes in any Westminster or Holyrood election since devolution. Conversely, the pro-UK parties have between them, with one exceptiion, always mustered more votes than the SNP (the exception was the UK general election of 2015 in the euphoric, for the SNP, wake of the Scottish referendum)
• The question of Scotland never getting the government it voted for at Westminster is not as clear cut as nationalists like to claim. In 2001 and 2005 the Labour party got by far the highest number of votes in Scotland and formed the government in Westminster
• It’s a moot question as to whether Scotland gets the government it wants at Holyrood with the SNP. Since they came into government in 2007 they have achieved between 33% and 48% of the total constituency vote. In contrast Labour and LibDems, who formed the coalition executive between 1999 and 2007 gained between 50% and 53% of votes
• All claims about what most people want or Scotland wants based on electoral statistics need to be qualified by the fact that at most less than two-thirds (63%) of the electorate have voted in a Holyrood election, and once less than half (49%). The equivalent figures for Westminster elections are higher – 71% and 58%.

As I say, the figures in the two tables are here for reference. Feel free to use them.

Will the Scottish NHS ever improve under an SNP government?

There’s been a bit of a stooshie today about the NHS in Scotland. Under the headline

NHS bosses in Scotland discuss having wealthy pay for treatment

the BBC reported discussions that ‘NHS leaders’ recently had on the subject. It’s not clear who the ‘leaders’ were (my guess would be chief executives of the regional and other health boards) but they were addressed by Caroline Lamb, NHS Scotland chief executive, director-general health and social care in the Scottish government, and a member of its corporate governance board i.e. a very senior civil servant. Ms Lamb apparently told the meeting that it ‘had been given the “green light to present what boards feel reform may look like” and that “areas which were previously not viable options are now possibilities”’. Amidst the upset about the revelations, the accuracy of a leaked minute of the meeting has not been denied.

It should be said that although the question of charging wealthier patients was – unfairly – headlined by the BBC and has become the focus of much of today’s unfavourable comment, the discussion at the meeting was much broader. I’d urge anyone interested in the subject to read the BBC article, which seems to be a balanced account of what the minute says, and includes comment from the first minister and cabinet secretary for health and social care.

Nationalists of various stripe have rushed to condemn what they believe to be the main thrust of the meeting’s discussion. Their wailings have included the usual nonsense about the BBC’s ‘agenda’ and a plot that somehow involves opposition politicians. All knee-jerk defensive stuff.

The context for the discussion cited by the minute is stated as:

 It “is not possible to continue to run the range of programmes” the NHS currently offers while remaining safe “and doing no harm.” And [the NHS leaders] warn that: “Unscheduled care is going to fall over in the near term before planned care falls over.”

The British Medical Association (the doctors’ trade union) recently said that the Scottish NHS was in a ‘perilous situation’ and strikes by nurses are currently threatened. I wouldn’t seek to argue solely from personal experience but I had to give up NHS dentistry a while back when no practices were taking NHS patients, I’ve recently resorted to private physiotherapy for a running injury, and on the advice of my GP surgery, I use Specsavers for the glamourous procedure of having ear wax removed. One friend has recently moved from one health board area to another and can only find a private dentist. And another spent thousands for an operation on a painful knee that would have taken years on an NHS waiting list to sort. If, like all of us, you’re lucky enough to have the resources to afford at least some private treatment, I’m sure you could come up with similar examples.

To revert to ‘the meeting’, the NHS leaders came up with a number of ideas to ease the problems the minute identified. Their discussion lasted only 45 minutes and their list has a touch of the brainstorm about it, though there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Here are their ideas.

• Design a two-tier system where the people who can afford to go private
• Change the risk appetite of hospitals
• Institute a target for patients to be discharged to their home for treatment after a maximum of 23 hours
• Do without an NHS, as other countries do
• Review the cost of long-term prescribing of drugs where there are alternative options
• Pause funding of new developments and drugs unless they can be proved to save the NHS money
• Pursue efficiency savings because there are still vast areas of waste in the service in ‘governance and all-day meetings etc’
• Consider applying a charge for freedom of information requests
• Stopping care services altogether and instead send patients home for care.

