COSLA victim of stalled charge of Argyll and Bute brigade

Over the first two days of this week, 13th and 14th June 2011, Scotland has witnessed one of its lumbering public sector dinosaurs left shaking its head in a very exposed place after a rout caused by its own poor judgment.

The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) had, in desperation to land a blow on the Scottish Government and on its Education Secretary, gone into a mad (mutually assured destruction) partnership in a major joint political manoeeuvre with… yes – Argyll and Bute Council.

COSLA and Argyll and Bute Council colluded in a plot that came apart spectacularly, with the junior partner stalling on the key attack, leaving the overconfident senior to swing in a stiff breeze.

The pair are not the most likely of collaborators, with a relationship history that more rationally fuels antipathy.

Over the last half of 2010 COSLA manipulated changes to the local authorities’ revenue grant calculator (GAE) that seriously disadvantaged Argyll and Bute in favour of councils represented by senior COSLA insiders.

On their part, Argyll and Bute Council’s inept conduct on manoeuvres in the area-wide theatre of war they made of their now double-failure school closure programme, attracted negative and mocking nationwide publicity. This has powerfully fed public support for the necessary drive to see the provision of education removed from local authority control.

Such a scenario is anathema to the lumpen but determinedly territorialist COSLA, a quasi trade union for local authorities, progressively losing touch with contemporary society but, in true stalinist mode, grim in its effort to maintain a grip on full-spectrum local government.

Here is no natural brotherhood. Yet these two moribund bodies came together in a desperate scheme, hoping that the alchemy of their unlikely bonding might regenerate them both.

They were drawn together by a shared fear of and political hostility for the SNP and its Education Secretary, Michael Russell MSP, in a complex context of need matched only by the depth of their mutual distrust.

Each are seasoned macchiavells by choice; neither noted for the ability their respective roles demand, or for forward facing strategic capability; and neither gifted with largeness of spirit or vision. They could be said to bond only in their shared mediocrity.

So what was the game?

Each wanted, for their own reasons, to give the Scottish Government a bloody nose.

With its ambitious but accident-prone President, Pat Watters, COSLA is the rump of the discredited old West Coast Labour, now all but gone.

Its visceral opposition to the SNP is ratcheted up at the moment by the Scottish Government’s known wish to remove education provision from the vagaries of local authority control and stabilise it under central government.

The current administration of Argyll and Bute Council, is, in turn, corroded by retributive venom against its former coalition partners, the SNP group of councillors. This group walked out of power to fight against the school closure proposals the politically incoherent Alliance of Independents was determined to pursue – and, unforgivably, have led that fightback with marked success.

With the LibDems in the replacement and now irretrievably discredited coalition, there is additional hostility to the SNP and it focuses on the schools issue for good reason.

The LibDem candidate in the May 2011 Scottish Election, Councillor Alison Hay, saw her support for the school closure programme deliver to her party a very poor fourth place in what had been its top target seat to retake. In the event, it attracted the LibDems worst percentage drop in vote in Scotland, at 19.6%.

In contrast, the seat was triumphantly taken by, then and now, Education Secretary, Michael Russell for the SNP, with his party’s largest majority of 32.3% (8,543) and a vote of 13,390 in a good turnout of 53.7%.

Driven by the dangerously destabilising emotionality of an urge to damage the SNP, each of the odd couple of COSLA and Argyll and Bute Council misread the ability of the junior partner in the planned move  to deliver its part of the deal.

COSLA needed Argyll and Bute – the one council foolish enough to stick its head over a parapet it is in no state to defend – to persist with its school closure programme against the Education Secretary’s requested moratorium, to carry the flag of the dinosaurs in one glorious last charge.

It needed this act of defiance from an individual council to slow Michel Russell’s progress in implementing changes to the delivery of rural education and to weaken government fire by splitting its targets.

Given the council from which this charge would emanate, it would be none too impressive a force to carry COSLA’s standard of resistance – but needs must. It would at least create a nuisance for Michael Russell – and the reality was that there was no other council willing to do it.

Argyll and Bute Council was more than happy to play the patsy, although it is unlikely that it saw its role quite so realistically.

COSLA has been known for some time to be looking for an appropriate battlefield on which to engage in ritual set-piece conflict with the Scottish Government.

However, we understand that a week ago, Pat Watters told a reliable source that COSLA would not fight on the issue of the Schools Act 2010, the proposed commission to strengthen the operation of the Act or the associated moratorium on schools closures for which the Education Secretary had called.

But a week, as they say is a long time in politicking and by Monday 13th June, COSLA was picking a fight on this very territory.

So what had changed?

As we understand it, Argyll and Bute Council Leader, Dick Wash made the move, approaching Pat Watters of COSLA, offering Argyll and Bute to lead the obstruction to Mr Russell’s plan to mothball school closures while a new commission examined the operation and treatment of the governing legislation, the 2010 Schools Act.

Mr Walsh hoped support from other individual councils would be offered to Argyll and Bute following its defiant move, so that it was not left vulnerable out there, waving stage property swords in the air all by itself.

