Jim Mather: over to us

When do any of us consider ourselves ‘a finished product’? And what do we do then?

There are people who, at some point in their lives, are, or choose to become, ‘set’. They may be 14 or 40 or 84 but, when it happens, that’s it. Mission accomplished.

The truth is that, however perfect and beautiful, any finished object is of limited interest because it’s ‘game over’. It is not organic, not engaged, not learning, not changing.

The man

No one who meets Jim Mather – Argyll’s MSP and a Government Minister with wide-ranging responsibilities -  or who watches him in action, is likely to see him as anything other than a work of his own, still actively in progress.

Every time you hear him he is talking with an illuminated excitement about new insights from something he has read or someone he has met, insights that he he is busily building in to his personal world view.

This is why age is somehow out of the frame in considering him. It is in the nature of things that it is the young who grow and, subliminally, we attribute youth to those who are still growing.

The essence of Jim Mather is this continuing, instinctive and willed organic growth. He wants to learn. He can learn. It delights him. He deploys what he learns – and most of it is focused on people: their ambition (or not); their ability to make things happen; their motivation; their interaction; and – the big one – their collaboration.

Mather is utterly committed – and rightly – to the centrality of collaboration. He sees that it is only together that we have the complete tool kit and only together that we have 360 degree vision.

And vision is what drives this man – not the vision of the mystic but the vision of the practical man, the achiever.

As a nationalist, Mather believes that Scotland will flourish when it accepts responsibility for itself, when every single person in the country understands that it is their show, that they are not an audience, that they are the performers and that they are part of a team.

This means that he believes that power – the power to create change, lies with us and that we need to wake up to that power and to set about using it.

The evidence

Mather walks the talk. When wind turbine tower manufacturers, Vestas, decamped from Campbeltown in Kintyre, in full Tommy Cooper mode – ‘Just like that’ – and people like us were spending our energies on finding the most damning adjectives to apply to them, Jim Mather got busy.

He avoided megaphone diplomacy. He didn’t blame Vestas. He used them. He harvested their contacts. He pursued tbose contacts. He made no ‘announcements’ of the sort that self-serving politicians are wont to make. He got on quietly with the job in the back room – finding and negotiating a solution that would avoid seeing Kintyre left yet again in the doldrums and losing the jobs it so absolutely needs.

And he succeeded – taking Campbeltown and Kintyre to the head of a key industry, led by Vestas’ fellow Danish company, Welcon Towers bringing Skykon into the abandoned manufacturing plant at Machrihanish. Skykon is re-engineering the plant, building it up to capacity to supply the needs of today and tomorrow with on and offshore turbine towers, not just saving jobs but growing them two or three-fold.

Skykon already has major contracts in its portfolio – supplying towers to Siemens for the giant onshore Clyde windfarm, for example – and there are many more to come. It is ideally placed to service the needs of the west coast of Scotland, north west England and the east coast of Ireland. Sea transport from Campbeltown Harbour of completed tower sections is part of the game plan.

This is how Mather works – not drawing attention to himself, not over-selling – but talking to people in private, getting the right mix of players together and quietly placing them in a position where they understand that there is work to be done and it is they who will decide and shape what it is.

It didn’t work with Diageo. Nothing could work with Diageo. The conjunction of Jim Mather and Paul Walsh, Diageo’s abrasive CEO, would have been fascinating to see. Never can two such different mindsets have come into closing orbit.

Walsh and Diageo are stuck in the last big idea – that ‘it’ is all about big business and the profit motive. Mather, by instinct and analysis, has gone beyond that to the changing values of today – that social responsibility is the sine qua non and that those who don’t understand that condemn themselves to eventual extinction.

Diageo has overreached itself. Hubris brings down the self-glorifying in the end. We all have to look beyond ourselves.

The modus operandi of the working realist was in evidence again in the upgrading of the overland Beauly-Denny power line. This is beyond essential. The National Grid is nowhere near fit for the purpose of receiving power from multiple remote sources of renewable energy generation. Until it is, Scotland’s focus on developing this vital capacity will be of the ‘all dressed up and nowhere to go’ variety.

Thanks to the irresponsible fiscal non-management of the UK economy with the consequent cost of preventing the major banks from failing, there is no money for other than basic essentials. This means that undergrounding the new line to carry increased power from collection points in the north, south to the hunger of the Central Belt was out of the question on cost grounds alone – never mind on consideration of environmental impacts.