Although I have views on some of these possibilities, I’m in no position to judge the merit of most of them. But they do show that senior leaders are thinking through potentially radical solutions to what look increasingly like intractable problems. I think that in principle we should welcome this.

Note that the civil servant in charge of the NHS said that the meeting had been given the ‘green light’ to think through what reform might look like and to consider change in areas previously unthinkable. She reports directly to the cabinet secretary for health and I cannot believe that he, and most probably the first minister, were unaware of what was going on. Perversely you might think, given my politics, I’d welcome a public commitment by the SNP government that they are up for thinking all this through seriously. The cowardice of course is doing it all hugger-mugger and upon publication immediately denying anything was afoot.

Just to introduce some, you might say unusual balance, I don’t think the reaction of opposition politicians so far has been much better in their own knee-jerk condemnation. And of course, this is not a purely Scottish problem; similar issues beset the NHS in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

To mix my metaphors, the NHS is of course something of a sacred cow to many and its reform a poisoned chalice. But uncharacteristically, the SNP could have been the first government in the UK to consider seriously the profound reform of health care. But they won’t now, certainly not this side of the next Holyrood election.

PS To be clear, I have no commitment to any particular model of health care but my mind’s open to consider any well-argued possibility supported by evidence.

Celebrating the UK: No. 7 in an occasional series – I’ve been (almost) everywhere man

The passports of some countries are worth more than others. That’s why Henley & Partners compile their annual Passport Index, which shows how many countries the holders of a particular nation’s passport can travel to without getting a visa. Most of us won’t have to bother with the reason they compile their index: they advise high net-worth individuals on what they call ‘Residence and Citizenship by Investment’. In other words, which countries will give you citizenship if you throw a shedload of money at them.

But passports have a different sort of value for most people. They enable, in effect, seamless travel from your own country to other places. The more countries you can visit without getting a visa, the more valuable your passport is.

These days most of us, at least in the UK, rarely have to get a visa for merely visiting somewhere else. When we do, the bureaucracy can be formidable, the investment in time and money considerable: forms to be filled, documentation to be copied and certified, appointments made in advance at maybe distant consulates, fees to be paid, and an anxious wait for your passport to be returned through the post.  I know this from recently helping a relative obtain a visa for a country that shall remain nameless.

So the more countries you can visit visa-free, the better. The latest Henley Passport Index for 2022 ranks 227 countries and territories in the world for visa-free travel.

On this criterion, here are the best and worst passports in the world:

• Japan – the holders of a Japanese passport can visit 193 destinations visa-free and need a visa for only 34
• Afghanistan – Afghan passport holders can only visit 27 countries visa-free, but require a visa for 200 (also at the bottom of the league table are other countries you might expect, for example Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia).

The top of the league table is a little more complex, with a substantial number of countries enjoying the same number of visa-free destinations clustering in equal positions, and where the difference between positions is marginal. For example, Germany and Spain are in equal 3^rd position, their passport holders able to visit 190 destinations visa-free (for the record, Singapore and South Korea are in 2^nd position).

The UK is in 6^th position, along with France, Ireland and Portugal, all able to visit 187 destinations without a visa. Just behind us in 7^th position (186 destinations) are Belgium, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, and the USA.

By and large the number of destinations a country’s passport holders can visit visa-free is a reflection of many other things – how much that country is trusted; how many international friends it has; how safe and reliable it and its citizens are thought to be; how healthy they might be; how able they are to support themsrelves while abroad; and so on. In short, the international standing of that country. The fact that the UK is 6^th equal on this measure amongst 227 countries is a strong affirmation of its standing.

A UK passport is one of the best to have in the world. Its value should not be under-estimated.

You can find the other articles in this occasional series by searching for the word ‘celebrating’ on this blog. Earlier entries are also listed here.