It was always unlikely that such local authorities would commit to the same action as the foolhardy Argyll and Bute  but there might have been the odd press release offering moral support. Council Leader, Dick Walsh, was so desperate for some score in what has been rout after rout at the hands of the Argyll Rural Schools Network (ARSN), that he would have settled even for that empty gesture.

The councils Mr Walsh had in mind to bring up the distant rear in his advance on the Education Secretary are said to have been Moray and Highland. Where are they now? Yesterday Highland Council was looking at a recommendation that, at its meeting next Thursday (23rd June 2011), it should offer the Education Secretary the moratorium on school closures he had asked for.

But at the point of his approach to Watters, Councillor Walsh had already forced a majority vote to proceed with the school closures at a vexed special meeting of his discredited administration on Sunday last, so he had a manner of mandate for his offer to COSLA.

The deal was done and COSLA prepared to pave the way for the (very) light brigade’s promised charge.

The game in action

On Monday 13th June, in an astonishingly ‘brave’ (ie foolhardy) move, COSLA issued a Press Statement which we published in full, pending this commentary.

Walsh needed some evidence of wider support for his planned rebellion to stiffen the resolve of some wavering troops at his special council meeting the following morning. This had been called to decide on its stance on the requested moratorium.

Watters saw to it that COSLA fully delivered on its side of the deal.

The statement opened by saying: ‘Following in–depth discussion and serious consideration of the issue, COSLA’s Leadership Board (made up of The President, Political Group Leaders, Spokespersons and Vice Presidents), has decided to reject the Education Cabinet Secretary’s call for a voluntary moratorium on the process of rural schools closures in Scotland.’

This was a blatant throwing down of a gauntlet to a government with an unprecedented overall majority and to an Education Secretary with his party’s biggest majority in the very constituency where its key partner in the planned manoeuvre is wholly discredited in the field chosen for the fight.

As they say in Private Eye, ‘Shurely shome mishtake’.

At once COSLA had alienated public opinion in rejecting, for no good reason, the necessary moratorium to protect further schools from illegitimate closure during the deliberations of the new commission.

COSLA also, characteristically cooked the books in its statement, with Watters saying: ‘The truth is of 35 schools proposed for closure, few have been called in and the Minister has only felt able to refuse the closure of 4 of these under the current legislation. These figures hardly represent a crisis in rural school management.’

The fact is that of the 35 closure decision taken, ministers have called in 17 of them – all but 50%, hardly ‘few’. And as well as four rejections to date, five others are pending a final decision. Should they too be reprieved, the percentage of call-ins rejected would be 77%.

The clumsy Watters made things worse, saying: ‘There was a clear view that no case had been made for such a moratorium and that the terms in which the Cabinet Secretary had described the need for a moratorium undermined local government’s careful management of rural education.’

This was a double own goal.

Watters did not  – because he could not – clarify quite how no case had been made for the requested moratorium on school closures – when the obvious case is that it would be a miscarriage of justice for schools to be closed under a law simultaneously under revision.

And then COSLA’s very own stumblebum had issued the most laughable hostage to fortune in even suggesting that local authorities were practising ‘careful management of rural education’.

Remember that Watters knew that he would shortly be seen to be accompanied on this maverick mission by the very council that had demonstrated, in full measure, the very opposite of ‘careful management of rural education’ – and indeed one whose cowboy treatment of the Schools Act 2010  had caused the very fractures that had disabled it.

At this point, we were already into the dress rehearsal for a pantomime.

COSLA’s baldly aggressive action, with little evident substantial reason for it other than political manoevring, left it utterly exposed. It had clearly laid the supportive foundation for Dick Walsh’s troops to saddle up the next day. Collusion was in the air.

From then on, COSLA’s fate was in the hands of Argyll and Bute Council, trusted to deliver Dick Walsh’s promise of a defiant continuation of their school closure programme.

COSLA was way out in the open, declaring its hand in advance of the Argyll and Bute meeting, making the collusion palpable and with nowhere to go should Walsh’s ragbag fail to come through.

Tellingly, the Argyll and Bute administration’s few contras remained unimpressed by the support available from COSLA and continued to refuse to vote in favour of continuing the closure programme.

This left the tactically astute Walsh aware that if the issue were to go to a vote of full council  he was likely to lose both the vote and consequently his administration.

Walsh could only go to a poor Plan B.

He caved in, with an impotent – and, in COSLA’s terms, quite useless – gesture of defiance to the Education Secretary.

A chapter-long motion was  proposed by the Education Spokesperson and carried by acclamation.

The council would drop forthwith its school estate review (the euphemism for its closure programme) and, with a straight face, citing as cause the very fractures in the Schools Act 2010 that its own extreme subversions had driven. It would choose this action in overt rejection of the moratorium the Education Secretary had requested.

COSLA now had anything but what it had needed.

The charge had never got moving. The school closures programme had actually been voluntarily dumped – not even suspended but gone for good.

There was no point at all in the ritual rejection of the moratorium.There was nothing to mothball. Tthe closure proposals had already been abandoned. For spectators, this was pure stand-up comedy.

The best Walsh could do for Watters in compensation for the betrayal was a feeble sentence in the councils laughably self-exculpatory press statement on its decision to retreat and to bin its second set of closure proposals.