Of course Jim Mather knew there would be a public row if he appoved the development of the existing overland line. But there was no choice. He didn’t duck or fudge. He approved the development but enforced a spectrum of operations to re-engineer the line, tidying up its track across the country. This involved taking much of the line out of the National Park of the Cairngorms, removing feeder systems with their attendant pylons and linking them more efficiently and less visually invasively with the main line.

Did he get any credit for this? Not a jot. The wealthy nimbys and their coterie, backed up by the minority unthinking wing of the environmentalists, simply bayed on command like a well trained team of huskies towing the rest of us towards a very steep drop. Mather will have expected noting else.(Our article on a huffy personal protest by Kenny Logan carries a factual account of the nature of the issue.)

The Minister had delivered the best that could be achieved – the realistic, practical option. And this is the same Minister who did not approve the plan for a giant onshore wind farm on the moor in north Lewis. So he cannot be said to be gung-ho for renewables at all costs. His actions are thought through and considered.

Mather the politician

Start with Jim Mather’s hyperactive portfolio of Enterprise, Energy and Tourism. Even the notion of such a brief would stop most of us in our tracks. Mather gets going. Who has ever heard him complain of overwork? He eats it.

Compare this with what happened when the greedy, brat-politician that was Wendy Alexander was literally force-fed by the crafty Jack McConnell. She’d been throwing tantrums to get a really important job – so he gave her three of them. It wasn’t long before she needed a family with whom to spend more time.

So what kind of politician is Jim Mather?

If we look at some highly visible recent stereotypes, we start to define him by removing what he is not.

Firstly, he is emphatically not of the Tony Blair variety.

Blair is much admired by adolescents like David Milliband for being the sort of celebrity whose motorcade could stop the traffic in any world capital – bar a few where the lynch mob would stop it first, if they knew he was coming.

Jim Mather is not minded to rock up anywhere with the attention-seeking bevvy of minders and movers that is the accessory of choice for the minnows, the wannabes and the narcissists.

He doesn’t even bring a flunkey to introduce him. He can do that himself.

He drives himself. He carries his own bags. He sets up his own presentation kit – and takes it down again afterwards. He sorts it out if it goes on the blink while he’s using it. He answers his own emails. And he doesn’t need either a script writer or a performance coach to time the pauses and  advise on the specific addition of a catch in the throat.

When did you last – ever – meet a Minister like this?

Well groomed, crisp and efficient but still human, it is impossible to imagine the grounded Mather having botox, a spray-tan and grinning permanently like a monkey in formaldehyde, in Blair’s omnipresent look-at-me mode.

Where Blair is no more than a construct eternally looking for a spotlight to give it life, Mather has the Cheshire cat’s ability to appear and disappear at will. Now he’s here – and now he’s still here, but we’ve stopped seeing him. He can turn visibility on and off at will. This is how he has a life.

None of the other examples of political archetypes fit Mather either. He’s not the autocratic and mischievous Donald Dewar; nor the thuggish John Reid; nor the dour Stalinist, Gordon Brown; nor the slyly witty Charles Kennedy; nor the thinking street-fighter, Jim Sillars; nor the much loved Tommy Sheridan.

In the end, we have to start to look at Jim Mather as a very new kind of politician, pursuing a very new agenda and aiming to usher in a very new kind of politics.

Mind-mapping

All of Mather’s characteristics of listening and of enabling, of responding actively to moments of need and opportunity, of fostering change and collaboration… contribute to his success in managing the mind-mapping sessions with which people now identify him.

It all began on Mull. Having been an SNP Highlands and Islands list MSP, when he finally took Argyll from George Lyon in 2007, he felt his relationship with the place click into what he had always wanted it to be. At last he was able to be proactive.

Ten days into his new responsibility, he got a challenge from the mighty Mull. Wilf Loynd called him and asked him to come and meet a wide range of local people – and not only was Mather off on the trail but so was his laptop.

People were expecting an ‘across the table’ discussion. What they got was a collective brainstorming, recorded and structured by Mather’s mind-mapping. The sense of energised  ‘we can do it’ that came out of that session in the Isle of Mull hotel led on to over 142 such occasions around Scotland, with over 42 of them taking place in Argyll.

In truth this technique is, on the one hand, no more than a practical way of producing effective and immediate minutes of a session – by showing the structure of the collective investigation of the issue in question and the lines for development.

It means that, typically, Mather doesn’t need a secretary to be present either. He can produce his own minutes.

