There are indeed political lessons to be learned from the recent result of the Glasgow North East by-election for the constituency’s Westminster seat. These lessons are to be digested by politicians, the Scottish electorate and the SNP.

The prior decision by the SNP Government to cancel the project to build a Glasgow Airport Rail Link (GARL) immediately became the issue on which the by-election would be fought and is now one which the Scottish Labour group are making a trial of strength.

Iain Gray, the group Leader, has publicly committed Labour to getting the GARL project restored.

Some SNP activists are alarmed by the party’s failure not only to take the seat (never likely) but to show formidable voting strength in this traditional Labour seat. They are going public with criticism of the GARL cancellation. John Swinney, Cabinet Secretary for Finance, is the target for criticism in such quarters.

There are three issues here.

• Was the cancellation of GARL the right fiscal decision?
• Was Swinney singly responsible for that decision?
• Was the decision handled effectively in terms of its communication to the public?

Beyond these, there are wider issues of what, regardless of independence – Scotland needs from its governments to develop their own capability and the country’s economy, its social and cultural structures, its ambition and its self-confidence.

Was the cancellation of GARL the right fiscal decision??

Yes.

In the current UK-wide financial circumstances the continuation of this project could not be defended as a national priority when Scotland’s transport infrastructure is a case for intensive care.

The first point here is that the Labour group at Holyrood passed the budget plans that dropped GARL, without making it a deal-breaker in the pre-budget announcement discussions.

This alone indicates that the fiscal sense of the decision was widely recognised.

Alternatively, if the Labour group believed this decision to be responsibly avoidable in fiscal terms, yet agreed to it, it was prepared to discard the vaunted (but not necessarily genuine) interests of its Glasgow heartland for short term political advantage – ironically to be delivered by that very heartland.

The UK is deep in a recession from which it is one of only two EU countries not yet to have emerged. The country has a national deficit standing at well over £2 trillion, setting both a historical precedent of an unwelcome kind and bequeathing a debt that taxpayers will be servicing for decades to come.

The Scottish Government had to construct a budget in these straitened circumstances, apportioning the pain and the protection in what it would have to defend as the country’s short and long term interests.

The decisions open to it to take were additionally limited by the lack of borrowing powers which, ironically, Glasgow City Council itself possesses.

No one has yet said what they would have cut to allow the GARL project, whose costs were already spiralling alarmingly,  to continue.

Political parties have got to abandon the old fashioned pork-barrel politics that have traditionally shaped the UK’s budgets. They have also to educate their constituency to understand this change.

At a corporate and at a governmental level, we interpret power primitively as the opportunity to take what we can get while we can. We sideline the fact that power requires responsibility. Any party in power should be there only because it is the one – at the time – that is the most capable of governing the country effectively and in the interests of the common good.

Successive Tory and Labour administrations have taught the electorate to expect favours from their party if it wins and, if it loses, to be disregarded by the opposition.

• When a party is in power for a considerable time, this breeds areas which behave with petulance, as Glasgow has done here, if they don’t get whatever they want. In such a system, notions of the common good do not obtain.
• When a party is out of power over a long period, it creates areas left relatively to wither and filled with an increasing resentment. This will eventually find its expression in the ballot box with the noses of supporters of the deposed power energetically rubbed in the mire, perpetuating a process we should have outgrown long ago.

The political mudpie the cancellation of GARL has become is not down to any lack of stability in the decision but to a failure in communicating the thinking behind it and the alternatives that had been considered.

With the Glasgow North East by-election on the near horizon, the old politics – still advocated by Labour and now also by some dispirited SNP activists – would have seen GARL not only retained but flagged as a strategic decision made in the interests of the city.

Patently, John Swinney and the current SNP administration chose the new politics of fiscal responsibility and it is very much to their credit that they did so.

But they didn’t make this principle the subject of debate it should have been, leaving the door wide open for Labour to resort to the old politics and paint a willing and paranoid Glasgow as hard done by.

Was John Swinney singly responsible for the decision to cancel GARL

Yes and no.

Yes, he is responsible because he is the final arbiter of what proposals are put forward in the budget.

No, because apparently the suggestion to cancel GARL did not originate with him.

In the immediate aftermath of the cancellation, it became known that each Minister in the Government had been asked what, from their department, might be cancelled or delayed in order to prioritise, within the limited funds available, protection for the country’s greatest needs.

