All governments like to keep things tight. As with the production of sausages, the received wisdom is that the less people know about what’s going on, the better.
In Scotland, however, the evidence emerging from the Covid inquiry in the past few days is exposing what has been obvious for some time: a governing culture that is excessively and institutionally secretive.
A stone is being lifted on the way Scotland is run. And what’s underneath is not pretty.
Controversial: Professor Leitch at inquiry yesterday
As Scotland’s Information Commissioner David Hamilton noted, some of the evidence that has emerged from the inquiry ‘beggars belief’.
There was senior civil servant Ken Thomson urging colleagues to delete their WhatsApp messages, noting that ‘plausible deniability are my middle names’.
In the same conversation, released last week, there too was Professor Jason Leitch, the Scottish Government’s ubiquitous clinical director, noting jovially that deleting WhatsApp messages was his ‘pre-bed ritual’ (a ‘flippant exaggeration’, he told the inquiry yesterday).
When journalists revealed Professor Leitch’s ‘ritual’ last year, the Scottish Government sought to deny he had done so. We have a government in power so wedded to secrecy that it’s prepared to misinform its way out of it.
Similarly, only last week it was finally confirmed that Nicola Sturgeon had also deleted her WhatsApp messages (though she says some messages, retained on colleagues’ devices, have now been handed over).
It’s a form of behaviour that has become endemic. As journalists have also revealed over the past few months, Scottish Government officials and their political bosses run a kind of shadow state.
Aware that official correspondence could be made public thanks to Freedom of Information (FoI) laws, insiders say that business is sometimes conducted on WhatsApp and by private emails and off-the- record conversations, where it can remain under lock and key or be deleted altogether. As one former SNP minister declared: ‘There are loads of ways to dodge FoI if you go out of your way to do it.’
It’s now become a bit of a game. The conversations released to the Covid inquiry in recent days show officials chuckling over their clever attempts to escape FoI’s strictures. It reeks to high heaven.
It is possible to feel some sympathy for those on the frontline in these situations. We can all think of examples of private conversations we have had at work which, if they were made public, would show us in a terrible light. I think I probably commit a sacking offence on a daily basis.
What can’t be brushed aside, however, is when a public inquiry is denied information that was its to hold and when ministers and officials treat established laws on freedom of information with contempt.
And what can’t be ignored is the wider culture of secrecy in Scotland that pervades our country and is damaging the outcomes we need.
It’s an attitude that runs deep and precedes the emergence of the SNP.
The truth is we have a deeply conservative public sector culture in Scotland which, in order to keep matters ticking along as they always have done, does not appreciate irritating outsiders demanding change.
Witness the fact that headteachers can be (and are) told they are not allowed to speak out about education or criticise policy without first running it past their government bosses.
Or think of the health board chiefs who, behind closed doors, recently discussed a series of extraordinary measures to fix the NHS – including charging better-off patients – before shutting up and staying quiet lest any more of these plans leak out.
Even a commitment to a ‘national conversation’ on the future of the NHS – which Humza Yousaf agreed to in December – appears to have run into the ground.
Look south of the Border to England and you find hundreds of noisy and bolshy leaders in education and the health service setting out new ways of working.
In our small, constrained nation, by contrast, where career paths are mapped out by toeing the line, everyone knows that it’s better to keep your head down lest you get marked out as a troublemaker.
What has happened over the past two decades is that this culture has found a happy bedfellow in the nationalism of the SNP.
After it took over in Edinburgh, the SNP never sought to challenge Scotland’s public sector elites. It accepted business as normal.
This worked for it, helping to maintain the myth of Scottish exceptionalism; that our nicer, less competitive, more compassionate way of working was intrinsically better than the great Tory Satan in the south.
Facts and hard evidence never quite helped back up this narrative. Hence the need either to deny that those facts and evidence existed or to do your best to keep them under wraps as much as possible.
This has been compounded by the sheer longevity of the SNP administration. After 17 long years in office, the civil service and the SNP leadership have become hand in glove with one another.
The independence referendum and Brexit have dominated its time in office. The memory of another way of working that doesn’t involve confrontation with London has ebbed.
For the SNP, defending and covering up two decades’ worth of slipshod delivery and poor outcomes has become a necessary – even worthy – task in the context of the bigger contest of opposing London.
The Covid inquiry won’t make recommendations on how Scotland should change the way it’s run.
If anything useful for Scotland is to emerge from Baroness Hallett’s hearings, however, it would be to change this stultifying governing system.
As I’ve said before, we need a more robust parliamentary system that remorselessly challenges complacency and secrecy within our governing elite.
Parliamentarians should see it as an affront when information is withheld from them. Holyrood’s current culture – too often run on autopilot – needs to change.
What is needed more than anything, however, is the return of democratic order.
No system of government works well when one party dominates for too long.
In Scotland, that’s as true of the SNP as it was of Labour before it. To end the secretive governing culture that’s holding Scotland back, we need political change – and on a regular basis.
Only when our Scottish state recognises that it will regularly have to be held accountable to new brooms seeking to sweep away complacency and managerialism will we see a more transparent and more productive form of government.
That day can’t come soon enough.