On the other hand, the job of mind-mapping produces exactly the sort of situation that allows Mather to demonstrate the Cheshire Cat’s capacity for the strategic appearances and disappearances we mentioned earlier.

It allows him not to be seen to be in charge but simply to be the recorder. This achieves a quite spectacular sleight of hand. The man at the heart of the event becomes peripheral to it, enabling the audience to shape its own discussion, to address themselves, to listen – to take responsibility.

Very occasionally the Minister will interject – to clarify, not to question and apparently just to get the record straight. These interventions invariably nudge the audience’s focus back on line.  He will beam with pleasure at constructive contributions and studiously allow the more confrontational to vent itself before finding its own route to the positive.

He works this way for two reasons.

He believes in people. He has a wry way of putting it: ‘If you get everyone together in the same room, their instinctive altruism gets the better of them’.

The other reason is the one you have to work to discover – and that understanding takes time to mature.

A new politics

There was a moment at a meeting in Lochgilphead where Jim Mather was chairing and mind-mapping a session with all of those involved in the situation where the survival of the Mid Argyll Swimming Pool was – and still is – under threat.

The meeting might have been a gloves-off confrontation between supporters of the Pool and its inspirationally capable new Board and representives of Argyll and Bute Council, whose financial support for this pool has been – and, to date, remains, inequitable, to say the least.

The potential for pointless combat was avoided by those present agreeing to let the history of the situation stay where it belonged – in the past – and to look to the future. The mind-mapping recorded the insights, advice and contributions offered and the suggestions made.

Things began to feel more and more constructive.

Then a clearly frustrated ‘doer’ burst out: ‘Talking is all very well, Jim, but what are you going to do?’

The room fell silent. Jim Mather simply looked at the speaker, caught and held his eye, neutrally and said – nothing.

Suddenly we got it. He wasn’t going to do anything about it. He was working to assist those present to identify what they they were going to do about it and to start thinking how they might do so.

And this is the new politics.

Jim Mather does not preach it. He enables it. He does not name it. He leaves it for us to work it out for ourselves. He trusts us to get there and eventually, to get on with it, to take responsibility.

This is one of the most interesting philosophical and political initiatives imaginable. It is slowly, carefully and undidactically letting us come to realise that no politician, no government can do much for us. They can shape the context but they cannot make it happen.

We have to take responsibility for ourselves and to drive forwards what we want to see.

Jim Mather is starting a quiet revolution. He is stepping out of the four-track and holding the door open for us to take the wheel. He’ll navigate, if that helps. He’ll suggest some worthwhile stopping off places. He’ll make sure we fill up the tank. He’ll invite some passengers we might find helpful. But he is not going to tell us where to go and he is not going to do the driving.

The risk for him, as a politician, is that not enough people may get it, not enough teams may take the offered bit between their teeth – in time.

Established habits die hard – of abdicating responsibility, expecting to be looked after and whingeing when the childishly longed-for white knights (who never were), inevitably buckle and fail.

Being given the time to come to understand that it’s actually down to us does frustrate some people. There are those who are prepared to go along with the careful process of collectively teasing out the most constructive way forwards – providing Jim Mather tells them what to do at the end of the process. This is never going to happen.

Politicians live and work to deadlines – the span of time before the next election.

We are used to seeing political leaders throw responsibility and integrity aside in favour of blatant bribes as an election approaches. We are seeing it at this very moment.

We will see at the next election – and so will Mather himself – if there has been time for people to realise what he has been carefully working to change, nudging us and supporting us in starting to take charge of our own destiny.

He is unlikely to tramp on the accelerator pedal for short-lived political gain. This is a man with the long game in mind, who knows that real change takes time and who does not put his personal interests above the common good.

Mather and Argyll

Jim Mather might have been bred to represent Argyll. His family and he have left their footprints on a great diagonal trajectory across the territory from Tiree, through Mull, Oban, Inveraray, and Strachur to Dunoon.

Back in the mid-60s, Jim himself took summer jobs in Argyll, working as a galley-boy on the steamer, Duchess of Montrose and starting to get glimpses of a picture suggesting that Scotland was not developing as it might.

His father was brought up on Mull – where his own family lived, on Tiree and Loch Fyneside. It seems to have been a warm extended family for the young Jim to grow up in. He remembers regular visits to relatives in Strachur, Inveraray and Dunoon.

Living in Renfrewshire, such visits gave him an awareness that his hard-working relatives in Argyll faced lower wages and higher living costs than were the case for his family, in the Central Belt, on the other side of the Clyde.