The identification of GARL as less than a top level priority in national transport development is said to have come from Transport Minister, Stewart Stevenson. Having offered up the project as a likely candidate for cancellation, Stevenson, a few weeks before the budget announcement was made,  nevertheless assured Steven Purcell that the project was not under threat.

This weakness and political ineptitude understandably fuelled Purcell’s rage when he discovered that the reverse was the case.

Has Stevenson spoken out to defend the GARL decision which he initiated? If he has, he must have spoken so quietly we have not heard him.

He is also something of a legend in doing little and in staying invisibly below the radar. The complex transport brief, critical to Scotland as a country and as a developing economy, is in the hands of a Minister who is patently overwhelmed by it. This will be a major weakness of the SNP Government until it is addressed.

Was the decision handled effectively in terms of its communication to the public?

Absolutely not.

From the outset the Government was backfooted by the swift and aggressive response from Steven Purcell, Leader of Glasgow City Council and a first-time Labour party candidate in the forthcoming Westminster General Election.

Purcell was given room to make instant political capital on the decision to cancel the project, bemoaning an Edinburgh-based Government’s lack of care for Scotland’s touchstone west coast city.

Visibly rocked by this assault, the Government never recovered its equilibrium and developed neither an effective defence of the decision nor an effective counter to the charges of disregarding Glasgow’s needs.

Why was the Government not prepared for this predictable response?

Mr Purcell has all along worked closely and uncritically with British Airports Authority (BAA), the company ordered by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to sell, among others, either Glasgow or Edinburgh airport, both of which it owns. BAA is a Spanish-owned multinational which has been maximising its profit margins  at the expense of providing adequate facilities for travellers at its (too) many UK airports.

It is playing hardball with the CAA and stalling on the requirement to sell one of its two Scottish central belt airports.

It has, though, been allowed to carry out, at Glasgow Airport a rushed interior development – some of whose features stand out as inconvenient and even physically dangerous to passengers – designed both to crank up spending while BAA owns the airport and to hike the price it asks if, in the end, it sells Glasgow.

Mr Purcell would have been better advised to have paid serious attention to the hugely successful and independent Manchester Airport Group who expressed an interest in buying Glasgow than in campaigning in a recession for the retention of a vanity project to deliver passengers to what, in passenger numbers, now appears to be a failing airport.

The residents of Glasgow North East would have been unlikely to see their personal and local circumstances change much with the arrival of GARL.

Where was the forceful and telling account of what the current Government has done for Glasgow and has done to better the lives of residents of this genuinely important and complex city and of the residents of its North East constituency?

The state of play

There are two main factors affecting the current political situation:

• shortage of talent
• the independence issue

Shortage of talent

There is a sense of tiredness in the SNP Government which clearly took the edge off its performance in this election campaign.

This is  not only due to half-way termitis  but to a front bench team that is relatively small and heavily worked.

In the context of an administration able only to do what its senior partner elsewhere allows and with no interest in doing other than treading water (as has been the case in the sequence of previous post-devolution administrations), this would be of little account.

With the current administration – giving Scotland its first experience since devolution of genuine and responsible government – this issue is a real one, born of three main factors:

• the work-ethic driving the current Scottish Government;
• the aim to be a capable, lean and cost-effective administration;
• the small pool of high level back bench talent available.

This last issue affects all the Hollyrood parties, each for a different reason. In the case of the SNP, its impact now is keenly felt in the context of its work ethic and its drive to be focused and capable. Ministers are busy and actually tired. The demands of jobs they take seriously leave little time and energy for promotional campaigning.

Is there the equivalent of a football club’s academy – a system for spotting inherent back bench ability, training it in the ins-and-outs of departmental responsibility and looking to see where its emerging talents might best be deployed? This could be a cross-party facility introduced at Holyrood. It would have the additional advantage of developing perspectives to inform the analysis and judgment of back benchers in debate and in committee.

The independence issue

The independence issue is both a red herring and a hostage to fortune. Wherever anyone stands on this question, what Scotland needs is conspicuously good government.

Any party delivering – on evidence – such government, will have earned the trust of the electorate either in proposing or opposing independence. A track record to support such trust needs more than a single term in office.

In the end, if Scotland is governed well, the country will be freer to make an informed decision on its future within or in an independent relationship with the UK.

Related Posts

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• Guess who’s in the middle of the Glasgow Airport Rail Link row? (5)
• Mulvaney reveals the game for Argyll & Bute in the coming General Election (11)
• Conservatives sprinkle the Goldie dust on Argyll – but are they a team? (11)
• Jim Mather: over to us (20)

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