This trumpeted:’We will work with COSLA to explore the wider implications of a moratorium and the impact it will have on education across Argyll and Bute.’

Well… WOW. The prospect of sitting down with representatives of the Scottish local authority that had made itself a national joke and had just left COSLA a very famous grouse, was a cert to warm the cockles?

Each of the unlikely partners was now publicly out of the coverts. Both had emerged to ginger up aspects of a conflict neither could win. Both have been left exposed, looking naive, inept and foolish. And COSLA will not forget the damage Dick Walsh has now done to it in promising but failing to deliver the continuation of the school closure process.

It could not have happened to a more worthy pair.

The COSLA position

COSLA, effectively a outdated Labour fiefdom, is instinctively opposed to the SNP and currently alarmed by the scale of its political success against the corresponding decline in influence of Labour,

Led by wannabe future Labour First Minister, its shallowly plausible President, the uninspiring traditional fixer, Pat Watters, has been itching to take on the SNP Government. He is driven to do this for party and personal reasons.

Not the smartest or the most intuitive, Watters has consistently misread and miscalled situations,

Certain that the SNP would be a one term minority administration,  he had already committed the major strategic error of declaring an aggressive hand too early and too expensively.

Before the May 2011 Scottish Election COSLA made it publicly known that they would be unlikely to support any further extension of the freeze on council tax and was openly hostile, dismissive even, to the SNP administration.

Watters may have felt that a strong signal of coming opposition from COSLA would help to secure a thumping defeat of the SNP in the May 2011 Scottish Election. Always a mistake to overestimate one’s own cosmic significance, this analysis now seems simply silly.

May 5th and 6th 2011 must have been a hard swallow for Watters.

He had not only revealed his hand damagingly prematurely but he had also removed the one source of value COSLA had for the SNP Government – its ability to deliver the council tax freeze.

The SNP don’t like COSLA any more than COSLA lkes them- but now it knows that COSLA is minded to foul up the council tax freeze. This lessens the need to placate the dinosaur.

The strategy on the commission

We note that within similarly confrontational stances on the moratorium, both COSLA and Argyll and Bute Council trill a little more sweetly on the matter of the new commission the Education Secretary is to set up on the delivery of rural education.

COSLA clearly feels an insult to its amour propre in not being made privy to Mr Russell’s intention before he announced it. Whingeing away on this snub in its statement, it nevertheless says that the idea of the commission has some merit but that – wey hey – ‘Local Government cannot be simply a participant in this commission, it must be the co-author of its terms of reference, membership, ways of working, etc.’  Was that a Gloucester Two Spot passing the window?

So COSLA is trying to fight its way to the table, to grab a slice of the action?  In reality, as it did with Mr Russel’s Short Term Working Group to revise the Guidance to the Schools Act 2010, its intention is to sabotage. It will be interesting to see what Russell now affords them. He owes them  nothing.

What COSLA fails to comprehend is that, like money, it is only valuable if people believe it is. It has no intrinsic worth whatsoever. If the government decide it is unimportant – as indeed it is – it can huff and puff but it will not blow the house down.

In turn, the echo from Argyll and Bute Council the following day was that it would ask for a seat on the commission. On the basis of exactly what qualification?

Russell’s make or break test

The scenario  now in train is, for Michael Russell, mythology’s classic test of the hero. It is the moment in which he must show who he really is; what he will really do.

he challenge from COSLA (Argyll and Bute Council has been no more than the pawn moved in the opening gambit) is now in the open.

COSLA has stumbled into a challenge it did not really intend to make, before it was ready to do so and on ground it is inadequately equipped to defend. Watters made an opportunist but ill-considered grab at Dick Walsh’s offer and now has no choice but to fight.

At the same time, ill-judged as it was, COSLA would not have considered such blatant opposition if it did not feel it could win.

In the limp chatter of Edinburgh’s political watering holes, the word is that Russell is regarded as all bark and no bite, not, for all his verbal force, a man for a scrap.

We do not believe this for a moment but we know that others do and COSLA’s incautious action must have been born from such a perception – or gamble.

Recent actions of Russell’s would appear to give succour to those who see him this way.

He was ready to let Argyll and Bute Council off the ropes and into the clear in his offer of a moratorium.

His response to the COSLA posturing in its rejection of his moratorium (on what basis precisely, one wonders, since COSLA has no closure proposals to consign to a moratorium?) has seemed conciliatory where a swift KO was merited.

Russell may well be making sure that he cannot be accused by either of these mavericks of being hostile to them, He is certainly home free on that count and need demonstrate it no more, particularly given the responses his generous gestures have met.

However, it is important for education in Scotland, for those who believe it can do better and has a more focused role to play in an evolving nation – and for the Education Secretary’s credibility – that he makes his position clear, takes no hostages and delivers an education and a future to our children that is unfettered by the forces of yesterday and of negativity.

Someone has to find the courage to dispatch the Furies and free Scotland from their retributive purpose. We believe that Michael Russell is that person and we see that no better opportunity will come again than is offered in the current political circumstances.

Cometh the hour…