Over time he began to understand the phenomenon of economic migrancy and to see that the term described his own father’s situation.

Later on, with the trained perspectives of a young accountant, he saw Scotland as a country that had been in gradual and relative decline since the end of World War 1.

Mather has long felt that he wanted to be part of the transformation of Argyll. He even speaks of a sense of ‘moral obligation’.

He has seen that Argyll offers an unusually rich quality of life but felt it has the potential to do much better in the future.

That future is not yet fully manifest but there are developments that Mather has brought about in starting to create a centre of expertise and capacity in Argyll for a spectrum of renewable energies initiatives. These offer the area a USP (unique selling point) appropriate to its vast resources in the field – and tide.

Argyll’s other USP is, of course, itself and, as Tourism Minister, Jim Mather is keenly aware of its potential in this business sector.

There is, though, a point where Argyll has to stop feeling good about its potential – which is vast – and start bringing it to fruition. The entire field of activity tourism from the world of the back-packer to the sailing fraternity to the cossetted adventurer is wide open to Argyll.

This development opportunity will respond to determined and well informed strategic action – and of course, to the appearance of the ghost in the arras, good marketing.

The core of what Mather wants to see happen in Argyll is the development of enterprises that bring the prospect, not just of more jobs (this is a low wage economy) but of higher quality, more challenging jobs creating what he calls ‘rewarding, sustainable and compelling’ opportunities.

These are the conditions most likely to reverse the trend of outward economic migration of the young and inward migration of the retiring.

Argyll needs to retain its own young working people with real career opportunities as close to hand as anything can be in this far flung collection of worlds-within-worlds. It also needs to have the economic activity to attract inward migration by the young and ambitious, with and without families.

Argyll excites Jim Mather. He describes its strengths as ‘immense’ and regards it much as a sleeping giant excites the imagination. Can it be woken up? Where should you poke it to make this happen? Will it leap into positive action? Will it growl and go back to sleep?

With Mather’s careful offering of a new politics – described above, his preferred scenario is that all of us poke Argyll to wake it up and get it moving. A single Ministerial prod is not going to do the business. He says ‘we really need a bandolier of magic bullets and a capacity to keep making more and more of them’.

He feels that Broadband is a come-out-to play invitation-prod, offering virtually unlimited possibilities for business development without needing to opt for economic migration. But it’s down to us to use productively what we have been given and to demonstrate what we could do if we had better.

He is enthused about the possibilities inherent in development trusts, with communities enabled to look to their own sustainability, creating and running social enterprises, keeping the local £ locally in play, limited only by their imaginations and by the extent of the responsibility they are willing to accept.

So what’s the recipe?

• Independence – Mather sees the lack of independence as a drag on the economy and the spirit alike, limiting our potential and driving the damaging economic migration of the young. He says that ‘more and more people can see that it makes no sense to operate Scotland on a diminishing housekeeping allowance from London, while at the same time allowing Westminster to charge the same rates of tax in Argyll and Bute as it does in affluent central London’.
• Build the working age population and amenity by ‘first levelling this playing field, then initiating an era of hard work, close collaboration and the active promotion of Argyll and Bute and its produce and services’. He says that this has started. He has been working on it for the past 33 months since his election.
• Success builds success – ‘fuelled by confidence and self-belief, both much easier to sustain when people collaborate, sharing the burdens and the successes’.
• Seeing ourselves more as gardeners than architects. “We do not know exactly what blend of economic elements will emerge and thrive in this century and we must not curb the potential of the local economy to adapt and evolve’.
• Bin the blame game. ‘Those who want to blame and castigate peple must realise that this behaviour only encourages disengagement, avoidance and defensiveness – which will take us nowhere. And that leads to stasis, which, as Eric Beinhocker says, ‘leads to extinction. Sadly some vested interests like stasis’.
• Pick what he decribes picturesequely as ‘the low hanging fruit of the affluent Argyll and Bute diaspora’. ‘Any MacDonald must at some time visit Islay; any MacLeod must see Mull; and any Campbell must immerse themselves in Argyll and Inveraray’. (We noted the sensibilities that led Mr Mather carefully to interpose MacLeod between MacDonald and Campbell.)
• Recognise and respond to ‘expectation inflation’. ‘Each generation expects better and expects quality  – so we need constantly to invest and improve all aspects of the visitor experience. This can result in lower maintenance costs, effective word-of-mouth marketing, higher prices and better margins. That is not to say that Argyll and Bute becomes simply a centre for 5-star accommodation but that it becomes synonomous with quality and value from hostel to 5-star hotel.

Why is he in politics?

In October 2008, Jim Mather told the Inside Track Interview – in the Holyrood house magazine – that he would  not be in politics if Scotland were already independent. For him this is ‘unfinished business’ and he said to us that, now in his sixties, he ‘knows time is short and the case is urgent and important’.

He has come late to politics. bringing to the job a lifetime of business experience. This stretches from a degree in Economics, Law and Accountancy from Glasgow University; to working with a firm of chartered accountants in Greenock and qualifying as a Chartered Accountant; to joining Chivas Brothers; and, at the age of 26, to seeing the unprecedented inpact of IT and going to the then global computer monolith, IBM, with whom he spent 10 years, movong from selling mainframe conputers to becoming Marketing Manager.

He left IBM to set up his own computer business, describing this initiative as driven by the ‘sheer horror of having a headstone that said “Here lies Jim Mather, a 35 year-old wage slave of IBM”.’

This business – and its successor – were both hugely successful and it was while he was a Director of the latter that he, literally, hit a moment where, in the words of his much loved Neil Munro creation – Para Handy: ‘we will just pause and consider’.

On his bike, at speed, he piled into the back of a lorry and broke his back, spending six weeks in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, much of which time must have been spent contemplating the possibility of a disabled future. He says he ‘re-evaluated what I was about’.

This re-evaluation brought him to ‘the urgent and important’ case for independence. An SNP member since 1974, he stood as its candidate in the Ross, Skye and Inverness West constituency in the first election to the devolved Scottish Parliament in 1999.

In the 2003 Holyrood election, standing in Argyll and Bute, he was elected as an SNP Highlands and Islands MSP; and in 2007 he was re-elected – but this time taking Argyll and Bute as its constituency MSP.

He now works closely with the SNP’s candidate for Argyll and Bute’s Westminster seat, Mike Mackenzie – soon to see action and who is appreciative of the generosity of support he has found in their collaboration.

It’s easy to see why they would get on. Mackenzie too is someone who is never going to see himself as ‘a finished product’. He too is hungry to listen, to learn, to develop and to change.

Described in the Holyrood magazine as ‘a patriot with brains’ (which uncomfortably implies most patriots are brainless), Jim Mather  remains driven not only by his nationalism but by his commitment to an egalitarian, non-deferential society.

This last element was born from a moment when his policeman father, after seeing the family into a police house in Inverkip, was visited by the station Superintendant and given the words of wisdom.

There were only two priorities to which he must attend.

• Look after Sir Guy Shaw-Stewart.
• Look after Lord Inverclyde.

Mather says that, even as a 5 year-old boy, he thought that was wrong. ‘It was forelock-tugging, deferential nonsense and not likely to benefit the totality of society in Inverkip’.

And so…

The mind-mapping will go on in Argyll as elsewhere. It is aimed at benefiting ‘the totality of society’ here and in Scotland at large by giving us space to discover what we want to do, that we can – and that we must.

Easy, relaxed, sure of who he is but not focused on it – always looking outwards to others, Jim Mather is nowhere near the standard-issue politician. He is never negative and he does no name-calling of his political opponents.

There was a moment at the meeting on the Mid Argyll Swimming Pool in Lochgilphead when there was a poignant juxtaposition of two political cultures.

Argyll’s Westminster MP, the LIberal Democrat, Alan Reid was present.

At one point he spoke and in some detail. Jim Mather held up his hand and Alan Reid – trained in a different political school and used to the nastiness of much of it, immediately assumed he was to be ticked off for taking too long and began to apologise.

Mather was horrified and was quick to explain that he simply wanted to clarify a point to make sure that Mr Reid was happy with the way it was represented on the mind-map – and Reid was then invited to continue.

This is typical of Argyll’s MSP. He does not do cheap shots. He respects people and is courteous, protective of their dignity.

Whether or not you support his politics, he is ‘an all round good egg’, a phenomenally hard-working minister and he has certainly given Argyll a new sense of self-respect.

The future will be interesting  – and as exciting as we choose to make it.

With one exception, the photographs accompanying this article are by copyright holder, Rebecca Martin and may not be reproduced without permission.

The single photograph of Mr Mather taken outdoors is cropped from one supplied by Argyll and Bute Council at the time of the launch of the Book of Scottish Connections at Kilmartin Museum in February 2009  – early in 2009 Year of Homecoming Scotland.